Sexual addiction/compulsivity is a trendy diagnosis these days and I have written much on this topic here and here . However, some studies have indicated a cormobid diagnosis of OCD for many individuals struggling with compulsive sexual behavior. Indeed one of the most common situations I have seen in my practice, which in my opinion has often been self-diagnosed by clients as sex addiction, could more readily be called homosexual OCD or HOCD, in which case the entire established paradigm is completely wrong. I will go into this in more detail further down in this post, for the moment, the most important point is that OCD type symptoms can create a tremendous amount of sexual distress and are very poorly understood and as a result, diagnosed.

I’m going to assume that everyone reading this has a basic notion of what OCD means, but I think few people understand some of the underlying mechanisms fueling this disturbance. First and foremost, OCD sufferers experience a tremendous amount of fear, which might seem obvious as OCD has been historically categorized as an anxiety disorder (although in the DSM 5, the two are split into adjacent categories). But there’s a big difference between a general feeling of anxiety and a very deep and pointed fear. In the case of OCD, the sufferer fears something very specific, which the symptom itself only touches on superficially. In therapy, the client and therapist work together to dig deeper and figure this out. Often times the fear has less to do with sexuality itself and more to do with the underlying worry of being exposed, […]