all right hey guys welcome back want to make a video for my hocd peeps out there um it's a question i get all the time and you've probably kind of gotten yourself stuck with this same issue about your particular theme here of ocd uh and that is what happened to my libido where did my sex drive go i don't feel horny anymore um before this all happened i was a horny little dude or uh you know uh horny chick um and now i just have no no sex drive and just the the concern um of
not having a sex drive then ends up fueling more of the hocd symptoms the fact that i don't want to have sex with people of the opposite sex um is is now more evidence that this isn't just uh ocd that there's something real going on here and so it's just another perpetual cycle of ocd and um so people want people often ask how can i get my libido back uh and when will i get my libido back and so um i mean look the annoying answer about this is it's just another question that comes under
your main theme of hocd here and because of that we treat it the same way stop stop looking for uh a certainty on this stop demanding that you get your libido back libido just doesn't work that way you can't force it and it took me a long time to realize that because yeah having like a natural normal healthy sex drive is something that most human beings enjoy having and so i lost that and there were periods where it it just was like non-existent but the more i tried to force it or look for it or
hope that it came back the worse it got and so really the answer to this question is to just stop looking for it let your brain and your body do what it's going to do naturally without trying to interfere you know um and this is the truth uh sex drive just like every other feeling and emotion it comes and it goes no one's horny all the time i mean thank god i i could actually look back on that time and and consider myself fortunate because i probably had in an overly stimulated sex drive before that
you know and who wants to deal with that all day and so what i find uh now is that i'm very good at not demanding that my sex drive be any different than it is in any moment and what happens is i find that i have a very natural um normal healthy libido again and there will be days where it feels like i don't have any libido at all and that used to set off a series of me trying to ritualize and figure it out and prove one way or the other that i was or
wasn't gay or whatever and now like take right now i feel like i have no libido at all it just isn't there that's normal you just go through periods of that perhaps um i could get myself worked up pretty quickly i'm still a young virile guy so um i i think that i could but um i find it more enjoyable now to not try to control any of these thoughts or feelings or emotions and so yeah right now i don't feel anything tomorrow i might be all horned up you know and uh and great i'll
i'll let what happens happen without trying to get in the way of it and so for you hocd people who perhaps are getting triggered by the reality that you're not having the sex drive that you used to and now you're using that as uh you know that is becoming an obsession in and of itself and as a result you are then going back to to your attempt to get certainty about your sexual orientation because when you do a little ritual um you do feel like your sex drive comes back probably temporarily right because you know
how rituals work when you do them they they do shoot you know they shoot a bunch of dopamine into your brain and you feel calmed down and you feel back to yourself you also know though that every time you do that you are practicing not accepting uncertainty and you are resending this signal to your brain that you can't deal with this and so that gets stronger and stronger your ocd tends to get worse and worse and so instead like i always say use these opportunities as exposures instead right i mean almost anything that pops up
in the course of treatment for hocd it can be used either as an exposure or a ritual so something like this happens naturally you feel like you have no sex drive and it's making you anxious and as a result you now have two choices you can lean into that anxiety you can lean into the reality that your sex drive just isn't where it used to be and this might be some sort of confirmatory uh proof that you actually are having a sexual orientation crisis and that you're going to accept that uncertainty and accept that you
might never figure it out and it might not even be ocd and allow yourself to feel uncomfortable and allow yourself to feel like you have no sex drive um that would be a smart move for treatment a bad move for treatment and this is where like i said you have a choice you can either push yourself in the direction of doing an exposure which is good or you push yourself it which doesn't take much pushing for ocd people this is their natural inclination is to do a ritual so you know somebody recognizes that okay wow
i haven't been horny in three days and that sets off the alarm um they their ocd spikes and they feel like they need to do something about it to make sure i need to make sure that i do still have a sex drive and that the reason i'm not having a low libido right now um is is not because i'm actually you know coming to grips with the fact that i'm gay and so then they'll go do some ritual okay so low libido can just be another um prompt for your ocd to flare up just
just like watching uh watching a movie about a person who comes out later in life might be a prompt all of these things can be prompts and you get good at treatment you uh look for these opportunities in your life look for the opportunities that make you more uncomfortable that increase your doubt that increase uh your anxiety and then go okay boom if i'm doing treatment i'm going to lean into that and uh i'm going to walk away i'm going to leave it unanswered and um and that's it so i mean look i managed to
always do this i turn what could be a 30-second video into a 10-minute video but just just get out of its way if if you the recognition that you don't have sex drive that you wish you had right now does create a spike and and um an hocd spike then um then lean into it look at it as an exposure and if you're unwilling to do that then it at the very least just don't do a ritual to try to undo it just say to yourself okay look right now i'm not horny okay great gives
a crap you know i'm not horny go do a thousand other things and maybe tomorrow you will be maybe you won't be who knows uh just get out of the way and let it come naturally the same way you do with the question of sexual orientation in the first place get out of the way the more information you try to figure out up here honestly the less you the less you know so it is let let this stuff let the the resolution of these problems just happen naturally in real time it's uh it's all up
here the spinning the figuring out the analyzing the pushing away that's getting that's getting you in trouble it's keeping your ocd alive all right that's it that's the end of the video 10 minutes that wasn't too painful um as always i appreciate uh everybody in this little community that's coming together i i posted a video that we shot last week of me and uh harold kirby who was my first and longest ocd therapist and i think you'll be able to tell in that video that harold just like is so full of knowledge on so many
fronts um so so he's he's really got an expertise in a million areas and so check that video out i mean we get deeper into mindfulness how to use that as an aid in your erp treatment and um and and just a whole bunch of other psychological ideas to to help you get better uh if you are interested in uh in in working one-on-one learning how to apply mindfulness learning erp learning how to get out of your way learning what the expectations of treatment are and how to stick with them feel free to hit me
up at ocd mindful gmail.com if you have general questions feel free to write them right here on youtube if you notice that they didn't go up i said this on my last video i don't know why this channel gets like very censored probably 50 of the comments i can see i get a little notification that a comment was made and then i go to find it and it's not there so i'm not deleting these comments uh unless they are intentionally triggering or providing reassurance so um feel free to uh leave a comment and hopefully create
a discussion i'm loving seeing people that watch my channel have like great answers to other people that maybe just discovered it so keep that up and i'll see you guys on the next one later
