Post published by captainflint1

It's a relief to know I'm not alone, and an honor to be alongside men who understand what I'm going through. I'm here to share struggles and insights, to seek and provide encouragement, and beat this with you guys.


BEGIN POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNING

About me. I've had a sissy/crossdressing fetish since early puberty, and I think that it was initially caused by exposure to tg captions as early as 5th grade. I've scanned my memory prior to that as hard as I could and I could not find any signs of a dysphoric, non-masculine childhood. I regret to say my first orgasm was while crossdressed (I didn't even really understand what it was until later). In high school and college, I relied on sissy porn and regular masturbation (with quite occasional crossdressing, tapering down to 1-2 times a year) to get me through the stresses of life. Although I achieved a lot academically, I was constantly burdened by the shame/guilt of how I got off when things got tough. I knew deep down that what I was doing was contrary to my non-addicted, non-horny self image. Right before graduating college, I was blessed to get with a girl, and we have actually been dating for 2.5 years now. I love this girl tremendously and we have lived together for 1.5 years now. Unfortunately because of my years of conditioning, I resorted to fantasizing about my fetish to be sexually viable with her. I bottled this up for a long time, before finally opening up 100% to her 12 days ago. I am the luckiest guy on Earth, because she accepted me wholeheartedly and is doing everything she can to support me in my journey towards beating this addiction and letting my natural love for her fuel my sex drive. Now I face a daunting challenge - starting in two weeks, my girlfriend is going to be abroad for 8 months doing a global medical fellowship (I'm so proud of her), and we will feasibly see each other for a week in May and in August before the fellowship completes and she returns for good. I want to take this time that I have alone, and use the lack of "performance anxiety", combined with the fact that I no longer have secrets from her, to permanently rid myself of this addiction. I have already been struggling with this prior to this post. For instance, I am actually porn free since December 8th 2018, but I still used my fetish imagination to perform, right up until I opened up 12 days ago. This is when things started to get nasty - I realized I was utterly incapable of getting it up after admitting my fetish and blocking it from my active mind during intimacy. I spent a week painfully doing PMO, and scored a small but significant victory two days ago, when I masturbated to completion WITHOUT my imagination and in front of my girlfriend, while she provided me with encouragement and a healthy fantasy of what we will do together. I thought I had figured things out, only to get hit yesterday with a sore throat and a relapse (in the sense that I masturbated again, but allowed my fetish to trickle into my imagination in order to orgasm). Sounds obvious in hindsight, but clearly one week of abstinence was not going to fix over a decade of conditioning. The root cause of my urges now doesn't seem to be entirely a physical need, I crave it to feel "normal". To make matters worse, I have just recently read about how this fetish caused some folks to transition to women, which really makes my stomach churn, because I fear, is this me? To clarify, since reading that, I have thought about this extensively and I genuinely DO NOT identify as a woman. When I am not stressed and genuinely in my element (ex. On a good day at work or at the gym), I have NO DOUBTS that I am comfortable in my body as a man, and love my girlfriend, in many more ways than just sexually. However, in moments of weakness or stress, I have been plagued by doubts regarding my gender identity, which have so far been quite debilitating. When I get these doubts, my mind becomes fixated on them (costing me sleep and sanity), and the only way to quell them seems to be indulging in masturbation to "prove that I am a functional man", which, you guessed it, takes me back to needing a sissy fetish to finish. This is what happened this past night. What's interesting to me is that it was precisely the act of reading about some people going trans that caused me to freak out so much over this. I think that is what finally prompted me to fess up to my girlfriend because I became terrified of potentially not being her "forever man". Before then, my fetish was just just something gross I thought about to orgasm and feel normal.

END POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNING

Anyway, given all this, I have resolved to do at least a 90 days PMO reboot as soon as I can without injuring myself, so that I can score more victories like two days ago when I next see my girlfriend. In order to do so effectively, I have decided to log my experiences here, and be super open about what I'm feeling. The hope is that with support and commentary from you guys, this will lighten the burden of urges/dysphoria fears and allow me to get past them without relapsing. So, I'd appreciate any responses with wisdom/encouragement. In fact, and please hold me to this, if you do leave a comment, I promise that I will strike up a conversation with you to see how I can help you with your struggle. One final note - please DO NOT respond with encouragement to transition. Even if your situation seemed similar to mine and you did end up transitioning, every person's gender identity and sexual preferences are different. I respect your situation and admire your strength in picking a solution, but I know in my heart that I am not trans, and considering it only increases my insecurity and therefore likelihood to relapse. This also unfortunately applies to gender therapy advice, which I believe is not nearly individualistic enough, and far too transition-friendly at the moment. I have far more to lose from it than to gain. In fact, I am going to treat any pro-transition thread from now on to be equivalent to porn for me, so under my own terms, I will not be able to respond to you since I'm not supposed to be looking at porn. So that's it. I'm at day 1 again. Here's to getting through this together, once and for all!