I have been a straight guy for as long as I can remember. Ive had multiple relationships, plenty of enjoyable sexual encounters, and obviously seen women as a point of attraction since i was very young.
However, my long term relationship has suffered because I started having these panic attacks about that. I start obsessing over the idea that I may not be straight, as a result of some erectile dysfunction, which of course only makes that panic worse.
Lately, almost exactly after I turned 30, its like that part of my brain just shut off. I can, most of the time, become erect and do the deed (so to speak) but its like a part of my brain is missing. The part that wants it, its so quiet compared to before. I have obsessive doubts about what im feeling, all the time. I dont enjoy anything. I cant masturbate, because when I do find a fleeting grasp of arousal it is met with a wave of depression and anxiety that shuts it down.
Im going to my first therapy session today, but im in a lot of pain and just wanted a place to put it.
Edit: weed was a major trigger and ive since given it up
Edit: would also just like to thank everyone for responding, thank you to the community.
As someone who has suffered through intense depression and anxiety and has had it seriously effect their sex life, that's what it sounds like to me. Especially regarding the personified negative voice you described in a comment. Meds are great and I wouldn't try to steer anyone away from them, but often the sources of depression/anxiety/negative mental health in general is something in your environment causing you an undue amount of stress. I'd start by sitting down and thinking through the changes that have happened in your life recently and trying to pinpoint what's caused this sudden mood shift. Serous self-loathing, especially when it comes to sex, is something I've always struggled with when going through a depressive episode. Most people's knee jerk reaction is to confront that self-loathing directly by going hard in the opposite direction on the things that it's attacking you for. So for me when my sex drive was being negatively effected by my depression and that negative voice in the back of my head was attacking me for it and attacking my masculinity over it I responded by trying to be as macho as possible and fucking (and drinking) eight ways to Sunday. This was not a healthy coping mechanism. What did end up helping me was singling out the stressors in my life and either removing them or finding new and healthy ways to deal with them. Once I dealt with those, everything downstream of them from my mental health to my sexual health improved naturally. Trying to brute force my way into 'being normal' without doing the introspection necessary to actually heal did far, far more damage to my mental health than anything else and started me on a downward spiral into deeper depression
I absolutely relate to this, and Im just not sure how. I don't know how to delve in and introspect, partially because the stuff is all fairly obvious, it feels like? Ive got no friends, sans a girlfriend I adore, in a pandemic that gets worse everyday. I dont take part in my hobbies to nearly the degree I used to, and I ended my late 20's in complete isolation.
Other than that, looking inward during the panic and outside the panic feel very different. During an attack, I look inward and the personified negative voice is just telling me that Im gay, or asexual, or broken, but outside of an attack that all feels kind of silly? Ive been watching straight porn (could also be an issue tbh) since I was 14 and have enjoyed it immensely. Ive gotten uncomfortable boners making out with girls in bars. Its all so difficult.
First and foremost I would tell you to absolutely not listen to those voices. That's your self-doubt/self-loathing trying to find ways to dig into your psyche and undermine you. They'll attack you from any avenue possible. Right now you're feeling insecure about your sex drive so they're using that, but for me they've covered everything from me feeling like I'm wasting my life to me feeling like a failure because I don't do laundry often enough. One of my happiest breakthrough moments was going through a depressive episode and realizing that those voices in the back of my head didn't have any ammunition to attack me with because I had been making a conscious effort to address the things in my life that had been making me unhappy. It took years of therapy and effort but fuck was it worth it
As far as the stressors in your life feeling obvious I think that's a very fair place to be. Most people are completely aware of the things in their life that suck and cause them stress on a day to day basis. That said I still think there's a lot of benefit in intentionally thinking through the stressors in your life to understand exactly how they're negatively impacting you so you can understand exactly how you can go about addressing them and either removing them from your life or mitigating their impact. I mean we're all communists here. We know capitalism is barbaric and eating away at us, but we obsessively study it to understand exactly how we can go about attacking it to end that negative process. We need theory to inform our praxis and in a similar way we need to understand the mechanisms that dictate our mental health so we can go about correcting them. And in the process of investigating an obvious problem I often found deeper issues I had repressed and buried that, on the surface level, were things I hadn't thought about in years but on the deeper, subconscious level I realized were things that had been gnawing on the back of my mind ever since they happened. So maybe there's some through line to your feelings of insecurity about your sexuality and there's something there to explore or maybe it's just a particularly gross negative thought that's weaponizing toxic masculinity against you. In either case the best thing I could suggest would be to sit down and think through where those thoughts come from, past experiences that have informed them (positively and negatively), and what you want for yourself in the future. Like I said earlier, just jumping in and trying to address these things without the understanding led me to leaning on ideological narratives of toxic masculinity that I had internalized without ever examining and in doing so only pushed myself further into depression.
Also panic attacks are called attacks for a reason. In the moment your main thought should be towards 'surviving' it, to make liberal use of figurative language. Successful strategies I've used in the past have revolved around grounding myself to reality to stop the anxiety spirals, so doing things like counting objects in the room or playing the "what's something you can see, something you can smell, something you can touch, etc" game that helps keep you in the now and present.