You know, I actually think it's common to have places where you can't tell if what you're feeling is tied to your gender, your sexuality, or both, because while those are technically separate categories, they tend to interact with and influence each other in various ways. Do you feel like those unr...

Honestly, one of my worries is just that I'm getting some wires crossed between my gender identity and my sexuality, in some ways, as well as issues with unrealistic expectations from media. It's difficult to work through, particularly because when I try to think of how to explain it all, it inevita...

As a matter of fact a whole lot of my trauma does revolve around feeling like I could never do The Right Thing despite trying to. When you combine ADHD, autism, and all the various other things that made me Different, on top of good old Gifted Kid Syndrome, I spent a lot of time growing up hearing o...

I mean… we’ve done that. Talked about this pattern, I mean. Ultimately, though, no matter how much we discuss all this, I’m not going to be able to improve unless we agree on a strategy and I put the effort into following it. And unfortunately, that never really works out. Either I end up shooting d...

Yeah, fair enough. I guess the reason why it feels like that time was “wasted” is because a lot of my problems feel like things that I could work on or push through or resolve if I just… actually tried, or was willing to accept being uncomfortable for a little while. But instead I’m so focused on tr...

Well, in terms of IRL friends, I don't really have, um... any. I have online friends who have been extremely helpful in exploring all this, but when it comes to actually putting things into practice, the anxiety can be... overwhelming, in a lot of ways. Having so many intersecting forms of neurodive...

Figure I might as well bring this up here in the hopes that I’ll get some new insight into things. So, I’m 28 and AMAB. For the last couple of years I’ve been questioning my gender identity… although maybe “questioning” implies a more active process. My anxiety and fear of “getting things wrong” hav...

Well… to be honest I’ve spent years now working with a psychologist to try to deal with my various issues. Unfortunately, I can’t really afford to have sessions more than once per month, which significantly reduces how much we accomplish, and even then we often don’t get anywhere - not that my psych...

Well, after both reading and thinking about it for a while, it’s starting to make some sense how my ADHD impulsivity likely makes sexual desire something that I don’t feel as “in control of” as I would like. I suppose the fact that I mostly experience sexual desire towards fantasies or ideas rather ...

I’ve taken a look at the article you linked - it’s quite interesting. However, I’m uncertain about whether it helps to deal with the core issue here - or if it does, it’s only a partial solution. My goal here is for masturbation to be an overall more pleasant experience, and I believe that having it...

So in terms of getting accustomed to recognizing pleasant physical sensations, I could see that being helpful, but also very difficult. In general, I’m someone who spends a lot of time “in my own head”, rather than focusing on my body and what’s happening around me. Could very well have originated a...

Yeah, after re-reading that article, I can definitely see that there was a lot of overlap between arousal and desire in those definitions. With that in mind, I think sexual desire as a concept is a lot closer to what I’m trying to wrap my head around - although I get the impression that it’s even mo...

After two months, I can say that… Well, okay, to be honest things haven’t really gone anywhere. I’ve found it very difficult to actively try to do anything differently, unfortunately. I do think that I might have a slightly better understanding of why that’s the case, though. I think a lot of the ti...

So, as someone who missed a lot of the early traditional introductions to the concepts of sex and sexuality in general, there’s a lot that I’ve had to figure out through context and extrapolating from the way other people talk about things. For the most part it’s worked well enough, but I’m at a poi...

Yeah, you’re completely right. Putting too much pressure on myself to “get it right” or figure things out as soon as possible wouldn’t end up doing any good.

Tried to masturbate in the shower and… well, it wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t really great either. I dunno if maybe I was doing something wrong, or if my expectations were incorrect, or something else? I’m not gonna get into specifics obviously, but… there was sensitivity and stimulation, but it didn’...

Morning or night is an option, technically, but I don’t think it would really work for me. I go to sleep pretty early compared to the rest of my family, and while I wake up early too, I’m not generally in the mood around that time - it’s usually closer to afternoon or evening. Also, I’m not sure how...

I suppose a lot of my questions and uncertainties revolve around disposal or being able to set things up in the first place. Like… I don’t know if semen has a particularly identifiable smell or something, so I don’t know if that would be recognizable as “evidence” or something? If I failed to keep e...

I suppose sex toys are technically an option, but they run into the same issue as trying to do things differently - or even trying to physically masturbate at all rather than rely solely on fantasizing. In other words, the anxiety/paranoia/general lack of knowledge of how things work makes it diffic...

Yes, I’ve looked at the various articles linked. There’s a quote in the second one you linked that stood out to me: “If we aren’t both careful and creative we can get stuck in fantasies that don’t mature and politicize with us. We can get caught in fantasies that perpetuate things so counter to our ...

Oh my god I spent so long writing out my early experiences that I got auto-logged out and lost the whole thing. Long story short, big contributing factors were a parent with trauma on the subject (meaning nobody ever talked about sex with me at all - never got The Talk), a religious upbringing, crip...

I have definitely considered that, because so many of my early experiences with sexuality and arousal were so steeped in shame and guilt, my brain may have correlated them so that a feeling of shame or guilt is necessary for arousal in some way. Although, neither shame nor guilt seem to prompt arous...

Honestly, a lot of it IS stories by others - in fact, that’s probably more of a problem, because it means that I’m less in control of where a fantasy scenario goes, and the characters involved are actual characters rather than “some featureless, unspecified person” like my imagination would create. ...

Likely both to some extent. There’s definitely an element of shame that makes it difficult to think about or remember these fantasies without distress - I spent a long time with feelings of shame attached to the concept of sex itself, let alone the shame that’s often attached to fantasizing about pa...

Hi. So, I’m 28, neurodivergent and AMAB, but very uncertain regarding my identity, and have spent a lot of my life dealing with guilt and shame regarding sexuality. The paranoia, anxiety, and lack of information I’ve experienced in the past have greatly shaped how I interact with sexuality, and I’m ...