Last updated on August 25, 2020
Question:
Hi! I’m 15 years old. I suffer because I have done various wrongs. I get attracted to both boys and girls! I’m going to far and I know it’s a sin.
I’m a virgin, but I have masturbated since I was 11 years old. When I was a child I pretended to have sex with a girl, she was my friend and we didn’t know what we were doing, but we would stay in our underwear and I would lay on top of her and rub my body against her. Then, when I was 9 years old I did the same thing with another friend, but he was a boy! I was just pretending to do something I saw on TV and I kissed his butt. I’m so ashamed nowadays, and I’m afraid that he will tell someone. 🙁
When I was a pre-teen I got attracted to girls, and I had some girl crushes. But I watched gay porn in the Internet. When I was 13 I stopped to be attracted to girls and I started being more attracted to guys. I had one boy crush and then I stopped watching gay porn.
When I was 13 and a half my boy crush ended and I started to feel very gay because I was effeminate and didn’t get attracted to girls. I forgot what it was like to look at a girl and get attracted to her smile.
I masturbated since I was 11 by rubbing my body against my bed. I never masturbated by hand until this year. This year I wanted to become a normal guy again, so I stopped being that effeminate and to look at guys. I started to seek for things that taught me how to get attracted to girls again, but in the correct way. I wanted to find a girlfriend, but I didn’t. 🙁
Then I started to watch gay porn again but not just gay porn, I started watching straight porn too; and I masturbated at an average of six times a day. That’s like more than 42 times a week. I cant’ feel like a normal boy like this. I want to be like some guys I know, like some friends, like the TV show guys; but I’m not. I’m just a perverted and obsessive lustful jerk.
I hate myself because I can’t help myself. I want to stop watching porn. But I already changed a lot. I stopped looking at all the guys around and I just look at some girls. I’m starting to get attracted to them again. But I need to change more!
I have a celebrity boy crush and this is the only guy that I get attracted to now. I learn things about girls with his TV shows and try to copy him as I did when I was a child. I love him, but I want to date girls and become a correct person.
Help me, please! 🙁
Answer:
Any bad habit is hard to break and sexual bad habits are even more difficult because the feedback from sexual acts and thoughts lock things into our minds. Situations, like yours, is easier to deal with when you and I can sit down and talk through all the issues going on in your life, but since that isn’t possible, I’m going to give you some things to think about and do.
First, when people want to fix a problem, they have a tendency to go to the opposite extreme. It is as if people think they can balance out their life. But often extremes in both directions are equally wrong. You’ve come to realize that homosexual lusts are wrong, but you are trying to balance it by chasing after heterosexual lusts which are equally wrong. You can’t spend your days thinking about having sex with a girl and have it counter thinking about having sex with a boy.
Second, what you fill your mind with often comes out in your actions. I noted how you spend your time imitating what you’ve seen on television and on the Internet. Not only are many of these things wrong, but they also aren’t real! They are made-up stories. Like all good stories, they try to come close to reality, but since they have other goals in mind, reality is not strictly followed. Since you imitate these things, you look artificial to people around you as well. These “moves” are not really your own and they aren’t real “moves” in response to real situations. I suspect girls are noticing how fake you are coming across and it turns them off. And this doesn’t start to address the problem that you imitating people portraying sinful actions.
Third, while you are anxious to have a girlfriend, I would like you to consider something more important: Why are you in a rush? You are 15. Are you planning to get married any time soon? (I hope not.) Just because TV makes it appear that everyone has girlfriends and even if a number of your friends have girlfriends, does this make having a girlfriend a requirement? Is there any harm in just having fun as a 15-year-old boy without the complications of a relationship?
The core problem is that you are focusing too much on sex and that is spilling out in all sorts of areas of your life. I’m going to ask you to do some things that can be really hard, but you will like the results in the end:
- For the next two weeks, I want you to stop watching television. Find other things to do. Go play ball with friends. Go on long hikes. Read a good book. But no television watching.
- For the next two weeks, I want you to purposely limit your masturbation to only once a day. Just because you get aroused or have sexual feelings it doesn’t mean you have to act on them and it’s about time you learn to control your body instead of it controlling you.
- If you can, get an Internet filter on your computer that blocks pornography. One that I recommend, which is free, is OpenDNS. It takes a bit of computer knowledge to install, but not a great deal. It can be overridden, but that means you have to do it on purpose. What I am looking for is something that makes you think before you go looking for porn. If you have printed pornography around, throw it out.
- No flirting with girls for the next two weeks.
What I want you to see is how different you will feel at the end of the two weeks. Sexual arousal is self-feeding. The more you stimulate yourself physically or mentally, the more you crave it. So we are going to break the cycle. At first, it will be hard because you will want to do what you habitually do. Instead, you are going to have to come up with something else to do, which will be hard at first and easier as the days go by.
At the end of the two weeks, let me know how it went and what changed in your life.