Mental Conditions Forum - Suffering From Sexual Anxiety /Obsessive-compulsive disorder

I am a 20-year old male in college and I have been suffering from what I believe to be anxiety of some sort regarding girls and sex for the past couple years of my life due to some things I told my mother regarding sexual emotions during high school. My case is, at least I feel, EXTREMELY abnormal and I am thoroughly frustrated because I feel like there is no end to these tense feelings/emotions that I have been dealing with to some degree for about three years.

Ever since 4th grade, I have been prone to strong feelings of guilt and worry when there really was never a need for concern (I'm thinking that this may have been OCD all along). I was raised in a fairly morally and sexually conservative household and several times in high school when I frequented a couple fetish websites I had unbearable, uncontrollable amounts of guilt. The only way to empty this guilt was to voice what I did to a superior. In this case, it was my mother. It was humiliating but it was the only way to get rid of the extreme guilt emotion I was feeling (I had been raised in a household where porn was considered downright horrible. Today, I don't necessarily view porn as bad or good, but how one handle's it, just like many things in life).

The pivotal case of this happened when I was a sophomore in high school. I was on Amazon.com when I happened upon a picture of the new Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Upon viewing it I had the guilt return, and the next day I voiced it to my mom again to relieve the guilt.

This is where my problem started. Ever since that day when I got the extreme guilt/anxiety emotion upon viewing the SI pic I have had moderate to strong anxiety around the presence of females, especially especially their breast and rear areas due to the SI pic I viewed. There have been periods in recent years I have been worried to look at a girl/woman I find attractive because of the fear of the guilt emotion I felt returning. This anxiety is unbearably strong and I don't know how to relieve it. The anxiety became extremely heavy a little more than a year ago when I viewed a sex-related video (I rarely do it, just to make sure no one thinks I'm some loner with no friends) on the web and since then I've always felt that the reason my anxiety increased then and persists now is because I feel that since viewing such material in the past gave me such a sharp guilt emotion that I had to tell my mom to get rid of the pain that this would be mandatory in this case too. Obviously I didn't but the anxiety remains. I believe this may be a symptom of possible OCD since I can't seem to get over the guilt emotions internally, even though I rarely actively think about it.

In conclusion, I am wondering whether this feeling of tension/anxiety around girls/females is I think it is related to one and/or two things: 1) the fact that my mother is extremely overbearing (always pressuring me to "succeed" and constantly nagging me and giving me aggravating advice all the time) and I live at home over the summers and the thought of her thinking and dwelling upon the things I told her is unbearable to me, or 2) an internal tensing up (perhaps a defense mechanism of some sort) against the guilt emotion I felt because I was so afraid of it. I am thinking it may be more of the latter because strangely enough I suffer the SAME TENSITY/anxiety feeling watching television today ever since two years ago when I felt YET ANOTHER strong rush of guilt for watching a movie that I felt that my mom would not want me watching due to the high level of violence (and no, I am not and never was a loner or "momma's boy" type - I just happened to grow up in a slightly overbearing household that had a strong effect on me).

If anyone has any feedback or advice on what they think I'm suffering from (I assume it's anxiety of some sort) and any idea of any remedies or advice, I would appreciate it so much. I've mentioned this problem on another forum and someone made the suggestion that I may be OCD and this may be contributing to my anxiety, stress, and tenseness. I believe that's probably true because I have a lot of common OCD symptoms (compulsively making sure my car's locked, washing hands a lot, triple-checking calculations at work, etc). I know this sounds pathetic, but believe me I have many friends and am a fairly typical individual for my age. No one would ever be able to tell that something of this magnitude is on my mind. This is taking a major toll on my sexual/emotional well-being and also my internal relationship with my mom. Thanks again to all for reading this, I'm aware this was an extremely long and complex post.