It’s easy to assume that our crossdressing is mostly sexual, but there are a whole host of other reasons why we do it. We need to examine our underlying reasons, the hidden motivations that brought about crossdressing in our lives in the first place. We all have healthy human needs and desires and emotions that we need to try to meet in our daily lives. But for some of us, we have been trying (subconsciously) to meet these needs through crossdressing rather than in other normal healthy areas of life. We need to identify these human needs or wants that we are foolishly trying to fulfill through crossdressing. Perhaps there are aspects of our personality that we want to let out, but we feel like we cannot let them out while as our masculine selves, and so instead we only let them out when in crossdressing mode. We need to integrate these aspects of our real personality into our real selves, so that we behave as we truly are, even when identifying as men and dressing as men.

I think it is important for us to take time to analyze these issues in ourselves, not only to understand our crossdressing struggle better, but also to help us in our recovery from crossdressing addiction. If we want to continue to resist crossdressing, we have to figure out what crossdressing was doing for us, what needs we were trying to meet through it, and then get those needs met in healthy ways.

So for example, if I am able to feel uninhibited, joyful, carefree, attractive, beautiful, and fun while crossdressing, why cannot I not feel that way as a man? Certainly some part of my upbringing or my own social understanding of the world stifled me. I learned to not feel certain things as a man, or learned that I shouldn’t or couldn’t feel certain things as a man. I need to think through these different feelings and traits and learn how to integrate them into my one self, my one real identity as a man. The alternative of course is crossdressing in which a man leads a sort of double life, with his feminine crossdressed self acting in a different way from his non-crossdressed self. I want to be a whole free human being. One that can be strong and passionate, attractive and adventurous, courageous and compassionate, all while being the same person. I do not want to be the stifled boring uninteresting but stable man, who then spends his weekends in a closet (or out on the town) crossdressed and being adventurous, beautiful, carefree, etc. I want to be a whole human being. I do not want to be a divided person. I do not want to look for important human needs of mine to be met through crossdressing, but I want to get them met through healthy relationships with God and others, productive work, and wholesome hobbies.

I have written more extensively on these ideas in an article called – Integration and Contentment.