Halloween is coming up, a very strange holiday, and a particularly dangerous holiday for us. I want to remind you that even if your wife, or girlfriend, or mother, or friends think dressing you up as a woman is a playful harmless thing, it is not harmless for us. For us it is a some kind of mixture of sexual fetish, or identity confusion from not feeling like we fit our bodies, or both (depending on whether you lean towards crossdressing just for sexual pleasure or crossdressing because of gender dysphoria).
Stay strong. Don’t give in to false rationalizations, fantasies, or lies. You will only feel worse after a time of temporary pleasure. If you know you are going to be strongly tempted, let our prayer group know or call your accountability partner, so that someone can be calling you during tough times, and so people can be praying for you.
Thinking about Halloween and dress up parties, I realized something about myself, and wondering if it fits any of you as well. I realized that despite my strong crossdressing compulsions, I hate dressing up in costumes. I hate it. I have no desire to do it at all, not for Halloween, not for a play, not for a theme party, not to play make-believe with children, nothing. That is not to say I would never wear a costume for any of these occasions. But I certainly have no desire to, and it takes a great deal of cajoling and pressure for me to give in to do so. I wonder how this fits into my desires to crossdress, something which at times in the past felt pleasurable. Much of crossdressing, from my perspective anyway, is about an enjoyment of dressing up. It is about a transformation of becoming something we are not. It is an elaborate costume and disguise.
So why would I hate dressing up as a knight or as superman? I really don’t know. I just want to be myself. Maybe crossdressing is different for me because I got so good at imagining my delusion that I could really believe it was a woman and not myself. So it was not just dress-up. It was not me at all anymore. It was a woman who I lusted after, a false woman, but one that was convincing enough for my lust.
Or maybe there is an aspect to all of this that results from crossdressing being something now only in my past. I ceased that messed up behavior. Since then I have found great healing and I enjoy being myself. Maybe because of that healing, I just want to keep enjoying being myself, and don’t need to go back to any childish imaginings and dress up games.
Or maybe it’s that dressing up as anything reminds me too much of how I used to crossdress, and I don’t want to bring back those feelings. I don’t want to be reminded of those feelings of shame, nor do I want to reignite the addiction again.
Anybody else have any ideas about this?
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