Ask a Counselor: How Do I Rid Myself of a Fetish?

I have had a strange fetish involving leg and arm casts as well as disability since I was a teenager. I am now a respected professional and very religious as well and it is an embarrassment that I get distracted by it, masturbate about it and go into chat rooms and pretend I am disabled or wearing a cast to get attention. How do I stop this?

-Jim

Dear Jim,

Thanks for your willingness to share this very personal issue with us and I’m sure many will learn from your experience. When people are dealing with or trying to resolve some type of fetish, it’s important to try to go back in your memories and figure out when the fetish began and the reasons it began.

You said that you’ve had this since being a teenager so obviously something happened in your teen years that was not only associated with this fetish but also gave you some sort of pleasure or reward in regards to casts or disabilities. Since we naturally crave pleasure your brain began to connect this fetish to pleasure/reward which meant if you wanted to feel that way again the fetish had to be present in some fashion.

Once you can understand how the fetish was started (this may require some counseling to get to the bottom of) then you can begin to deconstruct the thought processes that keep you bound to the fetish. In a lot of ways it’s similar to dealing with addiction with the pathways in the brain being connected to an object rather than a substance. Being involved in the church, I’m sure you’ve heard the rhetoric that you just need to give it to God and pray for deliverance but quite frankly there’s is way more involved than that. I think God is more interested in how overcoming this can shape your character instead of magically taking all your shortcomings away.

Breaking things like addiction and fetishes take time and is a process of behavior modification. I would really recommend that you see someone professionally concerning this issue as I can’t possibly walk you through everything involved given this format. Just remember that every human that walks the planet has some form of dysfunction operating in their lives and recognizing and understanding the problem is half the battle. I wish you the best as you seek to overcome this fetish and live a more balanced life.

Kind regards,

Ted