Originally Posted by
Marianne S
"Can it be subdued?" Subdued, yes. Eliminated, never!
I prefer the word "suppressed" rather than "subdued." Not that there's much difference in meaning, but "subdue" carries the possibility (and the hope!) that the urge will remain "subdued" in the long term, while "suppress" reminds us that there is pressure involved: that some of the time at least, we will have to continue indefinitely exerting pressure to "keep a lid" on the urge--because the urge never stops exerting pressure of its own for us to give in to it!
How is CD like an "addiction"? I can't claim to be any kind of expert on addiction, but Maria's mention of smoking points to a likely difference. My wife and I both smoked on and off for much of our lives, but eventually gave it up for good. However, even after quitting for good, our "relationships" with the habit still differed. For myself, once I'd taken a few weeks to get over the physiological addiction to nicotine, the urge to smoke went away and in the thirteen years since then I've never had any real desire to smoke. My wife on the other hand was more like Maria. She did succeed in quitting, but still retained an "affection" for cigarettes, and even years later was saying that she'd still like to be able to smoke.
We did both have the "usual problem" with weight gain after quitting, and that's because for many people like ourselves who kick a habit there still remains an underlying urge of some kind. With smoking it's presumably for "oral pleasure" or stimulation, and when that's no longer being satisfied by smoking, we turn to food instead!
Regardless of these differences, the point I want to make is that many addictions, once we have overcome them, do stay more or less permanently "subdued." Or at worst, the urge to resume indulging the addiction does not grow with time. I do understand for instance that many alcoholics after getting sober can never afford to drink again for fear of a relapse, but I don't suppose staying sober gets any harder with time, unless they're subjected to exceptional stress. I don't know how this works for gambling addiction and the like, but I gather most ex-heroin addicts don't have to stay on methadone for life. So even that deadly habit can be gradually "subdued." As I said, I'm no expert on addictions, but it seems to me that having overcome an addiction of any other kind, continuing to resist it gets easier with time, or anyway no worse.
Crossdressing is not like that. While the need to crossdress may wax and wane for many natural reasons, the likelihood is that the longer it's suppressed, the more the urge builds up until either it's satisfied or--for some people anyway--they start to suffer growing stress and other psychological consequences. For some this can be serious. It depends of course on the motives for crossdressing, which are not always the same. But as others have said, that's because the urges "come from inside," not from some acquired dependency on a particular substance or habit.
Speaking for myself, in my teens I went through the same cycle of "purging" and eventually "giving in" and resuming crossdressing, at least twice and possibly more: an experience so well known to all or most of us here. I've also noticed how, if I've been obliged to suppress crossdressing at one or two periods of my life, the urge "breaks out" with a vengeance once the "lid is off" again.
Probably the worst example of that was in my mid-to-late twenties when for the first time I was living full time with a girlfriend. Prior to that I'd lived either on my own or with my parents. Although I had limited opportunities to crossdress (in secret, naturally) while living with my parents, I knew there would always be those opportunities for the foreseeable future. If my attempts to purge and give up crossdressing caused stress in the short term, when the pressure to resume grew greater it was easy enough to give in to it! But once I was living with a girlfriend, I was telling myself "This is it! It's now or never! Now that we're having regular sex I ought to be able to kick this crossdressing habit permanently!" Of course, as we all know, this never works! But the more determined I was to "kick" the habit, and the longer I tried, the more the pressure grew, until in the absence of a wardrobe of my own (which I'd purged for what I'd fondly believed to be the "last" time before we moved in together), I found myself sneaking every opportunity, at considerable risk, to slip into my girlfriend's skirts, blouses and dresses--and needless to say, her bras and panties!--when she wasn't around.
That wasn't the reason we split, because I found in time that we had significant incompatibilities. Not the kind to cause big fights, but the kind that would have caused problems further down the Great Highway of Life. But after we split, my feminine self (which I'm sure she would never have accepted) did breathe a huge sigh of relief, and I did "break out" into a mini-orgy of gratification for Marianne's needs, which had been sorely and unwisely neglected in the meantime.
I learned a lot about myself from that experience, painful as it was at times, and I never tried to suppress my feminine self again; only to keep her discreetly in the background when circumstances called for it. It is not an "addiction." It is part of who we are!
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