POCD killing me please help

**TRIGGER WARNING**

I promise you you are a normal guy attracted to normal girls your age. OCD will make you think, but "what if" and you will constantly check to see if you are attracted to them. Trust me you are not. You are not a pedophile or a predator. This is SO common in the OCD world. So many teachers have this because they are around kids all day. OCD takes the one thing you are NOT and says to you, "Maybe you are."

The tingling is very common in many things. Your brain might of even associated the little girls butt with just that, a butt. And instantly subconsciously a womans butt, which we all love as men, just gave you a tingle.

Focus on the fact that you are FREAKED out that you might like this. Do you think True pedophiles go around worrying they might be pedophiles? No! they go around masterbating to kids and trying to find illegal child porn or catching kids undressing until thats not enough for them anymore and they debate acting on doing something to them, predator type things.

Of course you probably just read that and you are afraid you are the exception to that rule or you are afraid that one day you might wake up and snap and want to do these things or maybe you did like it and you are just afraid to like it. BUT THAT IS OCD. Takes what scares us the most and BOOM shoves it in our faces.

Everyone has had that reaction at some point I am sure but just dismiss it as a junk thought. But WE DWELL ON JUNK THOUGHTS....OCD makes us constantly think about why we had these thoughts. When they are just fleeting thoughts.

I am sure you have imagined doing things to them to see if you get aroused or not. And I am sure this causes you anxiety and if it doesnt cause you anxiety you are getting anxiety because you didnt get any anxiety. And if you got no anxiety at all then you are afraid you might enjoy it....

But try this. Imagine having sex with a dog... You arent getting anxiety are you. Because you know you dont find dogs sexually attractive. but that just means you know you arent attracted to dogs so why get anxiety over it? You might of even got a tingle thinking about it. But thats just because you put a spotlight on your guy down there and boom he activates. Like think about your left hand you will feel your hand more then anything else because you are thinking about it. Your penis is super sensative and we are guys so any thoughts of anything in that area will wake him up. Does not mean you are attracted to kids, animals or anything else.

If it is causing you to get upset you arent into it. Is just OCD.

Just please please trust me on this. YOU ARE NOT INTO CHILDREN in that way. The fact that you came on here and shared that fear proves you arent. Instead of going on some illegal porn site you came here. So that is proof right there.

Like I said, this is very common in teachers. They love kids so much and want to help them but ones with OCD start to question if they are sick on the inside too. I had a female friend who opened up to me about it before and her anxiety was so bad she was thinking of quitting. And I have known her my whole life and she is in no way whatsoever a pedophile. It is almost funny to me that she ever even thought it. She has since overcome that fear and is now petrified on something else..lol

OCD takes your worse nightmare and makes you think it is possible.

And I can relate on you KNOWING you wouldnt act on it... BUT your fear is WANTING to do it. Because that would make you a sicko and being a sicko is what you are most afraid of.

Sorry about the long post. But please trust me on this. You will get over this. and probably get some other weird thought and laugh about this one.

Peterarron123 wrote:I also have an issue with thinking I'm attracted, but I go over it in my head trying to find reasons why I'm not attracted, and I repeat the same process of convincing myself I'm not, and even if I come up with conclusions, I still doubt myself

What you're attempting is to check what your triggers are. Triggers are not the same thing as being attracted to that person.

The next question is, when you felt a tingling when you saw a child naked, exactly what was going on with them? Who were they with and what was that person doing?

Thanks for more responses, I'm feeling a lot better now, but still have a little worry. I'm pretty sure now I was overreacting to the child, and I'm not as worried about it now

There are back and forth periods of relief and trauma especially in POCD.

The most important step of them all that you'll eventually need to reach is to admit that there is uncertainty and that you cannot prove that you aren't a pedophile.

I work with children and can often get erections around them, but not because I'm attracted to them. It is because I have ageplay fantasies where I want to be pampered, disciplined, and cared for like a little kid, and being around kids can physiologically cause erections, and there simply is nothing I can do about it. Do I wanna have sex with them? No, but can I prove that I am not a pedophile? Also, no. What is important is that I don't have any interest in having a sexual relationship with the kids and I'm not turned on by the thought having any sexual encounter with them, so there really is no need for me to worry about it. It just makes life very sad and complicated if I have to prove to myself or others that I am not a pedophile. There is really nothing to prove, because I don't feel I have an interest in having sex with kids.

Even when I feel relaxed and ok, the pocd starts up again, my mind will always find some sort of possibility of being a pedophile, and I will obsess in my mind to find reasons why that possibility is wrong, and even if I solve it, something new, or an old thought will pop up again and I obsess over that, my mind is constantly finding reasons. Sometimes I have the fear I'm a pedophile and have OCD at the same time, so even if I was one, I still worry about it, but I'm not sure if u can have pocd and be a pedophile too

Peterarron123 wrote:Even when I feel relaxed and ok, the pocd starts up again, my mind will always find some sort of possibility of being a pedophile, and I will obsess in my mind to find reasons why that possibility is wrong, and even if I solve it, something new, or an old thought will pop up again and I obsess over that, my mind is constantly finding reasons. Sometimes I have the fear I'm a pedophile and have OCD at the same time, so even if I was one, I still worry about it, but I'm not sure if u can have pocd and be a pedophile too

Most likely not. There is a distinctive difference between the two. Someone who is a pedophile would likely know without a doubt that they have fantasies about sex with young children and wish that little kids could give consent to have sex legally and psychologically. They deal with distress and anxiety the same way people with POCD do as well, but generally it is more because they can't talk about their feelings of pedophilia with their friends and family, and can't find someone romantically who can make them happy.

I made a post last year about the differences between being in the closet, and sexual based OCD. It might answer some of your questions.

obsessive-compulsive/topic129375.html

No, no, nooo. Trying to make some with POCD see the difference between 'real' arousal and groinal responses/unwanted arousal is feeding the obsession. After they are satisfied of the difference, OCD finds another way to make them doubt that. He will now obsess about whether the arousal was 'real' or not. Do not engage with that, believe me, it makes the process so much worse. A good CBT therapist will do exposure, where you accept the feelings may or may not be paedophilic, you desensitize to this and learn not to care either way. A therapist does not convince you that you are not a paedophile, because that would only fuel the compulsions. Your fight or flight mechanism is in overload, trying to calm this by reassuring yourself you are not what you fear is giving it more reason to doubt over and over. Stop the checking, and try and desensitize.

I guess it can work differently by each individual.

For me, seeing the difference helped somewhat. Even in the 17 session protocol for POCD, therapists help patients to identify the differences between sexual attraction and sexual compulsion.

To me, it doesn't seem as the original poster is attracted to his sex thoughts about children, but repelled by them.

What partly helped me is instead of just not thinking about the sexual fantasies I had about adults and applying them to children, I dived into it (in my mind only) and pictured myself doing all the things I feared to children. This helped me to see that those thoughts were not me and not my desires, but just my fears of what my desires could become.

In all honesty, you said you never saw yourself becoming a sex offender, and I believe you on that one, so I think you're really only worried that you might be a pedophile because of the stigma against it, but if these thoughts began long after your sexuality developed and you began to like girls your age, then you have nothing more to worry about. If you were a pedophile, you'd like feel that you were a pedophile long before you even knew what a pedophile was, just the same way I felt I was gay before I even knew what the word meant.

Yeah, I guess the more I think about it the worse it gets, I think back to the past a lot, and I can recall being 15, and finding 12 year old girls attractive in movies, but maybe not knowing their age at the time, and stuff like that scares me again, my mind always finds new things to throw at me

Peterarron123 wrote:Yeah, I guess the more I think about it the worse it gets, I think back to the past a lot, and I can recall being 15, and finding 12 year old girls attractive in movies, but maybe not knowing their age at the time, and stuff like that scares me again, my mind always finds new things to throw at me

For girls puberty works a bit differently. If you were attracted to girls around 5-12 that would be pedophilia, but if it was girls 12 and up it wouldn't be, because girls can potentially start puberty at around 11 years old. Also, you were 15, and she was more in your range then.

If you read my forum post and have tried several things that aren't working, you probably need to go see a sex therapist.

I've told you some strategies that worked for me, but others need a different solution to click. If it helps, I've talked to several pedophiles in the Paraphilias Forum, and I don't think you're a pedophile.