Help POCD Confusion (*Major Trigger Warning*)

*Major trigger warning. If you have OCD you might get triggered by this*


Hi, I am a 15 year old male and I started worrying about pedophilia in November 2015.

It started because I masturbated to a picture of a boy while listening to a video of him on Youtube who was probably around 9 or 10 sometime around June or July of 2015. Then I did it again in October with only a picture. I decided to brush it off as being horny/experimenting since I never see children that way, and never had feelings like that other than those two times. I don't like kids how I like mature older guys. When I see a (sorry for being inappropriate) muscular, large guy, I usually have an urge to look back. I have never had that feeling with kids. That is why I mostly disregard that moment now, but the OCD part of me is making me question those moments as I write this, which makes this pretty hard to write. I still regret every second of those moments, but I didn't worry about it until November

In November, I had some intrusive thoughts about my little brother which started the POCD, plus those two times where I masturbated made it even worse. I began worrying and worrying and getting even more intrusive thoughts. I began avoiding my little brother and stopped carrying him or touching him. I wouldn't greet him with a hug like most of my family did, I would fist-bump him. And even then, I prefer not to fist-bump him. I was never very affectionate with kids either way, I thought they were annoying, but I started to avoid them as much as I could when the OCD started. I began testing and checking my thoughts to see if I really was a pedophile. I would constantly be checking forums and researching. I never masturbated to a kid to check but I would imagine scenarios in my mind to see if I was attracted/aroused or not. I would be in class, and imagine scenarios to test my mental reaction. Or I would be in bed trying to go to sleep and I would test my mental reaction by imagining scenarios. They weren't fantasies or things I enjoyed, I felt that I had to do it to see if I was a p who enjoyed it. I would get groinal responses sometimes but mentally I was disgusted. That whole cycle of worry and depression made my grades lower. I used to have all A's and B's but now I have 3 C's, which might become 4 C's soon. I don't know if my OCD contributed to it, if I even have OCD. I also had compulsions, where I would imagine kids, mentally imagine the image being pushed away and thought to myself, "I don't like that." Then, I imagined women, and thought to myself, "I don't like that", and then imagine the image being pushed away quickly, and then I would think of muscular guys and think "I do like this" and let the image stay. That was a mental compulsion I would do, I still do it. But in forums I read it says compulsions like that only give short relief and just feed the fire. But it is hard not to do compulsions.

I still masturbate to pictures of big guys like Henry Cavill (sorry if I sound inappropriate), and I sometimes have intrusive thoughts while doing it. Sometimes I stop when an intrusive thought comes and then start again. Sometimes I try to ignore it and keep going.

Then, around March I think, the testing images in my mind started to have different reactions. I used to always feel disgust when I would test images in my head. I would read forums telling me testing and checking even in your head makes it worse. But I felt that I had to do it to check if I was a true pedophile. And now, when I imagine scenarios to check, I get a mild ambiguous feeling of attraction I guess. And sometimes I still feel disgust but other times I don't. I don't know if it is possible for the anxiety and constant testing to kind of blur the line between what my mind thinks what is attractive or not. And the thing is, I only feel the ambiguous feeling when I imagine a kid sucking (sorry for being so graphic) my thing. If I imagine myself kissing or touching a child, as a way to check, I still feel disgust pretty much always. But I get the most ambiguous feeling out of the one situation I mentioned. And I don't know if the ambiguous feeling is because I am focusing too much anxiety and testing on it or not. I just feel so lost. I used to always feel disgust when checking but this past month or so, I have gotten this ambiguous feeling. This OCD is ruining my life.

This is how I usually test images in my head : I first imagine big muscular guys, and always get a mental reaction of attraction. I then imagine women, and always get a mental reaction of disgust/indifferent. I imagine these two to compare to the reaction I would get by imagining kids. I then imagine kids and I used to get a mental reaction of disgust and now I get sometimes a feeling of ambiguous attraction, not sure how to explain it.

I try to reassure myself sometimes because I know that I never had these doubts before the OCD, and other than those two moments I mentioned in the beginning, I have always masturbated to large older guys. But then my OCD makes me think, what if this age is when you discover it and it was just suppressed? I don't know anymore.

I am just 15. And I used to be so happy. I never worried about all this. I have never told anybody about this. I have been worrying about this since November. And I feel so depressed. I don't even know if I am a real pedophile or not. When I see a kid, I don't feel attraction, I don't have an urge to look. When I see a big muscular guy, I do have a feeling of attraction and an urge to look. So why do I have this ambiguous feeling when I check the images in my head? Whenever I see a kid on an ad I hover my hand over so I can't see it, or I refresh the page. I try and look away from kids and never touch them. I have never molested a child or felt the urge to. But then why did I masturbate to a picture of a boy two times many months ago? I think it was just me being horny, but I might just be a pedophile. I don't know. I am not sure if I have POCD or if I am a pedophile in denial. I hate this. I want to get out of this. I used to have a good idea of my identity, and I had a medium amount of self-confidence. But now I feel like my self-esteem has gone to its lowest point. This OCD makes me question who I am. I hate myself sometimes. I sometimes see people walking in school and think to myself that their lives are probably way better than mine. I never thought I would be in this situation.

hi

you're still only 15. your hormones are going CRAZY. i was there too. i can tell you i have no desire to EVER harm a child, yet one time i got off to the image of kids in a certain situation, yeah i won't go into detail and trigger you. was i ashamed? YES. however, i realize now that in times of stress (which, for a person with anxiety, is all the time), our minds and bodies do strange things. i believe the following are good possibilities for why you're experiencing this "ambiguous attraction" phenomenon:

- after that initial experiment, your anxiety has caused you to continue dwelling on it. dwelling on something, even if the reason is because you're trying so hard NOT to think about it anymore, only makes things pop into your head more often. that's the nature of ocd. because you associate this fear with sexual urges, it intrudes into your mind most in the sexual context. that causes your brain to create a neural pathway making this event (masturbating to a picture of an underage person) associate with arousal. that doesn't mean you're a pedophile or that you would ever commit such an act. you clearly know better than to do that, based on what you've said here. seems to me you don't even want to! you just had one moment of hormonal whatever-ness that's been hard to let go of due to the implications. that's how i see it; the same thing happened to me. i was wondering if i might be some kind of sexual criminal because i had fantasized about something i'm SO NOT attracted to in real life. however, i came to understand that our minds make strange associations sometimes without our consent. it happened in the privacy of your mind, no one was hurt, and the best thing to do is let it go and move on. i know that with ocd, that can be extremely difficult to do! if possible, you might be able to reach out to a counselor or therapist and talk to them about it. they will keep it confidential, and they would never judge you or think less of you because of it. they hear from a lot of people with a lot of similar issues and are well-informed about how the brain works in these situations. they might be able to help you get the intrusive thought out of your mind so you can explore your sexuality without worrying about things like that anymore.

from what i've read here, your best option would be to talk to a professional. you've clearly been asking around on forums and researching online a lot trying to make it go away on its own, and that hasn't been effective in the long run. it might be a short-term solution at times, but you need a long-term solution. if you already have a therapist, i understand it can be difficult to bring this kind of thing up. but therapy is a safe and judgment-free zone, and no one else has to know, even your family. it's all confidential. it's your decision what to do, but i think therapy is most beneficial. if you want to get your family's help and don't want them knowing about the specific reason, just say your ocd has gotten worse and is affecting your everyday life, so you need some resources to someone you can talk to who has expertise in the field. also helps them understand that getting help is a responsible, smart, and healthy thing to do. i was diagnosed at 16 and it took forever for me to build up the courage to say i had a problem and needed therapy.

i understand that ocd can make you feel very alone. i feel the same way often, seeing other people and thinking that things are so much simpler for them because their minds work properly. however, that's not always the case. ocd is more common than it seems, and everyone has their own worries and secret fears. you are not alone, and there are mnay out there who understand what you're going through! i hope you are able to reach out for help and get some support to make things better.

if i got anything wrong or you need clarification on anything, let me know and i'll do my best to answer effectively. thnx!

Hello,

I agree with what ruru said. You're 15 years old, it's pretty normal to be aroused by a lot of things in this age. And the two times you masturbated to the video/picture of a young boy don't mean anything. If you'd do that every day there'd be a reason for concern but not because of two incidents.
I want to add that anything sexual can be arousing. I read that there was a study made showing that a lot of women are aroused when seeing monkeys having sex. That doesn't mean they're zoophiles in denial, it just means they're aroused by something sexual in nature.
I have POCD, too, and I'm worried because my testing thoughts don't disgust me as much as they used to. At the beginning I thought about kissing a child and I thought immediately, "Ewww, that's disgustig and weird", now I think of it and don't feel disgust. That happens to a lot of people with OCD. It doesn't mean we suddenly turned into pedophiles, it means that we're desentisized. It's like watching a horror movie: the first time you see it, it's extremely scary, the 100th you watch it, it isn't scary anymore.

Is it a possibility to see a therapist? I understand that it's hard to talk to someone about this. I'm very ashamed, too. But being able to tell someone is also very helpful and just being able to share your concerns is helpful.

Thanks so much for replying ruru and tanja I really appreciate it. I am afraid to go to a therapist because I don't know how to access one without my parents finding out, since they would have to drive me there. I want to just suffer in silence and fix this on my own because I feel that if I tell my family, they won't understand and they will always secretly think I am a p in denial. And I think telling my family will make them think of me as what I fear, and not understand that it's OCD. I just want this to go away and for me to be the happy person I was in November before I had this. I see forums where people say they are never cured and on Google it says OCD is never curable just treatable. But then I see some posts where people say they conquered it. I never thought I would worry about this. Sometimes I just think "How did I get this low" that I am worrying about this. I hate it.

I'm so sorry to hear that you're struggling with POCD. I completely understand your concerns about explaining this to your parents. Could you just tell them that you are having thoughts of a disturbing sexual nature and show them some links to OCD sites? You wouldn't need to go into the exact nature of the thoughts with them. Then you could talk through the POCD with a therapist. Maybe they could help explain POCD to your parents with you.

I'm sure your parents wouldn't judge you and think their son was a 'p', but there are ways to approach it that aren't so scary.

I did have POCD quite badly and didn't seek help for ages because I thought I'd be locked up and was scared that it was real, but the psychologist had dealt with it before and just doing talking about it has taken a lot of the fear away and I'm not obsessing about it nearly as much. I have other obsessions now, but I'm dealing with those.

I've read quite a lot about POCD and found out that it's typical for people to become really confused and feel as though the thoughts don't bother them as much as it progresses, and then they start to think that they really could be a 'p'.

Also, compulsions are like a drug in OCD! You're always searching for that magical bit of relief that resolves the problem once and for all.

First off, I agree with the other posters that a couple of incidents as a young teen don't mean anything about who you will be. Teenagers can respond to all kinds of things that have nothing to do with their preferences later.

I was a little older when I went through this, but you seem to be suffering a lot so I'll share the things that helped me. Especially as other users have posted here who seem to be going through some similar stuff. I'll just share everything that might be helpful to any of you, because I feel lucky that I got through this theme on my own.

At the end of my teens I developed a broad fear of being a sexual deviant that included incest, p***philia and occasionally a few other things that were easier to shake off. It wasn't so much attraction that I was worried about, more what I could be aroused by, because of a sudden onsent of disturbing dreams and what I now understand to be standard groinal response and intrusive thoughts. I knew I wasn't attracted to kids or relatives as such, I was mainly afraid I would get turned on by things I found disgusting. I didn't really interact with any kids during this time due to never leaving the house so thankfully I never had any problems when actually being around kids, but I would get the intrusive thoughts and groinal responses when interacting with relatives. I didn't know at the time that OCD could take this form so I thought I was just ****ed up for having these thoughts, even if they didn't mean anything. I've had a few OCD-type fears with compulsions since I was a child, and for a while I would switch between these and the sexual obsessions. But by the time I turned 21 the sexual ocd had pretty much gone and I was just left with my old themes.

First, stop checking and testing. I would check using thoughts, fictional material, and reading about real people who actually had those desires to see if I got aroused or could relate. At some point I tested my reaction to pretty much every sexual interest I could think of that I didn't want to have. It took me to some dark places. The first time I remember getting distressed by a groinal response was a few minutes after I saw some inappropriate fiction online involving young characters. When that happened I momentarily had the thought that I should just try to look up some legal real-looking imagery to see if I was aroused by that, since I thought it would give me a much more definite answer. I got as far as looking up the laws to see what was legal and what wasn't before snapping out of it and realizing I didn't want to see that **** either way. I never considered looking it up again and I never tested my pocd using any kind of imagery, yet I still feel horrible for having that thought even years and years later. Checking fuels your obsession, it doesn't solve any problems, and it can cause many more.

Don't isolate yourself. When this started I was staying with one person who worked constantly and wasn't in the house much, and I didn't really have other friends. I crashed on her couch and would just sit there all day browsing the internet. Moving into a shared place with several other people helped a lot.

Tell someone, at least about some of it. I couldn't tell anyone the exact thoughts I was having, but I did confide in someone about a lot of things in my past that I was ashamed of (for example childhood experimentation and family issues) that were contributing to the idea that I was broken sexually. Knowing someone else could accept me while knowing all that did help a lot with accepting myself. Nowadays my sister and two of the people I live with know of my OCD to varying degrees and have been supportive, even though I've been a nightmare at times with reassurance seeking and whatnot.

Accept that your obsessions might be true. Throughout this entire period I was depressed to the point where I felt numb to almost everything. This hurt my ocd in that it desensitized me to my themes and made me less disturbed by them, feeding the fear that I might enjoy them or that I was a sick person for being able to even think those thoughts. But in a strange way it also helped in that I kind of accepted that maybe I was a horrible, twisted, disgusting pervert. I didn't really want to be alive anyway and I didn't see any kind of future for myself, so what did it matter? Then every time I accepted the idea that I could be as bad as I feared, it would become more clear that I wasn't because I didn't actually want to do any of these things. I started to recognize the thoughts as just unwanted **** flying around in my brain.

External reality checks can help. In an online community I was in there were a few cases of people having inappropriate encounters with much younger teens (because of this I permanently fell out with someone I had considered a very close online friend and ended up detaching myself from that community.) This was the first time I really noticed I couldn't imagine being attracted to even a mid-teen. When my sexual OCD started a couple years earlier and I was still a teen myself I probably wouldn't have seen that age group as so obviously too young. So this gave me assurance that my attractions were aging as I was and that if I couldn't even see myself doing that, why had I even worried?

If you're lacking in friends, get out and meet people. I started making friends in person after losing my online friends, and eventually met someone I felt very sexually attracted to (the first time I had really felt this) who was several months older than me. Again, more assurance that I was normal.

Keep doing normal things and don't neglect yourself. At one point when I was dealing with other severe OCD stuff (not sexual) I moved in for a few months with a close friend who was sick. I would prepare meals for him and sleep nearby in case he needed anything during the night. Not only was I helping another person, but this forced me to eat and go to bed when I didn't feel like doing either, and eventually it stopped being difficult. Find a way to stick to a routine.

If you're not studying, get a job if you can, or do something else that gives you purpose. My OCD was worse when I was unemployed, and getting out of my lowest times has usually corresponded with getting a job. Working gives you a distraction and something to feel good about, even if it's hard at first. I've found with any distraction, at first it will feel like the ocd is distracting you from it rather than the other way around. But eventually it starts to help and the thoughts will become a little less constant. It also means you'll have less free time to get caught up in checking and performing compulsions.

I still have OCD symptoms and I still get a new theme every now and again. Some of it stems back to these themes from years ago, although I did go a couple of years without dwelling on those too much. For example I still get urges to read about sexual OCD and compare it to my own experiences to make sure mine actually was OCD and I didn't just become a disgusting person for 2 years. People online and in person have assured me countless times that it was OCD and I'm not a bad person, yet it still nags at me. But I have good weeks, and good months. And I haven't really worried about whether I could have unwanted sexual interests in years now. So I'm just trying to use my experiences to help others at this point.