POCD (I hope) relapse. Miserable, any help appreciated

Don't want to trigger anyone, read with caution please <3 I'm sorry it's long

I'm a female in my early twenties. About five years ago I became terrified I might be a pedophile. This started after I watched copious amounts of SVU. I made myself think about a young naked girl in a bath to gauge my reaction. I guess I wasn't disgusted enough to satisfy myself (I don't recall if I was actually turned on or what, but apparently I didn't feel the "right" way). This fear evolved into hours of googling and reading online every day. eventually I had a few explicit dreams involving the obsession, which totally destroyed me. I just wanted to die. I didn't care about anything anymore. What was the point in worrying about school or work if I was a pedophile?

Over the course of about a year I managed to drag myself out of this by accepting it was possible and there was no way of knowing. Slowly the thoughts went away, there were no more dreams, I stopped googling the same things over and over. Great.

But now it's back. Started a few weeks ago over me feeling gross, like a freak, that I had those dreams those years ago and that I would have to carry that fact around with me forever. Now it's morphed back into the fear of being a pedo, but with new evidence that seems to back it up even more:

-I don't usually test myself by imagining inappropriate things and I don't want to do so, but I'm afraid I don't want to think about them ONLY because deep down I' know they would arouse me
-if I do think about, say, kissing a child, i'm afraid it doesn't disgust me nearly as much as it should, or that I'm forcing myself to stop thinking about it but really I want to keep thinking about it
-I've been reading about "virtuous pedophiles" who do feel guilty about their attractions and would never act on them. Maybe that's what's wrong with me
-i don't know if my thoughts are intrusive enough? It's not like I get random sexual images of kids popping into my head every hour. It's more like just a constant nagging worry
-something I read recently said attraction to children can come and go. Maybe that's why this went away for a few years
-I'm scared I'm too worried about the reactions of other people and not worried enough about it being morally wrong (which I know it is, but maybe I'm only concerned because I know other people hate pedophiles more than anything) like I start crying when I think about my boyfriend and how disgusted he'd be if he knew about this
-I'm starting to just feel kind of dead inside toward this. Like I'm not feeling ENOUGH anxiety about it anymore, which is causing me to feel worse and more like a pedophile



I'm sorry that was so long, any response would help. This is so effing miserable. I wish I could go back in time. Thanks for reading

You're not a pedophile. Not a single thing you wrote indicates pedophilia and it seems just like OCD. All your concerns are typical for OCD, comparing your OCD to other peoples' OCD is very common, too. A lot of people (including me) fear that they don't feel anxious enough, aren't disgusted enough, secretly want their thoughts etc. It doesn't mean you're a pedophile, it just emphasizes that you have OCD.

Thank you for the reply! It's just so hard to accept that these ugly things are happening in my head.

While my own OCD is different, I can relate to the anxiety about feeling anxiety, or anxiety about somehow validating my compulsions by performing them, and similar frankly absurd meta-obsessions. I refer to it as double-OCD, and (personally at least) had some good results by treating those metra-obsessions in particular with pure exasperated scorn-- so long as I recognize what's going on before it gets too intense. So I can also confirm that this kind of obsessive cycle seems far from uncommon.

As are OCD nightmares. I felt a little shiver at the word destroyed, recalling some of my own experiences. My sympathies, and best of luck.