I think I damaged myself

gwilly wrote:The truth is that there is probably no way to know for sure. What is the answer you are looking for? Because nobody who is honest can definitively say yes, or no.

I guess the answer I would want to hear would be that this is just a natural variation that I did not cause. If that were the case, I would just accept it and move on, I am not that vain about my appearance. You're right, though, there is no way to know and not much I can do.

I guess it all comes down to guilt and shame about hurting myself for sexual gratification. This took place almost a decade ago, when I was teen, and around 2000 there were not many websites for people with unwanted / excessive / maladaptive paraphilias other than some very general information on the diagnoses. I don't think that this forum or anything like it existed. So all the information I got on the subject was from BDSM type sites, where I was told that this fantasies were part of my "identity" and I should just accept them and indulge them in the most extreme way possible, but this conflicted with the straight-laced religious guilt with which I was imbued. I also got new ideas from the internet, things that aroused me, but things that I otherwise would not have thought of on my own. My parents were very conservative, they tried to warn me about "weirdness" that I could find online, but I didn't listen. It guess it was my way of rebelling from this rigid and constricting pruddish box of a life I was placed into, this secret fetish that I indulged and masturbated to in the privacy of my bedroom, it was the one thing I could control, since I failed at everything else, socializing and relating to others. But I hurt myself doing it, and now I feel like I can never rise above this problem because I am physically "marked" by it. I agonize about this every hour of ever day, and I can't get past it.