Please help me

Hello,

When I was about 13 years old, I started watching CP. This lasted about 4 years and then I stopped. I haven't done it since and don't plan to ever again. I'm 21 years old now. Whenever I think about it, I get sick to my stomach and feel incredibly guilty. I've been seeing a therapist for some other issues in my life but I feel like I need to get this off my chest. I can't go on much longer feeling the guilt and pain every day. I feel like it was a weird phase I went through. I really want to tell her but I am so so so so afraid that she is going to report me or something. I think if she reported me I would kill myself, but I think that if I don't get rid of this guilt I'm going to end up killing myself in a couple of years anyway.

Any advice?

I think you should tell you therapist about what you have done. Its better to get this burden of your chest then to just live with it. I would also like to comgradulate you on not viewing CP in the past while. If you don't mind me asking, you said it felt like a wierd phase, so do you no longer have urges to view CP?

Hi,

I'm sorry for the pain you are going through. As best I understand the law in the United States (I'm not a lawyer or a psychologist so I can't promise I'm right), they are required to report you only if they believe you are in imminent danger of harming a child or yourself. Simply discussing something you did in the past, even if it's illegal, from my understand of the law should not be a cause for reporting. That said, some therapists are not quite up to speed on their legal limits and requirements under the law. I'd say the best thing is to feel her out and see how she feels about the whole thing. If you feel like you can trust her, then tell her. If not, consider talking to a different therapist whom you can talk to anonymously. There are a number of online therapy services for example where you have the keyboard to separate you from the person.

Good luck.

Jim

Hi there,

Don't forget that puberty is a turbulent time even for the most 'normal' of people. I did some very bad things as a teenager, none of which I would hope are a reflection on who I am now. Forgive yourself, you're only human. And if you're struggling to do so, then maybe confide in your therapist, but do try to forgive yourself!

G.

To the OP:

I appreciate your caution in divulging this info to your therapist. However in the US what they are required to report to the Dept. of Social Services (who may in turn go to the police) is the suspicion of child abuse which generally requires an identifiable victim. If you say you are going to harm someone of any age, they have a duty to warn the target victim. And finally, if you are acutely dangerous to yourself or others, you can be committed to the hospital against your will.

It does not seem like you fit any of those criteria, although if you said you'd kill yourself if she reports you, and she is planning to do so, she may then have grounds to have you committed.

Now a couple of questions, please:
What happened that you went from loving CP for four years to the other extreme of feeling sick and guilty about it? And why do you feel guilty about looking at pictures?

Thank you everyone for your responses.

To answer Kouda and Shrink Rap's questions, I don't really have the urge to anymore. What happened was, believe it or not, was that someone actually hacked my computer and was talking to me over chat. They found some of the CP I had and they started belittling me for it. It kind of like "snapped" me out of it. Whenever I used to look at CP, it was like I was a different person. I don't really know how to explain it. I realized that it was wrong to be looking at it. It wasn't that one event that made me snap out of it because even after that I would look at CP now and again, but that one event is what caused the gradual decline. Maybe it was that I got older and I'm attributing incorrectly to the hacking incident, I don't know. Whenever I think about it now, I get so sick. I think what it was that attracted me to it in the first place was that they were around my age. Now that I'm older and I have a different state of mind, I think the fact that an adult would put them through such a thing disgusting. Now when I look at porn, I'm attracted to adults. I am attracted to YOUNG adults sometimes though, like 18, 19 years old, but I think that is normal. I think I feel so guilty about it because I can't believe I ever did it. I can't believe that I ever thought it was okay.

Again, thank you everyone for your responses. This place is very supportive.

helpmeplease1 wrote:Now when I look at porn, I'm attracted to adults. I am attracted to YOUNG adults sometimes though, like 18, 19 years old, but I think that is normal.

Perfectly normal. You know if you look on the computers of heterosexual guys aged 18-65+, it's mostly women 18-25 you'll find. Youth is attractive.

helpmeplease1 wrote:I can't go on much longer feeling the guilt and pain every day.

Well in that case you need to do something that will make the guilt and pain go away, or at least become more managable.

I'd say that you first need to understand that there is no reason to feel guilty for being who you are.
This should be obvious, but if you are feeling down and don't see any strong reasons for appreciating yourself, it might be hard not to blame yourself.

So, then, in order to help your brain understand that there is no reason to feel guilty for being who you are, you need to let your brain come to an understanding of the fact that you are actually a good person.
I felt the need to do that, and the way I did it was to do things for people, things that others didn't do because they were lazy or whatever - take the initiative and just fix things that need be fixed and sweep the goddamn entire parking lot that these other tools in the building have talked about sweeping for months and months.
Or something like that. Figure out what you can acknowledge as "being good" in you, what your values are, and work on bettering yourself in areas that you like.

If you appreciate yourself for good reasons, you won't focus excessively on blaming yourself for sides of you that you don't appreciate so much.
So find those good reasons, what they are in your view.

That's the feeling guilt / blame part. For me it took around four months to get that straightened, YMMV.
Also of course, working on becoming happy.
Happiness is good in general, but there's no Happiness 101 being taught in the schools.
Maybe there should be, along with Ethics 101. I believe something like that would help create better societies.
Anyway, here's a small resource on How to be Happy.

Now the Pain part.
I assume you mean emotional pain, due to feeling things that you don't want?
Well, how I experience that kind of pain, is partly because I can look at pictures of some minor, and know that I can never have a relationship with such a person, and yet what I feel is pure lust.
When I look at pictures of adults, I feel attraction and desire, but nothing near that level of lust.
And what makes me feel pain then, is that I would very much want to at least feel the same for adults as I do for minors.
My point being, the pain that I am feeling, is not going to go away anytime soon.

I don't know exactly what it is that makes you feel pain, or how.
But pain is a funny thing, in that the experience of pain can be manipulated.
For example, a dentist talking to you, explaining what he is doing now, and what he is going to do next, and how this will hurt, and how much time it will take, while he is drilling, is better for your experience of pain than if he were dead silent and the pain just seemed to increase and unpredictably jump.

I think maybe if you said abit more about how you experience pain, I could relate more to that instead of just going off on a tangent about my problems and rant away.

But don't dislike yourself just because of this one little thing, you are more than that.

Extreme guilt and shame is quite common for people in your situation. I feel the same way, but I'm currently battling a CP addiction. Good thing you were able to give it up.

As far as I know, in the US, you can't legally be reported if you're not putting anyone in danger. I told my psychologist that I was only four weeks clean, and she didn't report me. She said that she could only break confidentiality if she saw me as a threat. My guess is that you could take legal action against her if she reported you, and she knows this. Furthermore, you committed the crime when you were a minor, and the law is MUCH more lenient on minors.

If I were you, I'd tell her.

Thank you for the link. I do need to learn how to be happier.

Alevi wrote:I assume you mean emotional pain, due to feeling things that you don't want?
Well, how I experience that kind of pain, is partly because I can look at pictures of some minor, and know that I can never have a relationship with such a person, and yet what I feel is pure lust.
When I look at pictures of adults, I feel attraction and desire, but nothing near that level of lust.
And what makes me feel pain then, is that I would very much want to at least feel the same for adults as I do for minors.

I don't think I'm attracted to minors anymore. I don't have urges to look at CP or anything like that. I prefer adult porn definitely. I think the reason I feel so much pain (guilt/self-hate) is because I just can't believe I ever found that attractive to look at. I hope no one who reads that think I look down on anyone else on this forum, because I don't. I just don't find it attractive. I have trouble understanding how someone could do that to an innocent child. The fact that I used to look at CP makes me feel like I'm a pedophile. Now, I also have OCD (which is why I'm going to therapy in the first place), so I tend to obsess and worry about things. A lot. I just think about how I used to look at CP and my self-esteem immediately plummets. I feel like the lowest of the low.

I just really really really want to tell my therapist (I'm just afraid of being judged or reported) because I think I just need someone to tell me that I'm not a bad person and that I'm worth something. I know that is what everyone here is saying, but I have never met you, it's just not the same, ya know? Whenever someone compliments me, I think sometimes, well it doesn't matter if I did good deed x, I used to look at CP. I need to get past this and move on with my life.

Alevi wrote:But don't dislike yourself just because of this one little thing, you are more than that.

Thanks =)