I molested my cousin, my happiness is forfeit

Sorry, I should have considered how the laws may be different where you are.

Regardless, won't confessing cause more suffering? For one, your family would have to be dragged through the proceedings. They've already expressed their frustration at you bringing it up, so I would imagine taking it that step further may do more harm than good.

But you also need to think about your own mental health. I personally wouldn't go down the legal route to help with that. What would it change, really? It's not like you're a danger to society and it may actually make things worse.

Maybe therapy would be more productive. I'm sure your family would support you on that.

I did do some research recently and it turns out turning myself in would be a waste of time since it happened when I was a juvenile and it happened in China. The police I talk to about it instead just recommended therapy. That doesn't change how I feel though; why is helping myself the morally right thing to do? Aren't I the same as those child molesters now?

I'd say no, definitely not, but I understand how you feel because it's how I feel a lot of the time.

I'd never want to do anything bad to a child, and until two months ago I was certain in myself that I never had. I've been great with kids all this time, never had a cruel or lewd thought about them. Whatever it was (detailed at the end of this thread's first page), for its one second, I didn't harm anyone or gain anything from it. I wouldn't have been seeking to cause harm or gain sexually from it - but, then, why did I do it? Was it just a normal, innocent bounce? Why do I feel so guilty? What was I thinking at the time? Why have I remembered it (and why after years of being fine)? Is it in some part down to the intensity of horrific child abuse stories in recent British news, or is that just me rationalising and passing the blame?

'Sexual intent' is what makes something molestation, and I've no way of knowing what my young self was thinking, but for some reason it's in my memory as bad. What is sexual intent, precisely? Is it the seeking of gratification? Or is just thinking about something sexual enough? I know I wasn't doing the former, but what if, being in the midst of puberty, I had some sort of sexual thought in mind? I just don't know what's true. I wouldn't touch an infant for sexual pleasure, I wouldn't touch that area without a thick nappy being there, and I've been totally free of child-based sexual thoughts my entire life. It would just never occur to me. But then why all the guilt?

It's been making me very low in myself - how can I let my friends and family just chat happily to me when, as far as my guilt is concerned, I feel like I'm a guy who's molested an infant? They don't deserve that sort of company, and I don't deserve theirs. But perhaps the people I've (and you've) confided in are right - these were non-events, insignificant and inconsequential. But thanks to all the guilt, that just feels like I'm 'getting away' with something, and I'm not comfortable with that.

Of course, that I've been going over it again and again since last year hasn't helped. I don't know how much thought I've applied retrospectively. Reassurance from other people doesn't stick for long, but try to imagine what you'd say to a friend if they came to you with this same worry.

-- Sun Feb 23, 2014 3:10 pm --

I'm having a tough time again today. I've been reading about juvenile sex offenders, trying to work out if what I did would qualify as 'inappropriate touching'. Am I person who, unknowingly, and without knowing it for almost ten years, inappropriately touched an infant?

It was for a second, by the seat of her nappy. She was sitting on the floor and I reached across, though I can't remember my own position. Was I sitting on the floor? On the sofa? I can't remember. I must have been happily playing with her before and after. Was I impulsively emulating something I'd seen in pornography? Or is that just an idea I'm applying backwards? It only occurred to me today, after considering the OP's concerns. Was I literally just bouncing a baby, as happens to them thousands of times? Why do I remember it with this guilt? Was I being deliberately cruel? Trying to have power over, or annoy, the infant?

If that worst case scenario is true, that I was emulating something I'd seen in pornography, should I belong on a sex offenders' register?

When this memory first surfaced, I could just remember looking at the infant's face, but now I'm also visualising my own hand bouncing her, and it feels like real memory. Multiple versions, too. To touch an infant there, could that have been 'fondling'?

The infant was the daughter of my mum's friend. Whenever I met this child, it will have been during family hang-outs. Where would my whole family have been, and hers, that would leave us alone in a room together? That's at least five people all elsewhere, leaving me alone with a baby. Would that happen? Now I'm doubting the memory itself.

This is not the sort of worry I ever thought I'd struggle with. Coasting through life, year after year, happy, well-adjusted, never getting into fights or harming anybody, never viewing nor handling any child in an inappropriate way, and then this appears.

Sorry to be hogging your thread, guilty154. There are just very few places to turn with this kind of thing.

-- Mon Feb 24, 2014 10:48 pm --

Dear me, I'm turning this into a blog. Feel free to chip in, anybody.

I'm going to try and just forget it. Pack it away and move on. I've spent two-and-a-half months in very deep anxiety, asking myself questions I don't know the answers to. Some days I've been alright, some I'm sure I've wanted to be dead - today I've experienced both. Sometimes it's changed across minutes. My appetite and sleep have suffered badly. My clothes are all a little baggier. I don't know what's true about this memory. I don't know what I've managed to convince myself of. Am I just rationalising my way out of something actually bad? I don't even know that. Nobody on earth knows. I'm not going to get my answers.

All I do know is that I've never touched a child for gratification, nor to harm them. I never will. I've never considered a child sexually.

I go years perfectly happy. This hazy, one second memory pops up out of the blue: bouncing a baby by the seat of its nappy. I feel guilt and anxiety and spend two horrible months, the worst of my life, trying to figure out what I was thinking for that one second as a 13-year-old boy. Was it something sexual? If so, what on earth could it be? If not, why this guilt? I fail at this and come up with many different versions of what could have been. I imagine new 'memory' into place. When I try to think back, I don't whether I'm accessing a recording of the past or one of my reconstructed versions. Was there ever a true recording in mind? I will never be able to know. Gawd, the human brain.

I think it's okay for me to drop this. I guess I'm still seeking reassurance on that. I take comfort from the fact that I've been the only person struggling over whatever it was, seven or eight years ago. I didn't harm anybody. I hope I can get back to how I was before this worry appeared in my life. I'm not a bad guy.

Thanks for this space, it's been truly very helpful just writing my worries down.