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POCD or actual pedophilia? seems very real.

ok so ill just warn the readers now: mentions of pedophilia as it is a pocd post. 

basically i can't seek therapy right now so i need advice from other users who might have gone through the same thing. about 3 years ago when i was 14, i first had pocd. i was experiencing groinal responses and false attractions. i started experiencing these after i started questioning if i was a pedo or not so i can confidently say that these weren't already things that were happening unprovoked because if they were, i think i would definitely be a pedophile. it went on for like two months id say. by the end of this period i was so fed up with waking up everyday and questioning everything that i gave in and just admitted that i might actually be a pedophile. that was one reason, the other was that i actually thought i was one because of the groinal responses and whatnot like i mentioned. im 17 now. i have never been in a room with a kid and had an urge to do something bad to them. i have never had the sexual urge to look at ch*ld p*rn. i have never had the urge to want to go to the park for the sole reason of looking at kids and taking pictures of them. i don't ever sexually fantasise about kids in my own time. but what has happened is that one time when i was like 16, i had a sort of arousal towards someone who was 10. i can't remember the details well enough but what i can say is i didn't go ahead and do anything weird with that thought. this happened like a year and a bit after the whole pocd incident so in my head i already thought i was a pedo. any other sort of arousal that i have had was towards characters in cartoons. there was another instance where i had an 'attraction' to someone who was 12 but this happened at a time where i was having/just had another pocd episode so my ocd mightve been interfering with that. just recently i had another pocd episode and about a month/month and a bit/two months after, i had a dream doing it to someone who was like 12-13. when i woke up and i was having my lunch, i remember just the way this person looked put me off lunch. like not the actual s*xual part but just the way they looked as in being underdeveloped, prepubescent looking just made me kinda disgusted. i couldn't finish my food because of this thought. thats basically my experience with pocd so far, i just wanna know if me being convinced that i was a pedophile could have caused these thoughts since i don't fit the usual definition of a pedophile: im not primarily or exclusively attracted to kids (my attractions are to people around my age or just straight up adults), i don't have near uncontrollable urges to go for kids, i don't have fantasies about kids. the only thing that i could say would even hint at something like pedophilia just completely naturally and unprovoked by what i think is OCD would be attraction to petite girls around my age or petite women. but even then i prefer atleast medium chested than flat chested although either is fine. i wonder if maybe subconsciously i am a pedo but because of society's conditioning of 'pedophilia is bad' and seeing people always date people the same age as them in media might have suppressed my hidden desires. this seems even more true considering thats exactly how i found out i was bi too. i had hocd, didnt have any sexual or romantic attraction for years due to societal conditioning and that most people are straight and that being part of the lgbt was bad but as soon as i came out to myself as bi, these attractions suddenly became more frequent albeit my attraction to guys is a hell of a lot less frequent than to girls. so yeah, is it possible that being convinced that you are a pedophile can cause 'attractions' much later down the line like in my case? what's going on with me?
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Avatar universal
First, nobody can predict the future.  Just can't.  It does seem, however, that when it comes to sex you're prone to obsessive thinking and questioning.  This can indicate an insecurity about it.  It is possible you have some attraction to some young people.  But it's what we do and who we choose to be with in our actions that really determine our sexuality.  The mind will always have thoughts, it's what it does, and some of them will be nice and some of them will be troubling, but how troubling they are is up to how obsessive you get with them.  You indicate you've never acted on these thoughts and don't act on them now, so it's not apparently something you act on.  It's something you obsess over.  I'm not a fan of the labeling of things like HOCD or POCD, because thoughts alone while are now considered a part of an OCD spectrum by many in the mental health field, I don't think they are OCD at all.  Everyone with a mental problem has obsessive thinking, so if that's the definition of having OCD, well, most humans have it and that's just too much for me.  Labeling oneself kind of defines oneself.  But you have now had two bouts of obsessive thinking about sexuality, and the first one ended in you acting out on it.  Historically, we have many examples of civilizations that had very different notions of what types of sex and who you had it with than we do now.  Nowadays, we're much more focused on how this might affect the very young.  I don't know what's going on with you, maybe you just have a very large scope for your sexual appetites, and that's in accord with historical human behavior, but we don't do that now and you will ruin your life if you go down that road, so when you say you can't see a therapist I'm guessing that's probably not true.  That's what I would recommend.  But in the meantime, again, we aren't what we think, we're what we do, but we can think ourselves into a miserable life.  You do want to stop this trend you have before you get too old to do so.  Peace.
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I should expand this just a bit more, which is that we now believe one should only have sex with someone who consents to it, and the very young can't do that.
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