Dear AA:

You (25) shared that you had a normal childhood, raised by religious, god conscious parents who loved you and raised you right, teaching you “to be a man with good morals & ethics… to always respect people, help out anyone.. to always look after and help out my family… to be a kind person, to be disciplined in avoiding certain things… to basically be disciplined and patient in a life that can be testing at times”, to have “discipline over things I did”.

At around 12, at about the time you started suffering from OCD, your family moved to “another very new city” where you met new friends in school who introduced you to pornography sites.

You wrote about your current struggle on the other thread: “sometimes I can’t function.. I just keep thinking my parents might see me differently or that my friend might tell someone… and it just haunts me to the point I can’t eat or sometimes sleep… can you suggest anything please”?

My understanding is that as a young child, as it is in the case for all young children, your quest and greatest motivation was to be a good boy, so to receive and maintain your parents’ approval. You largely succeeded in receiving their approval. Problem is that a significant part of you feels that the person who received your parents’ approval is not really you, but a fraud (“feel like I was a fraud”).

And so, you are afraid to  be found out: “I just keep thinking my parents might see me differently”- see you as the fraud part of you believes that you are,

“or that my friend might tell someone.”- afraid that he will tell someone that you are a fraud,

“it just haunts me to the point I can’t eat or sometimes sleep… I just don’t want them to ever see me in a different light”- the fear to be found out.. you don’t want your parents and  other people to see you as a fraud.

Sometime during your childhood, possibly around the time you were exposed to pornography, maybe earlier, there was a disconnect between you and your parents: what they expressed to you as the ideal of a good boy was significantly different from what you knew about yourself. For example (and it is only an example of a possibility)- it may have been something like this: they told you that they are proud of you because, unlike other preteen boys, you were invested in your studies and never thought about girls. You enjoyed the compliment, and of course you wanted your parents to think well of you, so you didn’t correct them, you didn’t tell them that you did think about girls. You kept it a secret, not wanting the true you to be found out.

You asked me to suggest something to help you to achieve peace of mind. I imagine that my post so far is quite distressing to you, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it often takes more distress before we can finally experience that longed-for peace of mind. If you reply further, we can continue.

anita