Dear Elise:

I don’t view your past motivation and reaction to reading on that topic as normal sexual exploration, is what I mean. I think what motivated you to read about that topic may have been a non-sexual emotional experience in childhood that has something to do with feeling strong and weak. Therefore I suggested to explore that (non-sexual) childhood experience.

If you want to do that, tell me more about the instances when you “felt small and helpless or not in control”.

anita

Dear Elise:

An honest understanding of your non-sexual motivation will help you to no longer “feel like a terrible person” (the title of your thread), so it is definitely worth a try.

You shared that when you were about 8-11, you witnessed “a lot of arguments and animosity” between your mother and your grandparents. You were close to your grandmother and your mother suspected, or accused you of siding with your grandmother, of “telling her things”.

I need more about the “arguments and animosity”- what were (examples of) the words, the tone of voice, the body language, the acts that constituted that animosity?

Was that animosity done by your mother against your grandmother, or was it mutual, done by both?

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by .

Dear Elise:

Did you feel like a bad, guilty girl for .. sort of betraying your mother, for meeting your grandmother behind your mother’s back?

anita

Dear Elise:

The guilt you felt as a child is probably not gone just because you rationally recognize as an adult that you did nothing wrong back then.

You wrote in your original post: “I was really into ‘forceful’ stuff”-

– do you mean that at the time, you enjoyed reading about “small and helpless” people, basically,  being punished/ being forced to endure sexual acts performed upon them by people older and stronger than them?

anita

Dear Elise:

You read the stuff you feel guilty about when you were 16- 19. When you were 13 or 14 you told your mother that you suffered from intrusive thoughts, later to be diagnosed (?) with OCD. This to me means that you suffered from significant anxiety (anxiety is what fuels OCD) way before you read what you read.

From what you shared about your parents: reads like your father was overall not supportive of you, and your mother was particularly harsh with you, insensitive to you, accusing you… Reads like she was focused on how her parents mistreated her, but mistreated her own daughter. Maybe not in the same ways her parents mistreated her, but in her own ways.

Like any child, you felt small and helpless  in comparison to your big and powerful mother, and feeling guilty.. you felt that you deserved to be punished.

How did your mother’s parents punish her, and how did your mother punish  you?

anita

Dear Elise:

“I don’t know how I felt”- when children feel very scared, or otherwise very distressed, they get overwhelmed, the intensity of the feelings is too much, so they disconnect/disassociate. But the feelings are not gone, and they seep out or erupt in sometimes strange ways.

When a parent is angry at a young child, the child always feels guilty/ deserving of the parent’s anger, and if the parent gets repeatedly angry at a child (be it by spanking, using angry words, having an angry facial expression, and so forth), the child gets angry at herself, and at times angry at her angry parent (and then feeling extra guilty for feeling angry at her parent).

Back to disassociation, every child disassociates, some more than others. After years of disassociation, we don’t remember how we felt back then, we don’t remember a lot of what happened when we felt scared.. we don’t want to remember. But even if we forget the feelings, the feelings don’t forget us, they are always with us, until we reconnect to them, or re-associate.

Are you receiving any treatment for your OCD, medications or therapy?

(I will soon be away from the computer for the next 12 hours or so).

anita