I don’t see any reason why those two options have to be exclusive. He’s wired oddly, and then had some traumatic experiences that caused that wiring to kick in. I’ve heard quite often that “being stuck at a young age sexually” is often a reason for pedophilia.
The actual molestation is the one thing that I could see doing it. There’s a lot of guilt involved there, since you consented to the first part of it. I could see the trauma of that experience forcing you to think about sex from that age, even as you got older, to the point where you fixated on it. The other two things sound more like mitigating factors that made the trauma worse.
But I think the real reason for giving you an explanation is to get it through your head that it’s not your fault. While guilt is a good motivator to get started in therapy, it’s not good in the long run to have as much as you apparently do. It can get in the way of noticing the little improvements. Beating yourself up is not healthy forever.
I still wonder if they’ve said anything about you having an anxiety disorder (OCD or something like that). I seem to remember reading that one is often comorbid with pedophilia, and that dealing with that can help tremendously. The trauma in your life would make me tend toward PTSD.
Okay, I’m done playing armchair psychologist. I’m just trying to make you feel better, and I apologize if I’ve overstepped my bounds. I wish you luck dealing with this. I do think you have a fairly high chance of doing so successfully.
I think you’d be better off seeking an opinion from another psychiatrist with regards to your current psychiatrist’s theories. That said, I applaud you for taking what must have been an incredibly difficult step towards seeking help to deal with this issue. Kudos.
I understand what the psychiatrist was getting at here but I don’t blame anybody for being confused. It’s complicated and it only makes sense to me because I’ve worked through it already myself.
Adulthood is the point in your life where certain aspects of your personality that had been fluid as you went through the process of figuring out who you are (childhood) become fixed. For most people, psychological and physical growth move at about the same rate. Sometimes something happens and you enter what you could call your mental adulthood well before the physical changes are complete. From that point forward some things about you never change.
My parents seemed to care about me and took care of me very well in some ways. In other ways they were childish, petty, and extremely irresponsible. I was forced into the role of “The Grown Up” at my house when I was around nine. I had to be Mom to my little sister, housekeeper, money manager, and argument mediator. There are no words to explain how strange it was to be in a store and have my mother ask me if she could borrow twenty dollars because she had spent everything Dad gave her for the week already. I lived through a lot of miserable and truly traumatic crap around the same time that I don’t need to talk about here.
The end result is that in many ways I am the same person at thirty-two that I was at nine. A lot of my opinions, likes and dislikes never changed. I can’t bring myself to eat most vegetables because they’re gross. I still love cartoons and watch them at every opportunity. I wear the same type of clothes. It’s rare to see me in anything but t-shirts, jeans in winter, shorts in summer, and sneakers. I still sleep with “The Woobie” that I’ve had since I was three. I have never been on a date, been kissed, or even held hands. Wow, that one was hard to type. I am also still “The Grown Up”, trying (and usually failing) to talk my now separated parents out of their ridiculous, destructive behavior.
Sorry,I ran out of time to do a proper edit. I can see that I need to clarify some things.
I don’t have an interest in nine year old boys. I was convinced that all kids my own age were total assholes and couldn’t understand why they acted the way they did. I guess it’s no surprise that I can’t stand kids now, either. At the time when I became myself I was strongly attracted to men who were well older than me. I had a crush on a guy in his late twenties/early thirties who was nice to me. People who didn’t treat me like crap were few and far between so the attachment was pretty strong. I would fantasize that some guy like him would come and save me from my life. So that’s where my attraction dead-ends. The closest I ever got to liking a boy my own age was in middle school. He was a year older than me but looked older. I liked him and was freaked out by liking him at the same time. Nothing but confusion and anxiety ever came of it and I went right back to admiring older guys from afar. Now that I’m in my thirties my ideal man is appropriate. The problem is that I can’t see myself ever being attracted to anyone much older than I am now. Even if I did, I still have the nine year old hang up of sex being icky, gross, bad, dirty, and wrong so I could never let him touch me or see me naked. I can read stories about sex, as long as they only involve imaginary or animated characters. Sex on paper, sure, that’s fun and I get the thrill of being naughty. Sex in real life, get the hell away from me.
I have spent more of my life in therapy than out. I can admit now that I didn’t get very far for a long time because I buried some things and wouldn’t talk about them. I still can’t bring myself to speak or even type the worst of my traumas so Pdoul is way ahead of me in that area. I’m working on it.
Don’t lose sight of the goal here, which is to work through the problem. The goal is not to figure out why you are this way. It’s very human to want to do that, and it’s OK to do that, but only as long as it doesn’t get in the way of actually doing something about the problem.
I’m sorry if this was asked and answered here or in the original thread, but you had mentioned that your wife confronted you regarding her suspicions that you were attracted you prepubescent girls. Do you know what you had done to arouse her suspicions to begin with?
Btw, I really hope things work out for you in the end. I don’t think there’s any possibility of you ever regaining your attraction to adult women and that breaks my heart. You have my sincere sympathies.
Good luck in your journey, and I congratulate you for taking the first steps in seeking help.
Your experiences certainly do sound traumatic, and I do wish you the best in trying to take the time to work through them. I certainly do believe that traumatic experiences can cause problems in our development, and that we’re all filled with our own neuroses and habits as a result of our development and growth.
It’s a very normal human thing- that we can be shaped by our experiences growing up. And I certainly do believe that grave traumatic experiences can cause some more serious issues to manifest later in life, I don’t think it’s as easy as saying A causes B, and in all cases Trauma A will cause Issue B, but it certainly is an interesting hypothesis. Perhaps there are other factors as well as I’m a fan of the idea of Nature and Nurture working together to develop ourselves as people, and insults to either of these (or more likely multiple causes over time to both of these) can certainly cause severe pathological conditions later in life.
Again, I salute you for seeking help and I do hope you find the the best outcome in working through your issues.
QFT. You could drive yourself insane trying to figure out why you are the way you are… all of us are vulnerable to that. That’s not what matters. What matters is how it affects you now and what you choose to do about it.
As I said in the old thread, you’re good people and I respect you for coping with this by working as a volunteer. Best wishes.
I just wanted to tell Sodalite how brave I think she is for posting in this thread. I wish you good luck on your journey to overcome your past as well. Know that you too are in my prayers that you find peace and understanding in your life.
I’ve been through things in my childhood that changed who I was (and am) and some (sexual) experiences that affected my sexual life and choices. While I am not attracted to children, I have other paraphilias that might be linked to what I went through. I deny myself of most of these paraphilias because I’m a) not emotionally equipped to deal with them and b) there’s no way my husband would consent.
I love my husband, and I’m sexually attracted to him… but there are parts of me that have sexual desires he can’t (or won’t) fulfill.
My therapist has suggested that what happened to me as a child may be why I was so sexually experimental when I was younger, why I’m bisexual, why I was so promiscuous. We aren’t sure, of course, but those experiences lead me to question sexuality.
While I don’t feel your exact pain, I can empathize. It’s hard. Keep up with the therapy, keep up with the hard work. It’ll help.
I’ve mentioned before that I am a public defender. What I haven’t mentioned is that I almost exclusively represent juveniles (all crimes), and the occational adult (mostly sex crimes). Part of that process is obtaining and reviewing psycho-sexual evaluations. In five years (and quite a number of sex cases), I have only ever had one client who had not been previously victimized. (That particular juvenile client was exposed to a ton pornography, at age 8 - 11, the kind of which would make Marilynn Manson blush.)
The risk assessment portion of the psycho-sexual evaluation also scores extra points if you have previously been the victim of sexual assault, as that group has ‘statistically’ shown a higher rate of recidivism.
I am no arm-chair psychiatrist… by my experience in my job tells me that there is some connection… that this can’t just be some random sampling of ‘my’ clients in ‘my’ region.
I was dubious of Humbert Humbert’s correlation between falling for and losing the love of his life at 11, and in lusting after his nubile Lolita.
But I think there is something to the notion of a traumatic and sexually violent experience at a tender age screwing up your sexual wiring. Of course that doesn’t eliminate a person’s “choice” to engage in inappropriate conduct.
Good luck in your struggles, Pdoul… I hope you are able to continue to abstain from the choices that my clients made.
Pdoul, it sounds good to work on this as you are, and AFAIK it is fine to discuss it with people here, for whatever therapeutic or other useful result that gives. If your psychiatrist says otherwise, well, maybe you need to rethink that.
I think it makes some kind of sense that going through something traumatic enough could stop your further sexual development and leave you with an immature sexuality. I don’t think it’s anything to feel guilty about; but you do have the top priority and perhaps difficult task of never sexualizing your contact and interaction with anybody who is 11, or for that matter is too young to reasonably give a genuinely informed and mature consent to you. I don’t know for sure what it takes to accomplish that, but if you are doing something that threatens that task, you do have to make an emergency stop instead.
My reaction toward you is not one of horror or dislike. It is more like the feeling of caution around somebody who is contagious, perhaps. On the plus side, I’m in a demographic that isn’t in any direct danger, so it’s sort of abstract that way. I actually had my own difficulty with pedophilia, though as the victim when young, not the perpetrator. It’s a strange thing, and I guess people on both sides of that street struggle to understand.
I do think it is possible to go through life with sexual desires and interests that are never fulfilled through real physical experiences with other people. I’m not even sure it is difficult, exactly; people manage to do all sorts of things.