My Problem Stems From a Childhood of Neglect
How this all began was when I was around 15 or so, I started to become attracted to girls around me—I went into puberty very late. As I grew older, though, instead of my attractions growing in accordance with my age, they never moved, which lead me to continually being attracted to girls of that age.
When I was a minor, it wasn’t such a big issue, but when I became an adult it was. When I turned 19, I made the decision to essentially become a recluse.
I did not want to hurt anyone, but there were many emotions fighting inside of me. I had urges that I had little control of, and it was a mission every day to avoid following through on them. It came to a head one day when I was speaking to the daughter of a friend and the urges almost overwhelmed me.
I almost broke. This was the point when I shut myself away. I would only go out when I knew that children were at school, or wouldn’t be on the street (after dark). I avoided media involving children.
I avoided books involving children. Most days I wouldn’t go out at all, only going out after dark, if at all. I took jobs where I could work the night shift, so that I didn’t have to have any contact with children.
This made my life an utter nightmare. I became a nervous wreck. I would get anxiety if anyone came to the door, just in case it was a child. I still worked, but my performance was poor.
This often led to me being fired or disciplined. No one else knew what I was going through. By necessity it was something I had to endure alone, I just had to.
Around seven years ago, I found a psychologist. It had gotten to be too much and I had to speak with someone about it. Over the course of the next six months, we discovered the awful reason behind my urges.
My feelings were brought about by my being intimately mistreated at a young age. When it was happening, it was frequent and often violent.
As it turns out, I had repressed most of it. I didn’t know how bad it actually was. However, discovering this lead to that revelation. Over the course of three years of twice-weekly treatments, my feelings towards minors began to fade.
Slowly, but surely, I started to get better. I owe my psychologist my life—literally. Now, seven years on, I have no attraction towards minors.
I have a much more normal life. I can actually go out during the day without being anxious. I can talk to children with no urges. I am mostly normal. I am still dealing with the repercussions of my dark times, but the dark times themselves are over.
I’m married, and I have a baby boy on the way. The process of getting treatment is so freeing. I can’t even describe it now. My psychologist is the one who suggested writing this out.
He thinks it will help with my healing process. I hope it will. Thanks for listening. For what it’s worth, my psychological treatment was a blend of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Exposure and Response Therapy.
Those two therapies lasted for about 18 months, after which we moved into Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which also helped a great deal.
It was hard for me to find a psychologist who was willing to take me on. I live in the American South, so psychologists weren’t cheap, but my psychologist was interested in it from an academic standpoint, so reduced his price for me in order to study my disorder and my mind in general over the long term.
I ended up paying around $50 a session, instead of the $200 he normally charged. I had a fair amount of money saved to pay the psychologist, as I tend to live a frugal life. Not spending a lot of money on things that most people do for fun or in social situations led me to save a lot of money in general.
By the way, the person who harmed me was my father. My mother didn’t find out about this until it had been going on for a number of years.
I had never understood why my mother and father split, but once my memories began to resurface, I spoke with her about it. Upon finding out about it, my mother immediately left my father and left the house. She eventually moved us across the country.
My father was convicted and was sentenced to eight years behind bars. After five years of incarceration, he passed by suicide. After leaving my father, my mother looked after me alone for the next six years and then found a new partner.
She married him a year later, and I am glad to call him my father. I am still seeing the psychologist who treated me, though on a monthly basis now.
In regards to the urges I had, they were different from normal attraction. The best way I can describe it is like an addict looking to get more of a substance. throwaway847677