TW. I am terrified. I’m scared to share but I’m desperate. I need to know the difference between arousal non concordance and actual sexual attraction. I’ve read that some real p’s can be devastated by there condition and not act on it or morally agree with it. I’m scared because I have had groinal responses before this ocd theme started. When it happened I brushed it off because I knew my character and values and morals and knew I didn’t agree with it and wouldn’t do anything bad. But years later I’ve been obsessing because it sounds like according to the internet it does mean something. Like is it true that all you have to do to be in that P category is experience arousal? I would seriously not be able to cope if that was true abt me.

It seems like anyone without ocd would also be worried sick like I am and trying to figure out if it means they are something terrible.

I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this. This is one of the hardest parts of pocd. When you have ocd your mind is hardwired to think the way you do, you ponder things very deeply and consider different outcomes and what they might mean. Everyone has the thoughts you do, but if they don’t have ocd they can think a gross intrusive thought and think “ew, that was weird.” And never think about it again. You are a caring person and you had these natural thoughts and became really concerned about what they could possibly mean. OCD tries to tell you that you are evil, wrong, and bad for even being able to conjure up such disturbing images, and then you are forced to keep checking yourself to see if what OCD is telling you is true. What you said is partially true, there are pedos who feel guilty. Their experience is much different than how you feel right now, however. They don’t feel guilt the same way other people do, they have a hard time feeling pretty much any feelings the way most of us do. They have very low empathy. They might become excited and offend against a child when they are given the opportunity and feel guilty after the act is complete. This guilt is not the same as the guilt the rest of us experience. To the rest of us, we wouldn’t offend against a child in the first place. For you and me, even the IDEA of offending against a child makes us feel guilty, it makes us feel sick to have the thought cross our heads. They feel guilt, but not enough to stop what they’re doing. With POCD, we run from the thoughts and the way they make us feel. We might do “checking” like behaviors, where we intentionally force ourselves to think about pedophilia to make sure our reactions are the way we want them to be, but we aren’t fantasizing for sexual gratification. We don’t want to be thinking about it. Real pedos enjoy their thoughts. They seek out chances to be around children and to offend against them. They look for media depicting children. They have fantasies and cannot feel sexually gratified without thinking about offending against children. They enjoy the power they can have over an innocent, helpless child, and they enjoy the fact that they can hurt and exploit them without them even knowing it’s happening. When you have POCD, the last thing you want to do is think about this stuff. You often start avoiding being around children, and when you come into normal, healthy physical contact with them it makes you sick and nervous. You actively avoid imagery that reminds you of offenses against children. The groin reponds to a lot of things. Any part of your body is going to respond and have sensation if you focus on it hard enough. The groin is especially responsive because of the way we are designed as human beings. We experience sensation from intense emotions such as fear, pain, anxiety, excitement, anger, and thousands of other complex feelings we have to deal with as human beings. The groin also reponds to sexual imagery of any kind, regardless of whether the imagery is personally arousing to you. Sexual imagery activates the same part in all of our brains. Even if you’re shown an image of two really ugly people having the grossest sex you’ve ever seen, the image of two members of your species having sex will cause your brain and groin to have sensation. It’s not comfortable at all, and everyone experiences it, it’s the OCD and sickness of your thinking that causes you to assign such heavy meaning to it.