QUESTION

I’m really struggling right now. My mind is racing and I’m panicking about the content that I watched in the past because I don’t have a way to ‘prove’ that it was safe and consensual. I stupidly caved in and googled “what happens if an accidentally saw illegal porn” and I ended up making my anxiety so much worse. What if the images I saw in the past had underage people in them? Am I going to jail? Will my ip address be tracked? My brain is making all sorts of scenarios up and they feel so real. At this point I don’t know if I’m a bad person or not, I just feel like something terrible is about to happen. Although I know I’d never intentionally look for that kind of stuff there’s still a chance that I could have seen things without realising, and I actually don’t know what to do. I’m in total panic mode

Trying not to seek reassurance, but rather connect the dots on my OCD and possible reasons as to why I am the way I am. I have severe OCD (or at least I hope I do) mainly surrounding POCD. I've had symptoms of OCD the majority of my life but this theme has come up more recently. When I was a kid, and i'm talking 6-7, I was first exposed to some really gross adult content online. It was introduced to me by a friend of mine around the same age of me. I saw some really disgusting things that a 6-7 year old should definitely not see. This was not a one time occurrence, as I had been exposed to taboo topics online years to come after that, such as the same friend introducing me to Omegle... And i'm sure you can imagine how that went, theres a lot of genuinely disgusting human beings on there. Coming back to the reason for making this post; is it possible to early exposure to this content could be one of the reasons I struggle with POCD? It genuinely scares me to death because you hear that real p*dos dealt with simular situations when they were kids, so thats kind of making me feel that this could be more than OCD, and I could be a genuinely bad person. My POCD feels so real, that at times i'm fully convinced its not OCD. Sometimes I can't even distinguish the feelings of attraction between a younger person and an older person, except for the feeling of anxiety and fear. Its really hard to explain without going into detail, but it just feels so real. Some feedback on this would be great, thank you all.

Being exposed to taboo p*rn as young as first grade ruined my life and now ocd is making me pay for it. I have so much guilt for being a child/teen and looking at taboo stuff, and it was all fictional or anime or whatever but it was still so so gross. and I didn't realize It because I had been used to it at so young 🫠 I think what haunts me most is when I was a kid/young teen (like 12-14ish) and didn't have access to p*rn I'd imagine stuff similar to what I'd seen in the art. I can't even believe I'd imagine scenarios involving kid characters or whatever because it had been so normalized to me and I assumed it was normal since it was fiction. I'm 23 now so it's been a decade since I've done anything like that and I've never had the urge to since but still. I've NEVER been attracted to kids or had any urges or anything ever, even when I was addicted. The thought makes me want to vomit, I'd rather die than associate anything sexual with kids/minors and I think people who groom or assault kids are vile. But I still feel like the fact that I imagined stuff similar to the things I read sometimes when I was young is proof I'm a p*do. I don't think people would believe me if I said I'm not. I just feel like I don't deserve to live or that if I do, I'm living a lie. I know 'I was a kid too' but even when I was 13/14 I read/imagined stuff with characters younger than me because I thought it was normal. I'm so disgusted. I've had this theme for so long I'm starting to wonder if ocd is right. I feel too ashamed to tell my therapist.