Google

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

**TW for POCD** I’ve spoken about this a few times before. That urge I had to type in “child porn” into google. I talked to my NOCD therapist today about it. She told me the ERP for it was to type it in. She even did it with me. Obviously nothing but news stories, crime statistics, and photos someone would use for a project showed up. I’ve been so petrified of typing that in there. She wants me to do it every two hours and listen to what OCD will say. I typed it in that way, I typed it out full, and I typed it out with an additional word. I clicked and browsed through all the google tabs. I’m okay, but I can’t stop crying. I’m scared to do it again. She said it’s not likely going to get flagged due to people looking that up for research projects and stuff. I’m just afraid repeatedly searching it up will cause some sort of alert. I feel so scared and full of nerves. I guess that’s what the ERP is supposed to do, but it was so scary. So scary :(

I know a few of you saw my posts about my ERP and the googling urges. That didn’t end up going well. My therapist actually decided we needed to halt it for now. The thing is it’s almost like I learned googling is harmless from those few exercises and my brain keeps generating more things to google. Normally I would just spiral and be done but now I can barely hold back from searching for long. I eventually give in. I’m horrified because it feels like I want to find illegal content. I swear on everything I am, I don’t want to find anything even close to it. I’m freaking out because I don’t understand what’s happening. I keep compulsively searching/testing/checking or idk. I keep remembering details and I feel like I need to google again to be sure of something. I feel absolutely insane can someone please help me??? I’m petrified I’m going to get in trouble.