I’ve become terrified of the internet and technology. My biggest obsession right now is that there’s sexual videos of me on porn sites or on the internet. All it takes is one bad guy to record me secretly and put me on there. I’ve never been blackmailed or anything and it can happen to anyone but I get an urge to check because the feeling is so strong that I’m on there. I will check key words on porn hub and I’ll be relieved for a second when I don’t find anything but then I think of other things to search and then I doubt if I saw correctly. I say “what if that was me and I just overlooked it?” And my initial obsession gets worse. I have the urge to check again and when I don’t I have it repeating in my mind that there’s a video out there of me.

This might contain triggering content, but I'm also wondering if others have dealt with this similar thought, and if so, how to deal with it? Overall, I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm able to eat again, which I hadn't been able to do because of how much anxiety I'd been experiencing. I'm spending time around loved ones and not just rotting in my room, and I've been able to wake up without immediately being bombarded by intrusive thoughts. When things first got really bad, I'd wake my mom up every night for reassurance, but I haven't done that in a while either. I'm really proud of myself, but there's still this nagging thought in my mind... While looking through others posts on here, hoping to find advice that'd fit my situation, I ended up making things worse. Someone mentioned how they had a fear that they'd purposely search for illegal content (related to POCD). I panicked, and "what ifs" flooded my thoughts. "What if the intrusive thoughts affect who I am as a person, and I do that?" I'm terrified that I'll search for those things, which I know means I wouldn't do it. But then, another person on here said they'd actually looked for those things, and that freaked me out even more. Does that mean it's possible for that to happen to me? I don't want to do that, but I keep having intrusive thoughts surrounding it. I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm just... stuck. I don't know what to do. I've spoken with other people who have the same fears, but how do I manage this? It's not something I've even thought about before seeing those posts. I've been practicing accepting the uncertainty, but I'm really struggling with this one. I hate this. This morning, I woke up, and the intrusive thoughts were back. It's just disheartening.

Sorry if this is a bit of an odd post, but I’m wondering if there are any girls out there that have specifically struggled with shame around watching porn? A lot of my real-event ocd stems from watching that kind of content in the past, and for some reason it feels particularly taboo as a woman. As a young teen, I saw some genuinely disturbing things, and I think a lot of that was to do with having unrestricted access to the internet. However, despite lots of people telling me “that’s normal teen curiosity” it just never feels like it applies to me, and that I’m genuinely just a sexual deviant. I think because that kind of content is so graphic and overstimulating it’s really stuck in my brain, and I just wish I could turn back the clock and switch off the computer. I’ve recently been struggling with doing typical ‘girly’ stuff because I feel tainted and gross, and I just want to get back to feeling myself again.

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