Need help. I feel like I acted on my Intrusive Thoughts. I’ve been doing great with my recovery from POCD. I’ve been accepting the thoughts, and been on medicine and I’ve had thoughts, but have been able to brush them off. I’ve also been forcing myself to be around the children that are my triggers. I work in child care. But today, a kid brought in a valentines sticker book. He brought one of the stickers over to me and told me it said “you are so sexy” I took it from him, and one of the girls I was with asked what it said. I said it was inappropriate. My OCD then told me to let her read it. And I just handed it to her. And now my mind is telling me I did it because I’m a terrible child predator, and I keep asking myself why I did it, and telling myself I’m a bar person. I feel like I’m 10 step backwards.

Let me start by prefacing that I developed ocd as postpartum ocd after having my first child. I had harm and pocd. I had it on and off for years and then it just eventually went away completely for many years until recently after a stressful life event. Now that it’s back it again targets my children but now my grandchildren also. It’s been horrible and makes me pull away from them. Last night my 6 year old granddaughter threw up in the car when my daughter was about to take her home so my daughter brought her back in the house and asked me to clean her up while she cleaned her car. I had some anxiety about it because of my ocd but I couldn’t say no to helping so I opened the bathroom door and my granddaughter was standing in her underwear waiting for me to clean and dress her. Everything was fine and normal but then for some reason, I have no idea why, I looked down at her chest area. I immediately got so upset and didn’t know why I looked there and now my ocd is saying it’s because i’m a monster. I tried to tell myself it’s just normal human behavior when someone is standing there naked that you look where you shouldn’t simply because it’s just there in front of you but I feel horrible. I don’t feel any inappropriate way about her or any child but my ocd is saying it was inappropriate. Has anyone else been through this?

I had a compulsion to look up “child nudity” on google to see people’s opinions on whether nudity in children is sexualized or not. This came from a whole other obsession that I’m not going to get into right now. I had another compulsion to click on images and I told myself I didn’t want to I had a compulsion to look up “child nudity” on google to see people’s opinions on whether nudity in children is sexualized or not. This came from a whole other obsession that I’m not going to get into right now. I had another compulsion to click on images and I told myself I didn’t want to do that but still did it anyway. I saw one boy naked from the front. I immediately closed the tab but then got another compulsion to look again to confirm what I saw. I searched again and looked on images this time seeing a toddler girl nude from the back. I closed the tab and got a compulsion to look at the first image again to confirm the approximate age of the boy in the first picture and this time saw a girl toddler nude from the front. Doing all of this I yelled at myself to stop and when I saw the last picture of the girl I started crying. I’m still in tears and I’m so scared. I have another urge to look at the source of that photo with the boy again to confirm he wasn’t getting sexually exploited in that image. It was from 1920 and he had a straight face so I’m worried I actually saw something really bad. These images weren’t sexualized I think but are they still considered CP? Did I just see illegal material? Either way I just looked at photos of nude children 3 separate times and now I hate myself more than I ever had before. I feel like I shouldn’t be alive right now. I’m a disgusting human being l don’t deserve to live what is wrong with me. I don’t care if this is ocd I gave into a really inappropriate compulsion and didn’t stop myself. I’m not afraid I’m going to harm children I know for a fact I would never do that but this is a step too far. How do I continue living with myself. I messaged my therapist for the first time and she said we can have a session tomorrow but I’m an absolute mess right now. I’m crying so hard I gave myself a headache and it’s getting hard to breathe correctly.

*PLEASE READ* *any help appreciated* So I work with kids and it’s a lightning rod for triggering my POCD. I work with a mental health org that supports kids with autism and other intellectual development disorders. And so I’ve grown really close with one kid since I started since I was his first ever staff and he was the first ever kid I worked with. I’ve grown really protective of him and we’ve become really close and our relationship truly means the world to me. But before I get into my little incident, I have to provide context: so I am hypersexual and struggle with compulsive masturbation and my urges are almost uncontrollable sometimes. I have a lot of trauma from foot fetish stuff/pornography as a kid and it’s carried on into my adult life unfortunately. And so as I was waking up my kid and trying to get him out of bed to get him into the shower (I usually give him a few extra minutes but if he’s uncooperative I have to pull him out of bed gently) and so I just shift him by his legs bc it’s easiest. And my urges and thoughts have been so bad lately and when he wasn’t cooperating, as I was shifting his legs today, his foot touched my private area and I carried on normally but now I feel like a monster and everything I fear. I need some advice bc I’m scared to even talk to my therapist about this bc I think I will go to jail. I don’t want to be like this and I hate POCD so much and I rlly care so much for this kid and would actually die for him to protect him. I just need someone to tell me I’m not crazy bc idk if that contact between us was intentional or not and I have not spiraled like this for so long. I truly am losing my mind and want to give up bc I know I am not the person my POCD tells me I am but now I feel like I am everything it calls me. I feel so ashamed and repulsed and disgusted in myself and wish I didn’t exist. I feel like I’ve exploited my kid and taken advantage of him and that I don’t deserve to have him in my life and that I don’t even deserve to life and would be better off in jail or dead. im so broken and I’m sorry if what im saying is confusing