Anyone else read about "groinal response" and "arousal non-concordance"? Basically anyone can feel a slight "twinge" of arousal at a random time, but for people with OCD, they immediately latch onto it and think it MEANS something about them. This is how many cases of HOCD, POCD, BOCD, etc begin, I'd imagine. I can have felt something one time 3 years ago and nothing since then, but still be worried it "means" something about me. Or, sometimes that first incident causes repeated intrusive thoughts every time you come in contact with that thing, so it become a self fulfilling prophesy. I can be doing fine for weeks and then suddenly start worrying about one of these again. Anyone else have any experiences similar?

Every time I go to bed late and I’m falling asleep, I suddenly get an intrusive thought of a child’s face and my groinal area always responds to it. It’s such an uncomfortable experience. I am way too tired to try and freak out so I end up falling asleep. The next morning I’m always trying to figure out whether I had the groinal response first or after the thought. I start giving OCD power but it feels like If I let it go, then I’m in denial or whatever. I don’t want to ever do anything sexual with a child. I don’t even feel comfortable talking platonically with people who are 17, much less a child. My therapist says that I have a deep rooted fear that I’m this horrible person and that OCD loves to feed off of it. When you get a groinal response, it makes the thought that much more real. I never want these things to happen. I want to only be into adults. It’s so discomforting and stressful. Especially since I’m hyper checking how anxious I am, and if I find I didn’t really have much anxiety, then I’m like “well if I didn’t have anxiety, what does this mean?” And more questions occur til I end up in a rabbit hole

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.

(20f) I have been dealing with severe OCD symptoms for as long as I can remember. I recently got diagnosed about a year ago, and even though I know that these thoughts are probably my ocd, I still cant shake them. Growing up I was always very sexually curious. I was sheltered from a lot of things, as I went to a private school and things like sexuality and sex were never talked about. I remember doing some weird sexual things growing up (never affecting another person), looking up taboo sexual things, etc. I always seemed to become aroused no matter what the situation was, even if I just saw someone getting changed. I have no recollection of being SA'd, so i'm wondering where this all came from? Was I just curious and wanted to experiment and try different things? Or am I really a pervert, pedophile, etc. I have all these thoughts racing through my head and it's killing me. Everything I did as a kid I look back on and am disgusted, as those don't align with my views at all today. I never thought growing up thinking these things were wrong, or actually realize what they were until I got older. I'd like to think it was just my curiosity, but i'm not sure. What if i'm in denial and actually do like these things? I just need to know if theres something wrong w me, I cant keep going on like this. Could really use some advice.