OCD Versus Sexual Sadism, Pedophilia and Sociopathy

I’m not sure if I should post a link to this topic, because I don’t want people flooding over to the OCD forums to bother these people. These folks are suffering from a form of OCD that focuses on worrying that they are a pedophile. I will quote the site later on in the post after some expository material.

I wrote some articles about the subject, so I get a lot of emails from these folks, and I do a lot of counseling with them.

Not bragging, but they often tell me I’ve done a better job than their licensed therapists.

One guy was a millionaire who had been hiring the best psychologists and psychiatrists in the country. He was paying some guy $500/hour 3 times a week for a year or so. A couple of hours with me on the phone, and he got better than he had with the super-priced therapist in a year. Also, the psychiatrists had dx’d him as psychotic and put him on antipsychotics. I quickly figured out he was psychotic and told him so. All I saw was OCD plus some depression.

He had developed a particularly nasty form of OCD called “Harm OCD” where they worry that they are going to commit an act of violence. I don’t know if they ever act on it. Maybe there was a case or two, but I’ve never heard of a real case. So I just assume that they are harmless. Most folks are seriously freaked out about this OCD form too and think these folks are dangerous. The statistics show that actually people with OCD are the least likely to commit any act of criminal violence.

I just treat them like they are harmless and let it go at that. I even laugh at them when they tell me they are afraid they’re going to kill someone. It’s ridiculous. The millionaire, after two hours with me on the phone, finally got out of his house for the first time in four years. Actually, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the picture. I simply told him he was harmless, was never going to act on it, and to quit worrying.

I think I also gave him the Knife Therapy. I told him to put a legal knife in his pocket and go into a bunch of stores and whatnot, walking all around town with the knife. After a while, you’re not whipping out the knife and killing anyone, so you start to get over the fear.

I had one guy with Harm OCD who was a dwarf. I used to make fun of him and say, “What are you going to do, reach up and stab someone in the knee?” It’s good to ridicule the disorder and make fun of them because most people, including therapists, are freaking out on these people, and that just makes them worse.

This guy was also starting to get sadistic and pedophilic fantasies and imagery interfering with his masturbatory fantasies. He didn’t have a partner, so he masturbated. As he did so, fantasies of murder, torture, pedophilia, etc. intruded as intrusive thoughts.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty common complication, especially in young men. The main thing is that the OCD stuff is intrusive, that’s how you can tell it’s not normal. But they get upset about it because now the weird stuff is getting tied in with sexual arousal, and they can’t figure out if it turns them on or not.

There are lots of folks who get off on sadistic stuff. We call them Sexual Sadists. They’re quite common, especially in the gay male community. For straights, sexual sadism, like all paraphilias, begins in adolescence. They enjoy it and get off on it, the same way normal guys get off Raquel Welch or whoever. It feels natural, normal, like it’s a regular part of themselves. The fantasies are not intrusive. They feel just like any guy’s normal sexual fantasies. Do you try to stop those?

They like it! They don’t really want to stop thinking about it, because it’s too much fun. Sexual Sadism is a problem of desire. OCD is a problem of fear.

That’s the difference. Most sexual sadists are not dangerous, but a few of them are. Sometimes it escalates, and the sadist might start worrying that it’s getting out of control and he’s really going to hurt someone one of these times.

The differential diagnosis between Harm OCD and sociopathy is quite simple.

The sociopath loves to think about hurting or killing people. Serial killer types go around all day long thinking about little else. They don’t feel bad about the thoughts, and they never try to stop them. If they are out around the town all day, and if they like to kill say young women, they will be looking at every young woman they see and fantasizing about how they are going to capture, torture, rape and kill her.

They may not carry the acts out, mostly because they’re afraid that they might get caught. But they can’t see anything wrong torturing, raping and murdering people for fun. It’s simply their idea of a good time. Since they don’t see anything wrong with mayhem, they never show up in therapy and never ask for help. Sociopathy is a problem of lack of morality. OCD is a problem of fear.

Pedophilia is a tough case because it’s so confusing. Most child molesters are true pedophiles, that is, they prefer sex with children over sex with adults. Most of them don’t like sex with adults at all or at least not much.

There’s a website that profiles pedophiles here. It’s clear, looking through those histories, that this once again is a problem of desire. Pedophilia is a problem of desire. OCD is a problem of fear.

These guys have almost all gotten off preferentially on kid stuff since adolescence. They’re interested in adults only a little, or not at all.

They are almost all extremely happy to be pedophiles – that is, they love it! It’s what gets them off. I have no objection to their orientation, and I realize that they can’t help it, and there’s no cure for it. However, they do have to be celibate. This is going to be a problem, because how many of us are good at being celibate? So we need to watch these people all the time to make sure that they don’t act on their orientation. As long as they don’t act on their orientation, I think we need to respect them.

I don’t really know what to do with pedophiles. Maybe we should throw them on islands where everyone is over 18.

To the pedophile, pedophilic fantasies feel natural, normal, healthy, right, a part of you. They’re not really bothered by them, and they don’t try to stop them.

A lot of these POCD types start going round and round because there are some pedophiles who are not happy with their orientation. That’s not really the best way to put it. More that they are not happy with the way that society treats their orientation.

I tell people to imagine this: If you are heterosexual and repulsed by the idea of homosexuality, try this fantasy. Suppose that homosexuality was the same as heterosexuality is now. Suppose it was just normal to be gay. Suppose heterosexuality was treated the same way as pedophilia is now. Suppose straights were treated as evil, sick fucks who need to be tortured in prison forever.

Straight sex was illegal, and even straight porn was illegal. Revealing that you were straight meant you might get your ass kicked or even killed; or at any rate, massive societal rejection would ensue. I ask them how they would feel? This is how the pedophile feels.

Most straights would refuse to engage in gay sex and would continue to fantasize about straight sex. They would masturbate to it and enjoy it. Despite all the societal propaganda, they would collect straight porn even though it was illegal. They would form networks with other persecuted straights. They would campaign for changes in the laws to make straight sex legal.

Societal propaganda would try to say that straight sex caused serious emotional harm, but the straights would refuse to believe that. And in spite of severe legal penalties, they would probably try to engage in straight sex. They would not feel bad about being straights, but would only be mad at society for persecuting them.

With this analogy, you can imagine what it’s like to be a pedophile in straight society.

If you go to Wikisposure, you can see that almost all pedophiles are utterly unapologetic about their orientation, believe that kids are sexual and have sex drives (dubious), and think that adults having sex with kids is good, fun and helpful to both the kid and the pedophile.

There’s a lot of evidence now that this is not the case. For whatever reason, a lot of kids who get molested have problems later on. Why they have problems is not known, but I don’t think it’s relevant. It’s a great reason not to do something like that – chances are, you’re going to hurt the kid.

Things get complicated when some of the POCD types start testing out their POCD by masturbating to pedo fantasies. They usually just masturbate to fantasies, as child porn is illegal. They are often seriously freaked out when they find that often it’s pleasurable. This opens up a serious dx difficulty. If the person enjoys it, they’re a pedo, right? Well, not really.

At least 2

This is a pretty typical case that I deal with below. As you can see, he is complicating matters by masturbating to pedo fantasies as some kind of “testing,” but that’s only going to make him even more crazy.

At any rate, recent research shows that all normal straight males react to females all the way down to age 7. Maximal response it at age 16+. Below age 16, the response curve rapidly descends down to age 7 where it extinguishes. So really any normal male has a reaction even to prepubescent girls. It’s just not very strong is all, and it’s easily ignored.

Just spent a relaxing couple of days at a friend’s house, and started to feel ok, decided maybe I did have POCD after all and it was all in my mind, then started spiking really bad in the afternoon about various paedophilia-related things, including feeling a sudden surge of arousal when testing to see if I was aroused by paedophilia, when I had trouble getting off to normal pornographic fantasies, though managed to eventually.

I started feeling better later on after writing down my worries but then at the end of a walk in the park two young (pre-pubescent) girls walked close to me, and I thought one was cute and felt a vague groinal response, maybe a partial erection.

Then I thought, it must just be the anxiety, but then I couldn’t dismiss the feeling of finding the girl cute, and thought, ‘I never find young girls cute’, it must be sexual attraction, and ‘I must be sexually attracted to young girls’, and at this I felt a sudden intense arousal, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this, my arousal growing, then I thought, ‘If I give in and get myself off to this, it proves I’m a paedophile and I’ll end up looking up pictures of children on the internet to get off to and then that’ll lead to me molesting a child’, and horribly these thoughts made me even more intensely aroused, but I don’t think these thoughts were due to my OCD making me think of the progression of actions, it was maybe more a series of escalating sexual urges.

At the time of these thoughts, to make it even worse, I was only resisting slightly, but my anxiety grew, and I started worrying about these thoughts, but the arousal was still there strongly, and when I got home, despite my anxiety and decreased arousal, I gave in to the arousal, unable to resist, and ended up getting off to images of the two young girls ‘together’ if you know what I mean, though not in a particularly explicit way, which I think makes it even worse that the arousal and orgasm were so intense.

Immediately after, I felt shame and deep depression, realizing I must almost certainly be a paedophile, with OCD, rather than someone with POCD as all these events fit the symptoms of paraphilias and not POCD at all.

I only post here in the vague hope this can be explained as POCD, but the fact that even now in my depression and anxiety I still feel the arousal combined with the events described means there isn’t really any hope of it being POCD rather than paedophilia.

I guess now I need to work out how to fix this, if that’s even possible. For past details, see my previous post. Very depressed…

UPDATE: I now seem to be blocking out this incident as I have great trouble accepting that it happened and this blocking out serves further to convince me that I am a paedophile in denial as someone in denial would block things out like this, things which show they are a paedophile (and the omission of the word might when I wrote this seems to confirm I’m blocking this out due to denial and deep down believe I am a paedophile) whereas I think someone with OCD would not block these things out, especially not so easily (denial=easy to block out OCD=hard and thoughts recur from past experience) but would worry about them constantly and their implications.

FURTHER UPDATE: I now remember there was anxiety ‘during’ the arousal after the initial intense arousal, which like the later anxiety decreased my feelings of arousal I think, which suggests the intense arousal was not caused by anxiety, maybe just from the thought of acceptance, which as I typed just caused a feeling of arousal, but now when very anxious I only have mild feelings of arousal, though not thinking paedophilic thoughts.

This is really messing me up…I also now remember at the conclusion of the thoughts thinking ‘I’m a paedophile’ and getting a rush of excitement and arousal rather than disgust like I do now at the thought. Anxiety might have come straight after this but I’m really not sure…

Other than the run-on sentences, I can’t see anything wrong with this guy, besides the anxiety issues that he is torturing himself with. As you can see, this person is going round and round about anxieties in his head, and his mind is chasing its tail. He’s trying to think his way to a correct solution of this problem, but that’s not going to be possible.

A concise picture emerges from this case study. Although there are some variations, this is the classic picture that I see in most every case. I tell them that it seems like they are reading off the same script.

The OCD preys on whatever you are most afraid of. There’s ridiculous and insane mass hysteria about child molesters nowadays, and being a child molester is about the worst thing that you could be. OCD tells you your worst fears are going to come true. Since people are terrified of pedophilia, we are seeing a lot of OCD playing into this fear. A while back, there was a wave of AIDS OCD. It plays up whatever fears are floating around in society.

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36 thoughts on “OCD Versus Sexual Sadism, Pedophilia and Sociopathy”

  1. pocd really sucks but when i found it was a mental condition rather than a real problem I got over the stigma and shame. people who have pocd really don’t have anything to be ashamed of but they let it ruin their lives. I assume its the same with hocd which i have also had but it hasn’t been as much of a problem.

  2. “At any rate, recent research shows that all normal straight males react to females all the way down to age 7. Maximal response it at age 16+. Below age 16, the response curve rapidly descends down to age 7, where it extinguishes. So really any normal male has a reaction even to prepubescent girls. It’s just not very strong is all, and it’s easily ignored.”
    Can you provide a link to this research.I do believe it.

    1. Read the study in a book at Cal State University Fresno in the early 1990’s. I could not believe it so I went back and read it over and over again to make sure. I must have read it 10-20 times. It’s only one study though.

      1. That still sounds a little too unspecific.The exact name of the book,the exact year or the name of the researchers will be very helpful.Even better will be an internet link.Thanks for the info anyway.

        I actually do believe the study.I don’t think a person’s sexual orientation will change with age .Even if it does ,the magnitude will be little.Youth is health and sexual attraction is nothing but the sign of good health for a potential offspring in near future.

    2. it depends on the guys age. a middle age man would have a differnat age of sexual interest than an adult male in his 20’s.

  3. A lot of the trouble can be traced to our society’s acceptance of thought crime and the rejection of people for what’s in their heads. You are right. A person cannot control what he is attracted to so we should not persecute others for having fantasies that are different from our own. Mere images fall into the realm of fantasy; we should not be concerned with the images people possess, look at or get off on – unless we need those images as evidence. When another person is harmed, or in imminent danger of being harmed – that’s when we should be concerned and action should be taken.

    You should read http://human-stupidity.com/. He shows how absurd many our sexual laws are.

  4. It sounds like these guys need to learn and practice meditation. I have anxiety disorder and manage it quite nicely with meditation. The mind can be like a runaway train if you don’t learn to understand its nature and exercise control over it.

  5. ok this is exactly what i’m going through, i have to keep reading your article everyday to remind me. I live in the North of England United Kingdom do you know of any good therapists who can help me? I’ve been through the NHS here but i don’t think there is an expert in this amoung them Please Help

      1. Im a 12 grader. im just 17 rt nw bt i dont knw why bt gt sexuslly arroused by watching bdsm movies morovr iv practiced sever diciplenary sessions wt my juniors by. Spanking dm wt some sort o impliment. above all nw whn i see girls nd women arround i jst want to torture dm. . In my dreams nd imaginations i see what i dream. Nd aftr watching dat i gt excitd nd i oftn masturbet bt at d same time aftr thinking abt it i feel guilty of it nd i remained depressed for 2 to 3 days nd dm everything becomes normal nd i continue wt my fantasy… Bt i want tto go out of ds thing bt i cnt control myself. . Plz help

  6. Hi Robert i hold you in incredibly high regard and have done hours of research into OCD.
    Thing is im confused, i have a fetish and suffered severe unipolar depression due to it.
    OCD thoughts caused my depression because i have a weird fetish.
    I have always been a highly strung anxious person and fear being a Paedo,becuse i have a weird fetish.
    Please help me!

  7. Forgive me, but your councelling methods sound a bit egytysical and simple. Did you not consider that these weirdos just enjoy all your non judgemental time and attention? Never “assume” you know the full story.

  8. I am really scared:((( please help me I keep on thinking that I am a bad person or a serial killer I recently went to the hospital because I was crying and stressed a lot I was diagnosed with ocd and I was upset. Ocd runs in my dads side of the family and schizophrenia runs on my moms side. I keep on getting scary thoughts and even urges ?! What’s wrong with me !!!:(((

      1. Hi

        I have just emailed you. I really hope you reply I want someone to reach out to and jsut offer me advice and help

        thank you

  9. I’m 17, 2 years ago i had a fantasy about a 9 year old girl and while i was able to move on and not have recurrent or intensely arousing fantasies about children for 2 years, I have recently been told i suffer from anxiety and have not been able to move on from that one fantasy 2 years ago…it makes me think i am a pedo and always will be which makes me want to kill myself, can you help?

  10. Thank you for this. I began researching OCD when my brain started trying to convince me that I had schizophrenia. After about months of experiencing terrifying symptoms manufactured by my brain (and being convinced that I was psychotic and couldn’t trust my own senses), I began to realize I had a relentless obsession that was interfering with my job and personal life. I am now in therapy.

    I ran across your article because my brother believed he was a pedophile and was diagnosed with OCD. I never understood how someone who said the things he did could be OCD. I was scared of him. Unfortunately, my brother committed suicide before he got the help he needed. I now understand that my brother was very sick. I finally feel that I can grieve the loss of my brother, not a monster.

    My father was also OCD. It ruined my childhood. He never sought or received treatment. After witnessing what this disease has done to my family, I refuse to allow mental illness to ruin my adult life as well.

    I wish I had been more educated on the topic while my brother was alive. I deeply regret my lack of understanding.

    Peace be with you all.

  11. Hi Robert,
    this is a great article and i have suffered with this feeling for quite some time.now. I was wondering if i could email you? This post is old so not sure if u still offer advice?

    Thanks

  12. There are lots of folks who get off on sadistic stuff. We call them Sexual Sadists. They’re quite common, especially in the gay male community

    Really? Are you sure? Sadism is a very masculine trait, so I would expect it to be most common among straight men and gay women.

    Masochism on the other hand seems very submissive and fem, so I would expect that to be more common among gay men and straight women.

      1. There is a much higher rate of sexual perversion in men, so any sexual population which consists of only men i.e gays, will have much higher rates of all fetishes when compared to male/female sexual populations i.e straights. It’s got nothing to do with perverts being attracted to the homosexual lifestyle or anything.

        1. Let me give you just one example. Only 4% of males are gay. But way more than 4% of serial killers are gay. A large number of gay serial killers are sexual sadists. In fact, it is with gay thrill killers that we actually see professionals such as university professors, accountants, engineers, physicians, etc. who are involved in sexually sadistic murders and even serial murders. They often involve their friends or even roommates in these escapades.

          In contrast, most heterosexual sexually sadistic killers or serial killers are marginal people, typically lacking good, high paying professional jobs.

  13. hey there! i hope im writing in the right place! im pretty sure i have pocd but im worried that its not! i work with children and i love my job but the constant fear is there that im a pedofile or deep down a sick twisted person! i startedgetting groinal responses ab
    out a yearand a half ago towards children! whenever i saw a baby or children the groinal responses immediqtely come! i and last night on this tv drama police show, it had a little girl who had been raped, and i feel like deep down i must like watching shows like that because i get aroused over children! i always get aroused ( but uncompfortable) when ppl tell me about stories of others being raped or
    molesterd, i hate it! because no one deserves to have that happen to them, but then i start thinkibg your only just say

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