Fetish shame making me feel non-human

[weirdbydefault]

Hi. I sent this thing that's been bothering me to the mental podcast in shame and secrets but it never got read. I know it's likely there are just a lot of submissions, but part of me still thinks it wasn't read because it was too creepy/way too weird.
I'm asexual, I've never felt attraction or a desire to be with anyone in that way, I don't think about sex. I finally found out I was asexual in my early twenties and was glad to meet people who are the same way. I almost felt for the first time like I belonged to a community, but this fetish is the one thing that makes me feel like I can never belong anywhere, I am just too weird, so I don't even fit in with other asexuals even though there are lots of asexual people who have fetishes. I know it's not something I need to feel ashamed of, especially since it isn't causing harm to myself or anyone, but I do and I want to get over it. I want there to be a reason that I don't have to carry this burning weight inside me anymore, this self hate and disgust. I tried talking about it on a forum for the specific fetish I have but even there I didn't feel I fit in because people on there aren't ashamed of their fetish and I felt like talking about how I felt about it also made people on there offended like I was also judging them as well as myself. I don't judge them for their fetish, it's purely self-centric. But I immediately started being low-key cyberbullies on there and left promptly and deleted all my posts, I felt stupid. The other reason I didn't quite fit in there was because of the nature of my fetish. I am sexually aroused by tears and crying but it is purely in fantasy or fiction, I am not aroused to see people or animals in pain in real life. My fantasies are also very benign, no incredibly sad subject that leads to the person crying, usually something trivial that they easily bounce back from. Otherwise I accidentally make myself sad and it is no longer arousing. I have some form of dacryphilia basically. I learned I had it when I was 14 and was completely traumatized for most of my teen years by it and there was no one I could talk to about it. All I wanted (and still want) was to be a regular girl with no fetish. I had no problem being straight, gay or anything in between, I just didn't want a fetish. But there it was and it's a facet of myself I have to learn to accept.
I feel like everyone can see or sense there is something off about me the same way people or animals can sense when someone is a psychopath. As a result I have a slew of problems relating to my outer appearance. I am desperate to keep up an appearance and not ever let it slip that I am actually very creepy. I also have disordered eating tendencies as I feel disgusted with my body or myself in general randomly and it is usually worse after I eat or if I can't go out to exercise from bad weather. As a result I go back and forth between regular eating and starving/binging. I am thin/average but I think my health is garbage from my erratic diet. I get sick a lot and sleep terribly. I do it sometimes out of self harm.
My fetish arouses me sexually and I have only one fantasy that makes me orgasm and it's been the same one I've had since I was very little, younger than 5 and it's from fiction.
I have other problems that have come about as a result of my fetish shame that are a daily bother. I have Pure-Obsessional OCD that used to be very bad. I thought I was a pedophile and into beastiality, my dad, and a lesbian, and was terrified to look at or have any physical contact with my dad, children, animals and my own school friends and sister when I was a teenager. Gradually most of these fell away, and I was over most of these fears by the end of high school. The lesbian fear I feel bad about because I am not homophobic, I would have no problem now being gay or non-heterosexual. I didn't have a problem with LGBT even while I had the fear of being one myself. It sprung up because I was being bullied so badly everyday, kids were calling my homophobic slurs constantly, even on the bus out their windows at me while I was walking home. I consider myself part of the LGBT community now that I know I am asexual, and I am proud of that. That is my revenge against them.
The one fear that hasn't left me is that I am attracted to my dad and have intrusive thoughts and tactile sensations of grabbing his penis. I almost always am bombarded by these unwanted thoughts and an unwanted groinal response after I hug my dad and I will immediately go to my room and have a shutter-cringe attack. It's awful. My dad is awesome and I love him. He has know idea. I believe I have this fear because a small part of me is afraid I am not truly asexual and I am just attracted to my dad. It's beyond awful and I hate it.

I've tried to kill myself a few times in the the last few years. I'm in my late 20s now, scared and only have one friend outside my family. I am close to my family and love them, but we have a dysfunctional relationship. My mom is sometimes verbally abusive to my sister and I. My dad is critical of my work and my grandma was also critical of me. My sister and I are best friends. A lot of the shame comes from the fact that my family knows about my fetish. It is horrible. They found out about it long before I even knew what it was. I had no inhibition as a child and would openly masturbate to the scene from a movie that still is my sole source of sexual gratification. I stopped one day when I was about 7 or 8 and my sister saw me and told me to stop. I felt disgusted and did immediately, but continued to masturbate to that scene privately. My sister years later found a window I'd left open on the computer and I'd forgotten to close it, and it was the scene from that movie. She told me she'd seen it and I don't really remember what else she said now, I only remember she looked uncomfortable. I knew she couldn't help it (we were both young, she was probably 15 and had no idea what I was doing) and I didn't take it personally. But that moment is the foundation of my fetish shame. The person I am closest to seeing that side of me I am so mortified of. I've never been able to get rid of that shame from that memory.

So there that is and it is long and weird. I don't really know how to end this. I'm sorry if I caused gross feelings. Talk to you later.

[manuel_moe_g]

You are among friends. You don't deserve to suffer. Please take care, all the best.

[Brooke]

Hi,

Who cares if you think you are creepy? We all have creepy, dark sides within us and I think the first step is to accept that as you are and be OK with it. I know it's easier said than done, but I'm in the process of doing the same... It doesn't matter what the dark part is (it's different for everybody), the real work is to stop resisting / rejecting that part of ourselves and slowly learn to accept and love it--because that's how we are and that's what makes us unique.

Now, we don't have to announce it to the whole world. We can just keep this in our hearts, but the key is to accept and love that part of ourselves that we are ashamed of... That's the ONLY way we will find peace and balance, which will in turn move us into the right direction.

It's OK to have "gross" intrusive thoughts sometimes. We all have them. When they come, I would like to say, "Oh, there you are again" and let it sit there until it goes away. We can't define ourselves by our negative thoughts that pop up in our minds without our permission. We can't resist them or they'll keep pursing. I'm learning how to talk to myself when that happens by saying something like, "I'm sorry you have these negative thoughts coming up right now...what do you want to do to make yourself feel better?" Sometimes, I'll just hug myself and say "Poor me...poor me...I'm so sorry for you..." until I feel the love towards myself.

It may feel sappy, but these are my true feelings that I wanted to express to you...

Love,
Brooke

[snoringdog]

Hello WeirdbyDefault (Not! ).

I found these podcasts a few months ago and they've helped me through a rough patch. The board has been a bit quiet lately, but there are lots of interesting threads that might be reactivated....

Lots to unpack in your post, and I'm certainly not qualified to do so, but can make a comment or two, if I may...

First - I hope the suicide attempts you mentioned weren't serious, or that you've been able to analyze what brought you to that place, and do a course correction..

Mental anguish / Lack of hope or the inability to imagine anything better / Availability of method / Impulsiveness seem to be the ingredients much of the time. From what I've read, survivors almost always are glad they didn't succeed. (A story on the Dick Cavett episode of Hilarious World haunted me for awhile after I heard it).

I've been clicking around a few of the links, and here are a few that might be of interest
https://mentalpod.com/get-help
https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/
https://www.helpguide.org/home-pages/su ... ention.htm

I'm sorry you were bullied on the other forum, don't think it'll happen here. (Internet seems to bring out the worst in some people, doesn't it..).

As far as being asexual - maybe if there was a little less sex overall, with all it's attendant messiness (!), the world would be a better place...

And the Greeks wrote about Oedipus thousands of years ago, so maybe there's really "nothing new under the sun".

Take care.

[weirdbydefault]

Hi, I wanted to reply back to you who responded to my novella–length post entry. It has taken me months in part because ah depression, you motivation thief you. And because the layout of this forum is different from what I'm used to and it confused me a bit. I couldn't find any reply buttons to what you wrote accept for the bottom of the page so here I hope you see it. I'm grateful for your compassion.

To snoringdog - Thank you! Yeah it was definitely a hefty post. Thank you for the links! I am bookmarking them. Thank you for taking the time to read and not shaming me for this stuff that I have.
The suicide attempts have definitely never been serious. They have always been half-assed attempts because usually in the moment I'm not really thinking about killing myself so much as I am just thinking about "ending the pain" and it's a blurry, unclear thing in my head. And like so many others have said, the guilt of leaving and traumatizing my family in the aftermath is always what stops me from fully committing to it. I am grateful these places exist. Life is hard right now. I am wishing all the time I could go back to the days when I was happier which for me was in my college years/late teens and early twenties. I was still really messed up then and my mental problems did eventually drive me out of college but that was the happiest I think I'd ever been.

To Brooke - Thank you! I do definitely want to find a way to embrace this part of myself. It's hard though, definitely something I have to work on. The intrusive thought coping strategy you offer is great, it doesn't sound sappy at all! I'm going to try that. I feel comforted hearing from others who have them.

To manuel_moe_g - Thank you!

[snoringdog]

Hello WBD!

Nice to hear from you! It's been awhile, and I thought maybe it was something I/we might have said...

Mental anguish, yes, pretty familiar with it. Mental struggles can certainly be as painful as anything physical, and when they become obsessive can really wear you down... Trick is, how to keep from building up too much internal pressure...

Anxiety has been a real problem for me lately (see some of my posts, maybe you'll get a chuckle). But expressing it either in writing or with a friend or co-worker really helps. (I tend to bottle things up as a natural way to deal with it).

About college etc - What do you recall from those days that made you the happiest? Maybe there are ways to find similar, but maybe not as concentrated things in your present situation....?

Take care!

SD

[weirdbydefault]

Hi snoringdog!

I'll definitely check out the stuff you've written on our anxiety. I can relate with what you're going through, it is the worst.
I was really happy in college for a lot of reasons. The top reason I think was the feeling I had of being in a new place, the fresh start/clean slate feeling. I knew I was very unlikely to run into any of my old school bullies, and I felt total freedom to express myself and was way more open to talking to people. I made friends with a handful of classmates and got to hang out with them outside of class. I lost touch with virtually ALL of them after I came back from college because I got a new phone and didn't feel like there was a point staying in touch since I lived so far away from them, and because of low self esteem like "Ah they don't want to hear from me."
I had this sense of camaraderie with my classmates because we all had very similar interests and passions, and people were not judgemental or scornful of the stuff we were into. We were all into art, digital art, cartoons, video games and anime.
People were just really nice and it was so awesome. Teachers and my classmates were always supportive of each other. I miss that.
Being about to learn things I cared about and that were fun to me.
My friend and I were living together in an apartment and it was really nice there as well. But this didn't last because she also had a partner staying with us who bullied me and was abusive to her. But I enjoyed living there before it got really bad. Her ex is still crazy but thankfully they live far away.
I was bullied for years in my hometown and it messed me up badly. To this day I'm still trying to get over what happened, it was traumatic. I am back in my hometown and have severe social anxiety and agoraphobia again because I am afraid my old bullies will see me. Two months ago one of them did see me while I was out walking, and it was a worst case scenario come true where they were the exact same awful person, and repeated the same abuse they said to me in high school. It made me feel like nothing that happened between high school and now made any difference, even though I know this is not true.

Anyways, I'm sorry if I went on for too long again. Happy to hear from you!

[Heatherwantspeace]

Hi weirdbydefault,
How sad that your hometown bullies haven't gained any perspective or empathy. I'm sorry you have to be around them. I don't know if this will help, but some advice I got was to imagine a protective waterfall around myself. Anything toxic just rolls off with the waves and doesn't get through to touch my heart.
Take care,
Heather

[snoringdog]

Hello WBD!

Read your latest, and here are a few of my thoughts, for what they might be worth...

College/friends - That does sound like it was really great (something I missed out on, myself). College is where a lot of people seem to make life-long friends, and I'm sure that some of the ones you made would like to hear from you! It shouldn't be too hard to reconnect with all the online tools around. I encourage you to try. What's the worst that could happen? You have a lot of common interests, right?

Bullies - Your agoraphobia is understandable, in not wanting to have a replay of past experiences and possibly risking that when you go out. But remember that bullies have low self-esteem and use bullying of another person to make themselves feel better.
It might work with a few of them to confront them with this fact. Might make a few of them think, and would help you to feel less like a victim. Lots of people have experienced bullying and there are some great insights, like

http://www.planetofsuccess.com/blog/201 ... ng-quotes/


Anxiety - I found a book called "Hack Your Anxiety" that I've just started. Idea is that instead of just reacting to anxiety and trying to tamp it down or ignore it, try to dissect it a bit and think of it as a source of energy. (Sounds a bit weird maybe, but starting to make sense to me). Here's a link to the author's blog.
https://aliciaclarkpsyd.com/deal-with-anxiety/

BTW - Don't worry about the length of your posts! We've all probably spent way too much time online just wasting time.... why not rather spend it trying to understand and help a fellow struggler, right?

Regards,
SD

[brownblob]

Hi WBD,
Paul has read far worse on his podcast so don't feel like you are to awful to be read. The surveys are available to be read. Read a few and you'll realize everybody has some dark chapters. I am asexual too. I don't really think of myself as such, because I do have heterosexual fantasies, but when I was younger and had sex I didn't enjoy it. I would detach from my body and feel like a fly on the wall just watching.
I was bullied horribly as a teenager. I was a small, poor kid at an upper middle class suburban school. I am white, but the kids decided I was oriental and treated me terribly, I basically couldn't speak as a freshman without somebody hurling a racial slur at me. Teachers just sat back and watched and never said a word. Is there any chance of escaping your hometown?
I didn't get to enjoy college. I worked and lived at home and was suicidal and ended up dropping out because of mental state. I know that feeling of wanting the pain to stop. I hope that stays in your past.