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Hi, So for some reason over the past few days I have been rembering random things from my early childhood (preschool to kindergarten). I’m currently 17 and most of the memories that are coming back to me are things I had never given much consideration to or had long since forgotten until now. I also wrote a post in the “sexuality issues” forum but I’m not sure these memories are related to the subject of that post. Some brief insight to my life before I share my memories: I’m a 17 year old male, currently living with my dad. I was raised by two loving parents but two years ago I lost my mom to cancer ( I was 15). Ok, now for the memories, and I apologize in advance if some of these seem bizarre. When I was in preschool, my family took in a foster child. She was about my age and she stayed with us for a few years. I have memories of pushing her around and bullying her to an extent (which I now feel pretty bad about) but I think it was due to jealousy of having a new child in the house, and I never really hurt her, I could just be mean. And for the most part we actually got along fairly well. Now here’s where I’m confused; I remember “experimenting” with her in some fairly innocent ways like kissing, hugging, etc. but now that I reflect I think I also displayed some abnormal sexual behaviors toward her. For example, we kissed once, but I remember trying to put my tongue in her mouth. Or there was a time where we took our pants off and got in my bed and rubbed our legs together. I’m not sure if this was 100% innocent or if I was trying to gain some sort of sexual satisfaction out of it, even though I was only 4 or 5. However these aren’t what concern me most. We were playing upstairs by ourselves once and somehow we ended up naked. I had an erection and I remember we tried to fit it into her... you know what. We didn’t succeed and thankfully gave up. This is confusing to me as I’m not sure where I learned this behavior, as being so young my dad had not yet explained to me how sex worked. I got quite a few erections as a kid which I realize is fairly normal, and while I didn’t masturbate I would touch my penis a lot and I remember feeling some form of something similar to arousal. I remember seeing my mom naked once and trying to touch her vagina, but she scolded me and so I stopped. I also would take my pants off and rub my legs on my moms, and once I tried to take off my underpants and rub on her, but she told me no. Are these things normal?? When I was older and my dad gave me the sex talk, I got scared that he was going to show me his penis and I felt pretty uncomfortable and nervous. Of course he didn’t, and my day was normal after that. Also when I was younger, I’d get really scared at night. This fear was something I’d completely forgotten about until very recently. When I was young, I was scared of being either upstairs alone, or downstairs alone. And when I say scared, I mean i HATED it. It scared me sh*tless and I don’t know why. I would also get really scared when I was in bed. I know being scared of the dark is really common for kids, but I would get so scared that I was afraid to move or open my eyes. I was paralyzed with fear and would feel like someone was watching me. I even imagined that if I left my hands out from under the covers as I slept, a man would come to steal my hands. Recently this feeling of paralyzing fear has come back, and as I lay in my bed I am scared to move and feel as though someone is watching me, or that someone is standing over me. Everything I hear when I’m this scared seems enhanced. The sound of my dad in the hallway, the sound of the TV in the other room. Even the other night I fell asleep on the couch and my dad came to wake me up. His dark shadow standing over me made me uneasy. I realize I rambling now, but there’s a few more memories that are sticking out to me. In 1st/2nd grade I got a lot of intrusive thoughts about hurting my family members or my dog. I felt deep guilt and shame during this time and remember sitting in class thinking “nobody here knows what I’m thinking and going through, nobody can help me”. I remember camping with my dad and being scared of him when I was younger, thinking he was going to attack me with a hatchet. I don’t know why I feared this, it’s totally irrational. Lastly, I remember not liking it when my mom wore glasses when I was young. I thought they made her look angry and she didn’t seem like my mom, it made me feel uneasy. Or when my mom would come back from a Halloween party dressed in a costume, I didn’t like it when she’d give me a kiss because again; she didn’t seem like my mom and it made me nervous. Sorry for this rambling post, I’m just confused as to why I’m suddenly remembering all these things and they’ve been causing me quite a bit of stress as a lot of them seem strange to me now. Is it normal for teens to randomly remember things from their childhood? I feel like there’s something important I’m forgetting but I’m not sure what it is or if I’m just overthinking.

I know I have not been very active on this site lately. There was some discussion of this in the Announcements thread introducing me as a new moderator, but I thought I would add more detail here. The blog feels like a more appropriate place for this, and that way I don't feel like I'm cluttering up an announcement thread with a whole wall of text. I have made massive progress in the past year or two in learning to stop beating myself up. I'm starting (just barely) to accept who and what I am, flaws and all. As a perfectionist, I find this to be a difficult thing to do, but I prefer it over the alternative, which is rejecting myself until I meet some artificial standard that I set up for myself in the hope of gaining approval from others. I'm also experimenting with not giving a lot of weight to what others think of me. That does not imply that I reject social norms (I'm actually rather conventional from most points of view), but rather I am allowing myself to be me, rather than trying to make sure everyone likes me. If someone dislikes me, at least the are disliking the genuine me, rather than being kind of meh with some fake version of myself. This is so freeing, but nonetheless I still drop back into my comfort zone of being invisibly neutral whenever I forget to consciously work on it. I wish I could share this with others, but I had to do a lot of hard work to get here. It took many months of practice and hours of sitting with discomfort, trying out new behaviors (along with new medications, yuck!), and disputing irrational thoughts. I am still not a master of this skill, but I am gradually learning to make friends with my own suffering, and not add to it by layering on additional meanings which are only projections of my reactions to past events I can't let go of. I definitely have improved, but there is still more work to do. I'm not a good enough writer to be able to package this up in a way that communicates to others how to do what I did. That's why I don't really post that much, which on reflection probably shows I've still got some perfectionism left to deal with. However, I don't want to say something that causes more harm than good. Given my personality quirks it is easy to take something I say the wrong way, and hear something unkind when I did not mean it that way. In 3d land, (aka IRL or "outside") I am also very quiet for the same reason. OTOH I don't see how my silence helps others, so I could experiment with being more active. Just writing this out literally made me sweat, so this causes some degree of nervousness on my part. I could view this as a good thing, another opportunity to get out of my comfort zone. If you have managed to read all this, thank you. I would love your input as to this dilemma. What would you rather see from me - more postings that potentially could be taken the wrong way, but potentially could offer support or understanding, vs being quiet and only stepping in to "referee"?

Hello! I really don't know how to begin: I am suffering! Right now, and in every minute. I am afraid, that I might be wrong. When I have a problem, or when I think about something, I am afraid, that my thoughts/etc. could be wrong. When I find a solution, I am extremely satisfied. But then I think "But it could be wrong as well, because of this and this" and it starts from the beginning. The problems I have are thinking problems. When I hear about Communism for example, I think why could this be wrong. And then, after I've found a solution, then another thought pops up in my head saying "But what's when..." and it lasts for about 5 hours (the longest period was two days!). I do not even know why I am thinking about Communism (just one of a few examples) and why I continue to think. Maybe because of perfectionism. Maybe I want to be "perfect" and to "know everything and to be right in every matter". Yes, I use logic thoughts. I mean: When I think about Communism e.g., I try to think extremely logically. I try to avoid fallacies. Indeed, when I talk about it with my friends, my friends do not know how to argue with me, because they don't know any opposite argument. They say, that I had to be a politician or something like this. But this is the deep reality of such a person: Your thoughts are not leaving your head. You wake up, and you start to thing about such situations. You sleep, so you dream about it. Everyday I have an enormous headache because of this. And my problem is: I don't know how to stop it. I don't know how to think normally, literally. When I talk about it to my parents (about my thoughts), they're just like: "Why you are thinking about those pointless situations" (My thoughts are going deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and at one point, they're deep enough to not be understood by 99% of the people). One example is: "What if you imagine that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is originally meant as a metaphor and it only means that you have to make taxes higher up to 50 per cent?". I know, it's a kinda strange example, but these thoughts are like this. And when I found a very strong contra-argument, I start to worry extremely, I become angry, afraid of the whole situation, it's just like a whole world is going down. Not a good feeling. And it only ends when I have found a solution. Because I think, I can never be happy. I can never enjoy a movie because I've not thought a thing to the end. This thing ruins my life. I cannot enjoy anything just because I cannot rest from my thoughts, they're hunting me and when they find me, I have to thing about this topic. And even when I've found a solution, I think about it over and over again, just "to feel that I'm right". Really, I want to be normal again. It is one of the worst "diseases" you can have, I wish it to no one! I've also made a personality test (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) online. The result: INTJ. T (for thinking): 100% It sounds cool but it really isn't. I tried to distract myself, but with no results: Every time I want to begin making something productive, I start thinking. And then, I just lay on my bed (or go up and down) and think for the next 3-5 hours. And I cannot stop because "I'm too deep in this crap". My problem is that I cannot accept the fact that I actually don't know a solution/something for a topic. And it makes me feel helpless, like the world end is just coming up. Like if a world is just broken down like glass. It's difficult to describe, I tried once to stop thinking about this. There was a moment where I said to myself: "Just stop thinking, f**k it". Eight hours later, I couldn't fall asleep because I had this thoughts in my head. Through the whole eight hours, the thoughts didn't go. The thoughts were more quiet, but this didn't help. The thoughts are only gone when I've solved the problem. Another time, I'd found another problem right before going to bed. I could only sleep for 5 hours and this was the worst sleep you can imagine. In the next morning, I found the solution at last. I also have problems with studying and writing exams, just due to my thinking-problem. I lack in concentration so bad that I literally write crap on my paper (every time I get the test I just ask myself: "WTF I've written!?"). I also have the feeling that I need to write when this thing has started: It was 1,5 years before, I guess. Before, I was fine. I had my dog-phobia (I have it as far as I remember), but I wasn't interested in thinking/problems/... I was just a normal guy who wanted to have fun. Then, I felt in love with a girl. The problems: She was two years younger than me (it is not so bad, I know, but come on: a 15 year old guy and a 13 year old girlfriend?) and she was the sister of a good friend of mine (so I didn't even tell anyone that I'd been in love with her, because I didn't want to ruin my friendship with him). So, I gave her up. De jure. De facto: not. I was so extremely in love, every time, I saw her, I felt to the ground, because my knees were just like pudding. I started to search on the internet if someone asked a question with the words "love" and "boy". The 16 hours I was awake, I probably spent 3 of them just searching after "her question". I wasn't in love anymore, I was limerent. Then, on February 24th 2014, I saw her with her boyfriend cuddling. Since then, I was destroyed. This crap f**ked myself. I was depressed, really depressed. I really had to take medicine (my parents do not know about this story, I started to take it as I developed sleep problems). After that, I've felt normal. But during this dark period, I've developed unusual thinking-habits. I started to interest myself in politics/economics/philosophy/..., the themes, I use to think about it a lot. Then, some months ago, I had a kinda traumatic experience: I wanted to inform myself about anarchism, and then, I've found arguments for anarchy which I couldn't answer. It hit me so hard that I didn't know what to do (like a shock). I could find a solution to it, but it was so shocking for me that I've developed the main problems since then. 1,5 years ago, I wouldn't react in this way. I think, that the first dilemma was for being emotionally unstabile and the second one to be mentally unstabile. Now I am here, I probably know more about those themes I've mentioned as my classmates, and I hate it. I want to go to the forest and to look at trees without questioning the evolution. You understand? Everything is a trigger for me. I want "to live", not "to think". Because when you live, you are present. And when you think, you are in your mind. Two worlds. Brah. But, for example, when I go through the forest and I see some trees, and when I actually start to question evolution (just an example), the first thoughts hit me like Mike Tyson Alan in "The Hangover". They're literally knockouting me. Like: "Oh no you have to think no time for life". And then they're saying: "We only let you out when you've found a solution". Of course, I do not hear voices in my mind, I mean it kinda metaphoric. And the craziest thing is: I let them in and I listen to them. I don't know, why it hits me so hard. I really think because of the two dilemmas. I hope, you can understand me better now. It's like worrying too much about a topic, but you cannot see that it's (the worries) pointless because you want to find this solution for a topic. And when you do not find a solution for it, you feel like sh**. Like your inner balance is gone. Example: I see a tree and ask myself: "What if evolution is wrong?". Then I develop theories about creationism. Then I ask myself: "But what about theological evolution?". Then I think further. And then, at a certain point, I get a thought that seems kinda insolvable. "What when Darwin has actually written some information about theological evolution? What when he's hidden a necessary god in his theory?". And then, I do some research, but usually, I never find anything. Then, I think about it, how it exactly was. It's like solving a sudoku with 17 filled boxes (as far as I know it's the necessary number to solve a sudoku-puzzle). You have very little information and you try to figure the history out just with this information. And that's the point where it starts (sometimes my first thought is this insolvable question/theory): You're not in peace till you've solved. You know that feeling, when you play a video game and you cannot win. Imagine, what if you stop playing this video game without wining this level? Shitty feeling, right? And imagine it 100 times stronger. You're not even close to this I must feel. I really hope you understood me now. (And yes, I do think about evolution (because I'm interested in theology and it's a contrast to it), as I've stated, I think about philosophy, theology, politics and economics). Maybe it's not anxiety, but it feels like this. ​I hope you can understand me and that you can help me! (I am not a native speaker - Sorry for my English)

So... I just need to get this verified. (Is this the right board to post this on?) I think it's just my anxiety, but I can't say for sure. Please help thank you. (Note: The only mental disorders I have is OCD, anxiety, and depression. All professionally diagnosed, so not self-diagnosed.) So, I have a fear of delusions, because I remember one time I didn't get enough sleep and I was playing a Pokemon game, and I swore they were "talking" to me, and I couldn't tell if it was real or not, and then I had a panic attack. Later on I realized it as fake, but at the time it seemed so real. Ever since that day, I have had a fear of delusions. A couple of days ago, I woke up around 2:40am, (I think I was still dreaming while I was awake) and the walls were pink with hearts and flowers around them, but soon it vanished and my room was normal again. (My room is blue, with a gold ceiling on top, and green dots between the blue and gold.) During that time, I was thinking weirdly. I thought my mom died, but I knew she wasn't dead, but it felt like she really was dead!!! Afterwards, I thought God was talking to me, but I knew He wasn't talking to me, but it felt real... I think I had a anxiety attack afterwards but I don't really know if it counts as a anxiety attack. After I went back to bed, I woke up feeling fine and I knew they weren't true at all. So it's weird, because at the time I can't tell if it's real, but afterwards I know it's fake. But they seem real to me, it's freaky. Sometimes my anxiety (and OCD, I have OCD I don't know if that's playing a part in this but hey it's possible) makes me believe in things that aren't true. Like, for an example, if someone got hurt, I would feel sad, but my OCD keeps giving me that reoccurring thought that I actually DON'T care about this person and I should be ashamed and hurt myself. I really hope this is just my anxiety/OCD, because if it's actually delusional thinking I'm going to cry. I can't have this it's too scary I can't deal with it. Sorry if my post offends anyone. After rereading this, I'm pretty sure it's just my anxiety. Just need to know for sure though.

Hi, I am a 17 year old boy. For about a year now, I have had intrusive thoughts which I find very difficult to control. I obsess about whether i'm a pedophile, whether I am sexually attracted to children. I have a girlfriend, we have been going out for almost 8 months. I am very sexually attracted to her and we have a great sex life. Recently though these thoughts have become worse, and when I see young girls I usually question myself about whether I'm attracted to them or not. Then on the few occasions that I can control the thoughts and convince myself I just have a disorder, I then start to obsess about whether all pedophiles start off feeling like how I feel. I find myself noticing that I've looked at a young girl and questioning whether I choose to do it or not. I have also noticed that these thoughts are more frequent when I have allot of time to myself, or at night when i'm trying to get to sleep. All this makes me extremely distressed, I can't tell my girlfriend because I'm worried what she'll think. She could leave me in disgust. I am generally a anxious person, and my friends and family say I over think things allot. I have stopped smoking weed because I found my thoughts are even more uncontrollable. When I'm stoned my obsessions are only deeper and more consuming. I occasionally have intrusive thoughts about jumping off a cliff, or cutting myself or sexual thoughts about family but I can usually brush past these, dismissing these as stupid. These things to me don't seem quite as horrible as being attracted to young children. I understand that in order for these thoughts to go away I have to react to them calmly and accept them, but I find this very hard. I find it hard to accept these thoughts because I worry about the effects this might have. If I'm having these thoughts and accepting them, then what is the difference between me and a pedophile. What I need to know is are there any good techniques for controlling my mind better, making myself act calmly? do I need therapy to sort this out If so, considering I live in the UK is this therapy free and will my parents have to know about it? I'd really appreciate any help/advice anyone can give me. This is really ruining my life at the moment. I find it hard to sleep sometimes if I can't shut these thoughts out.