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I'd like a therapist who can help me, and be aware of my pedophilia, one I can be honest with without evoking hurtful reactions. But I feel like I'm trying to swim out of a whirlpool. The first time I saw a therapist his mission was to conduct conversion therapy to stop me from being a pedophile.
Everyone's fourteen at some point. If you're my age, you were fourteen in the early 2000s. If you were a smart, introverted nerd from an upper-middle-class American family, your home had likely acquired a computer sometime in the prior ten years. My family had gotten a computer when I was young, I still remember the quaint dramatization of accessing a computer's file system known as Packard Bell Navigator.
By the late nineties, my obsessions with our computer had evolved to the point that my parents handed me down the family box when they got new equipment. This unlocked access to exciting new things: Red Alert and Internet Explorer. Like so many millennials I have perfectly clear memories of the sound of a dial-up modem. I remember apologizing after accidentally kicking family members off the phone. I accidentally broke things on my Windows 98 installation countless times, and always managed to find and apply a fix: sometimes the fix was re-installing Windows, but more often it involved learning a tool like RegEdit.
My father was a manager for a chemicals company. My mother, after my birth, left her job to become a stay-at-home mom. My father used a computer at work, of course, but he never maintained or debugged it himself - his employer had an IT department. When I was twelve or thirteen my parents, being prudent and caring sorts, decided they needed to install some monitoring and censorship software onto my computer. That evening I had deleted the software's executable. If I were given access to a computer, they generally lacked the technical know-how to impose limitations on my use of it. When I was fourteen, my mother walked into my room.
"You have to take the password off of your computer. If you don't, your dad and I are going to throw it away," my mother said.
"OK. Throw it away, then," I replied.
My mother walked out of my room for a moment. A minute or two later she walked back in.
"Are you gay?"
Lawrence v Texas had not yet gone to the Supreme Court. We lived in Texas, actually, and I was intimately aware that ever having sex with someone I was attracted to would be a crime - at the time, I was already very aware that the attraction to minors was infinitely more stigmatized than the attraction to members of the same sex, but neither was technically legal. I was also still just fourteen. I attribute to my youth, my lack of experience, and my lack of perspective what I consider to be one of the greatest mistakes I've ever made in my life. I told my mother that not only was I gay, I was a pedophile.
Enter Conversion Therapy
My parents decided the right course was to make me see a therapist to try and give me conversion therapy. They disagreed with the homosexuality - we were a religious family - but they were deeply alarmed by my awareness that I was attracted to younger boys. Specifically, at fourteen, I felt like I was attracted to ten to thirteen year old boys. I was also, at fourteen, rather confident that wouldn't change. I don't know why I was so sure; perhaps I thought back to when I was nine or ten, to whenever I first identified being attracted to boys, and had witnessed no change from that time period forward. In any case, I was quite sure. And so my parents sent me to talk to my first-ever therapist.
It was not a productive conversation. I basically told him that I had no desire to change. My attractions, my sense of aesthetics, what I cared about, what I wanted were all core components of who I am. I wanted (and still want) to remain me. I've never cared how hard that makes my life - or rather I do care, but I have never cared about it as much as being myself. I wouldn't change because they wanted me to. They would not be able to make me.
I think they only forced me to see that therapist either once or twice. My parents had a conversation with me on the floor of my bedroom. My mother cried. I explained to them that I obviously wasn't going to ever have sex with a little boy, but neither was I going to change. I think my mom was more heartbroken about the prospect of her baby boy never finding or having love than anything else.
At some point, they sent me to a new therapist. I worked with her on more general issues - depression, mostly, as I recall. Being a high-school-age nerd is oddly conducive to experiencing depression. In terms of having someone to vent to, I recall the experience being useful. I don't know how often, or to what extent, we ever discussed my attractions.
After High School
When I left for college I moved several hours away and so stopped seeing that therapist. Some years in, feeling extremely depressed, I enrolled with the college's health center in their student residency program to receive therapy from a student working on her degree. Our conversations helped some with the depression. I never discussed my attractions with her; I don't know if she ever would have had access to my former therapists' notes but I don't know of any reason she would have.
After school I went quite a few years without therapy. I got my degrees, got a job. During school I had started dating another guy who was my age (to within a month). We'd met on a forum for "young gay guys." We were among the older users at the beginnings of our twenties. I would say the board's audience generally ranged from about sixteen up to about twenty-two. I'll call the guy I met K.
I had, by then, become quite a twink. Now, in my late thirties, I look at photos of myself then much more wishfully than I could at the time - I'd still rather be 11, but even if I wouldn't be happy at 21, I could be some kind of hot.
K wasn't exactly my type. No one on the board really was my type, even though by then I had developed a mild attraction to boys from fourteen up to twenty or so.
However, I was absolutely K's type. He was attracted to me and pursued me. I've never been any good at rejecting people, and his pursuit eventually caught me. We would date for the next seven years.
Three or four years in, I tried finding a new therapist. This became a repeating pattern. Over the course of years I would try a new therapist, they would be a terrible match, I'd get discouraged and withdraw from trying, I'd get overwhelmed and try again.
By the sixth year of our relationship I finally found a new therapist who was a good match for me. She helped with the depression in general, but eventually she provided the ultimate cure: she brought me to realize the cause for this current, years-long instance of depression was that K was emotionally abusive. In our seventh year, thanks to her help, I broke up with him. Shortly after, she stopped taking my insurance and I stopped seeing her. I'd never discussed my attractions with her either.
Well, I'm Better Now. What Next?
I wasn't entirely sure if I were depressed or not after that, but prior experiences with therapy had led me to believe that a sort of coach, a professionally trained psychologist, would both help me be mentally well in general and could potentially scratch a lot of curious itches I had about our knowledge of the human mind. I decided to look specifically for someone familiar with queer communities. I was now in a polyamorous, kinky relationship, and I looked for someone I could be open about that to. I think I found her through the site Kink-Aware Professionals.
I had, from the start, aspired to come out to her about my pedohebephilia. I wanted to make sure I could trust her first. It took me a long time to feel ready to risk it; I think after seeing her for about two years, I came out as a MAP.
When I came out she reiterated - as I expected - that if she believed a minor was at risk, or there was a risk of minor abuse-related crimes, she would have to report them. She asked if there was anyone in my life I thought I might be at risk of offending against. I confirmed that there wasn't. I think we went through, a bit, confirming that really there were no children in my life. Some cousins that I might see for a couple hours, once a year, over Thanksgiving with all our family present. Other than that, the only time I'd ever even see children in person was when I was shopping at the mall.
That opened the conversation up. We talked about my history of minor attraction. When and how I knew, how I felt about it. We talked about how, even more than wanting to be with young boys, I wished I could have the body of one.
We discussed my disinterest in the mentality of a young boy, of how I would be just as or more attracted to someone with the mind of an adult and the body of a child than I would be to an actual child. We talked about my internal fantasy life - of how I liked escaping into the Star Wars lore, imagining myself with Force powers, utilizing the dark side technique that let you swap your mind into the body of a clone. Cloning myself to an age of eleven, swapping into that, repeating that procedure every year. Things like that.
And then we kind of stopped. Pedohebephilia wasn't the main source of distress in my life. My job was. My relationships were, too, to a lesser extent.
I would occasionally in our sessions steer the conversation back towards my attractions and desires, either when they had been on my mind or the yearning for them was especially acute. L seemed to disapprove of continuing to bring them up; she would engage with my thoughts, but generally with a slightly edgy air. It came across as hostile;
I don't know if it was discomfort due to nerves, due to a fear of needing to report me, due to a general dislike for MAPs, due to her being queer, like me, and MAPs being an extremely uncomfortable topic for queer people, or what. Eventually, her reaction to me bringing it up changed from feeling somewhat prickly and combative to being dismissive, redirecting the conversation elsewhere.
It was never anything overt, any explicit objections or anything. It was tone, facial expression, just little things.
I Guess I'll Just Pull My Arms and Legs Back Into My Shell Now
A sex-positive, queer, kink-aware therapist still isn't a MAP-sympathetic therapist. In trying to find someone specialized in studies of human sexuality, I found someone well-versed at supporting other sexual minorities. Someone great at supporting aspects of my sexual and romantic identity like being gay and being polyamorous.
She never stigmatized those things, never demonstrated conscious or unconscious derision or fear about those components of my character. She empathized with the struggle of being gay (which has nominally been accepted in our society) and being polyamorous (which hasn't).
She acknowledged that being a pedophile isn't something that changes. It is not, from the perspective of psychology, a sexuality; but psychology does acknowledge that, like legitimized sexualities, it is a lifelong sexual and often romantic preference for a particular subset of people. That's a lot more than the first therapist I ever saw acknowledged.
But even a sexuality-focused therapist practicing after another twenty years of society celebrating the liberation of sexual minorities is still so uncomfortable with the topic of pedophilia as to commit microaggressions toward us.
Earlier this year, I ran out of money to pay my health insurance, and to pay her. I let her know and stopped seeing her.
Now, several months after that experience with poverty, I have a job again, and money. But I think I may look for a new therapist.
My name is Ozymandias
I still believe in the potential benefits of therapy. I believe in the study of the mind as a science, and the treatment of ailments as medicine. None of my experience changes that.
I don't yet know where I go from here. I know, better now than ever before, what my mental health struggles are: depression, ADHD, anxiety. I'd like to get treatment for them. Preferably, from a therapist who is a good match for me, and one who is... pedophile-aware, for lack of a better term. One I can be honest with without evoking hurtful reactions.
But looking for such a therapist is difficult. It is a lot of work. And I feel too broken, at the moment, to attempt it. Still, living with these problems is also the reason I feel broken. My struggles don't come from nowhere. I feel like I'm trying to swim out of a whirlpool. It seems as though a lifeline to help keep me out of the whirlpool is just beyond the edge of the top of the funnel, if only I can reach it.
I'm not suicidal; I imagine I will continue struggling for some period of time, and then either be in such dire need as to prompt me to put all my effort into seeking therapy, or else have recovered enough on my own to have the mental bandwidth to spare to seek therapy. Which will come first, and how soon, I don't yet know. | |
