Compulsive masturbation to something I know happened

Umm, I’ve got to disagree with you friend. If your mom is allowing guys your age to flirt with her in front you while you’re still a kid, that’s totally not good. I had a mom like that and it messed me up pretty good. Healthy parents don’t put their sexuality on display in front of their children. Just my two cents but you might want to really spend some time thinking about this.

 

So, this Josh guy sounds like someone you know and not a random stranger from your college. If that’s the case, pardon my French but that is f*cked up on your mom’s part. You’re not being “a dick” at all. On the contrary, your mom is the one being the dick.

 

It still seems pretty weird to me that your mom has on multiple occasions flirted with guys that are around your age or even younger than you and that you know these guys. I can only tell you that if my mom did that, I’d be really upset by that. Also, I can’t think of a single mother of any friend I had growing up who flirted with kids. I’m pretty sure that any friend I asked about they’d feel if they saw their mom flirting with guys the same age as them would say it would upset them. A lot.

 

Points taken about boundary violations and whether this constitutes a history of violations. I am likewise no therapist and agree it would be better for the poster to speak to one regarding this issue.

However I must take issue with your insistence that the poster is a developing child and in need of protection from his parent. By his own estimation, he's 4 year older than the 19 year old in question. He's 23 and not a child anymore.

I agree with both of you guys, it is a rather shocking thing to learn about one's parent. I'm not supporting her decision, but I also don't see how involving himself in their business will bring him any closer to healing his compulsive behavior. If anything, it'll create more trouble and make things worse. See a therapist or a counselor, sort this out there.

 

I totally agree, he’s definitely an adult now and not a child anymore. However, my point, which I may not have made clearly enough, was that if his mother is exhibiting these kinds of behaviors since he turned 18 (openly flirting with other guys his age in front of him), there’s a pretty good chance that she didn’t just start doing things like that when he turned 18. There’s a pretty good chance that weird sexual behaviors on her part and/or other boundary violations have been going on since well before that. If so, that’s not normal behavior and it would have been occurring since the OP was a child. In which case, it was her job to protect him from inappropriate sexuality in her part and she failed to do so. Again, I’m speculating since I don’t know the full history and obviously I’m not a therapist either but I do know that very often when some sketchy behavior like this is happening, it didn’t usually just all of the sudden start after 18 years of totally normal behavior. If the OP says that there was no problematic sexual behavior in his family while at the same time also saying his mom has been flirting with dudes his age that he knows, that’s a big red flag. His response to her behavior is also a big, red flag.

At any rate, as I said to the OP, I don’t know a single friend who had a mom behave in that way and I know for a fact that any one of my friends would have been seriously creeped out and bothered by such a thing. It’s just not normal behavior to flirt openly with dudes half your age in front of your son. Like, if she wants to date a younger guy, that’s fine, who cares. But if she’s flaunting her sexuality casually in front of her kid, even if he’s legally an adult, that’s messed up.

Also, you may be right that it would do no good to get involved in their business. He has already told his mother that her behavior bothers him and she has dismissed him. That also is a pretty incredible way to disrespect your child, no matter what age, but it also indicates that he probably can’t resolve the situation directly. So he should definitely visit a therapist. But one aspect of healing core issues like this is learning to protect yourself from toxic situations and the first step in that is realizing that when someone is behaving in ways that are damaging to you, (which to me, jacking off to your mom in any context is a pretty fucking self-harming behavior) you have a right and a duty to yourself to learn how to set boundaries. Even if you eventually have to cut certain people out of your life.

 

Well, I would say that, on the one hand, your mother does have the right to date whomever she wishes to date. In that sense, you do not have the right to tell your mother what she can or cannot do. However, that is very different from a situation where your mother openly flirts with young men, especially ones whom you know, in front of you and also sleeps with them.

Here are two different scenarios to demonstrate the point I am trying to make:

First scenario: your mother meets a man much younger than herself and over time gets to know him in a respectful way which eventually leads to the development of a committed relationship. There is absolutely nothing wrong with such a situation, if it is grounded in love and mutual respect. Healthy relationships between people with big age differences do exist, though they are quite rare. For instance, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, is married to a woman 25 years older than him. They met when he was her student. He was 15 and she was 40. They fell in love right away but knew they needed to wait until he was at least 18 to begin a sexual relationship. When he turned 18, they began the sexual part of their relationship. They married eventually and thirty years later, they are still together. This is an example of a healthy, mature, loving adult relationship between two people who have a vast age difference. It may be very unusual and some people may not approve but from my point of view, as long the relationship is grounded in love and mutual respect, there is no problem.

Second scenario: one person who is much older and also has parental responsibilities casually flirts with any much younger man who shows attention to her and also engages in sexual relationships as a result of these flirtations. The relationships are likely not grounded in love or mutual respect but rather in the fulfillment of superficial desires. This kind of behavior is rarely isolated to only certain situations and very often reflects a kind of selfishness on the part of the person engaged in the behavior. The selfishness may result in exposing vulnerable persons, such as yourself—her child—and these other young men, to situations where you and they become the unwitting objects of gratification for your mother’s selfish desires. This is damaging to a person who is still developing their sense of personal identity, as it communicates to them that they are not seen as whole human beings but as objects to be either seduced and manipulated, as in the case of your acquaintances who are engaged in flirtations with your mother; or as an object to be the ignored and dismissed, as in the case of you, the son, who is upset by your mother’s self-centered behavior.

So, to sum up: a relationship that develops over time and is rooted in love and respect is fine and would probably not bother you, at least not to the degree that it does. Relationships that are based on the satisfying of surface desires, such as lust, are problematic, especially when they involve a parent who is exposing her children to these kinds of situations.

Sorry to go on for so long but this is a very complicated subject and your situation is very complicated and requires a lot of investigation. My advice, in addition to the advice of at least one other person here, is that you really need to get to a therapist and throughly explore this. It’s way too complicated to sort out in a chat forum.

 

It seems to me that the first part of the work of choosing different feelings comes by first honoring what we are feeling and not trying to move too quickly to replace those feelings. OP is perhaps for the first time starting to grapple with the confusion he feels over this situation, which is not his fault and which he did nothing to deserve. Want OP has gone through is traumatic and would be traumatic for most people. So there needs to be an honest process of acknowledging the feelings of being disrespected so that those feelings can then be let go and space can be made for more positive feelings and reactions to take place.

 

No, that is just wrong. You do not choose your feelings.

You choose your actions. That is, the things you say and do.

 

I agree with this. We cannot choose our feelings. We can however choose to bear witness to the thoughts and feelings that do arise, which creates a space in which we then have the potential to choose better responses. There are different ways to practice this, such as meditation and yoga.

The more we’re able to allow space for our thoughts and feelings, the more we’re able to let them pass through us instead of having them fester and infect us. The less we identify with and get caught in any particular thought or feeling, the less power it has over us. This makes it likelier that we’ll spend more time experiencing positive states of mind and less time being afflicted by negative ones. But that’s probably the closest we can come to “choosing” thoughts and feelings. And the stronger the thought and the feeling, the harder it is to just experience it without getting totally sucked into it. That’s where we have to have self-compassion.

So if you’re having a lot of strong feelings about what your mom is doing, of course you are. Anyone would. Your feelings about this are normal. Your responses to those feelings may not be good for you but start by giving yourself a break and realize that you’re dealing with a very difficult situation.

 

I don’t view you as nothing and I’m sure the others who have taken the time to respond to you don’t view you that way either. You’re a human being. You have worth. You’re brave for showing up here and sharing this painful stuff with strangers.

It’s hard to practice compassion for yourself if you haven’t been treated well by others, especially your family, but it’s possible to learn. There’s some great resources out there. I’d start by reading some of Kristen Neff’s work on self-compassion. She’s a pioneer in the field: https://self-compassion.org/the-three-elements-of-self-compassion-2/

Likewise, it takes time and patience to develop the inner strength to be less affected by what other people do. For most of us, it’s a life long project. Also, realize that being affected by the shitty things your mom is doing is actually a healthy reaction. It would be much more disturbing if these things didn’t bother you at all.

If you can, give yourself a break for being in a really difficult situation and see if any of the reading material on how to treat yourself with greater gentleness helps at all.

 

Happy to help. Most of us here have been at all-time lows with our self-confidence. I certainly have and I’m currently trying to recover from a kind of rock bottom place myself. Knowing that may not take away the pain you’re in right now but at least it might give you some hope to think that you’re not alone in this and that there are some things you can do for yourself to improve your situation. Being here talking about what you’re going through and getting support is one of those things. Keep letting us know how you’re doing.