Is it possible to get rid of a fetish induced from childhood trauma?

[iwantout1164]

*I'm not sure if trauma is the correct word but I couldn't think of a better word to describe what I went through*

It has been 120+ days since I stepped away from P. I MO Without P sometimes, maybe once or twice a week strictly to my imagination to my ex-gf.

I started this journey around mid-March, doing NoFap cold turkey after using porn throughout my adolescence, escalating to different genres until I got into s***y P. I used it for about 4 months (only text stories) before I started the challenge and decided to quit because of the many warnings about such P on this website.

After 90 days of cold turkey, I was happy to say that I was improving, I had less frequent gay thoughts and I could manage them by recognizing that they were all nothing but intrusive thoughts and that they had zero power over me. This gave me a huge amount of hope because I knew it could only get better from here. But I was wrong. I'm on nearly 130 days and the thoughts are still coming back.

I thought that i only got into s***y P due to my porn escalation, starting off with vanilla, then into exhibitionism, humiliation, cross dressing (cross dressing was something I was into before P) etc. But even after I quit porn the thoughts still lingered. I started taking long walks in nature to figure out why I had acquired such fetish, if it weren't for P escalation.

I looked deep into my childhood memories and realized that throughout my childhood including kindergarten and primary school, I was forced to wear feminine clothes like skirts and dresses by the teachers and my mother (single parent). I distinctly remember I hated it as they forced me to wear it and I remember having grown-ups having a laugh at my expense, basically humiliating me. It didn't help that I had a dominant mother, a strict one who would chastise me for hours (I had to look at my feet for hours until my neck got sore because looking up would just make things more scarier) for not living up to her standards like school grades and chores. I don't know any other words to describe what I experienced but as trauma.

I internalized the pain I felt throughout my childhood and once I hit puberty I found P and after 7+ years (only last year) I finally found the ultimate P which exactly mirrored myself: forced feminisation and humiliation from my traumas, femdom and submissiveness from my mother. There is only one P in this world which embodies all traits mentioned previously: s***y P. This would also explain why I had such a rush when I first encountered s***y P. It wasn't the escalation nor was it the novelty, but because it was the P that my inner self who internalized it was looking for: it hit every part of me.

I honestly believe this is the correct explanation for why s***y thoughts lived in my head. Would also explain my AGP and it coincides with many of you guys experiences, who believe that their fetish was gained through a childhood event. I'm basically convinced this is the truth. I believe that P escalation and novelty would have accentuated my P usage, but the fundamental, root reason for why s***y P resonated with me and why I found it 'comfortable' would be the interalisation of my traumas. If it was entirely P escalated, I feel that my brain wouldn't be suffering from having these thoughts literally every 10 minutes after 120 days of P free, and not to mention it is exclusively s***y thoughts. *Since my 90 days my brain no longer thinks about P entirely (huge win), it only thinks about fantasies of being s***y, not s***y P.

But this scares me even more. This means that no matter how long I stay away from P, no matter how long I do cold turkey and even quit MO, I'm scared that this fetish will be a lifelong fetish that I can never get rid of. I am heterosexual, I've never had sexual attraction to males and only had it towards women, but what I am experiencing now is what I can only call HOCD and is causing me stress and it is severely affecting my performance like working out, even when I'm just eating or watching something it just comes up, my brain keeps telling me to just go search for s***y P.

TL;DR: Is it possible to get rid of a fetish which resulted from childhood trauma rather than P escalation? Is there any hope for me, or should I accept that I have this fetish, recognize it but still stay away from P?

 

[Perfectionst]

You have done a great job examining yourself and finding the root of your fetish, congratulations. It's not fair what happened to you.
I've never been in that kind of p so I don't know if the following will help you, but just in case here goes:

Our brains love drama. Maybe what keeps you hooked on that fetish is that you feel guilty for having it, and your mind finds that narrative somehow amusing. Feelings like shame are fuel for addictions. At least on my case, as I stopped being addicted to p when I started looking at it and myself with compassion.

Stay away from p, by all means. But if you ever fall back don't be hard on yourself. That would only give reality to the fetish by making it more thrilling, more powerful than it really is.
I expand on this in the third exercise of the thread linked in my signature.

Hope you find some value on this, good luck!

 

[UnholyConfessor]

Gonna tag @Roady here because he's something approaching an expert on this topic. Personally I believe it absolutely is possible. Self awareness is the very difficult first step and you already seem to be there. I had similar realisations (not regarding sissy porn but along those lines) about past traumas influencing me in the present. It's painful but healthy to work through these things.

 

[UnholyConfessor]

Also, I'm not going to say go to a therapist if only because it's like playing Russian Roulette and you don't want one who validates these feelings as opposed to helping you overcome them. You know yourself better than anyone else does, you just need to clear the fog in your brain first. Oh and before I forget and have to comment a third time, rebounding urges and thoughts after months clean is a natural part of the healing process. It's a healthy sign that your brain is letting go of the compulsion.

 

[Roady]

Hi there,

First I want to welcome you here, a place where a lot of people try to get rid of their addiction and the underlying issues.
Thank you for your honest post where you share a bit of your story.

@UnholyConfessor Thanks for the mention, I'm willing to give some hints if I can.

I looked deep into my childhood memories and realized that throughout my childhood including kindergarten and primary school, I was forced to wear feminine clothes like skirts and dresses by the teachers and my mother (single parent). I distinctly remember I hated it as they forced me to wear it and I remember having grown-ups having a laugh at my expense, basically humiliating me. It didn't help that I had a dominant mother, a strict one who would chastise me for hours (I had to look at my feet for hours until my neck got sore because looking up would just make things more scarier) for not living up to her standards like school grades and chores. I don't know any other words to describe what I experienced but as trauma.

I internalized the pain I felt throughout my childhood and once I hit puberty I found P and after 7+ years (only last year) I finally found the ultimate P which exactly mirrored myself: forced feminisation and humiliation from my traumas, femdom and submissiveness from my mother. There is only one P in this world which embodies all traits mentioned previously: s***y P. This would also explain why I had such a rush when I first encountered s***y P. It wasn't the escalation nor was it the novelty, but because it was the P that my inner self who internalized it was looking for: it hit every part of me.

I honestly believe this is the correct explanation for why s***y thoughts lived in my head. Would also explain my AGP and it coincides with many of you guys experiences, who believe that their fetish was gained through a childhood event. I'm basically convinced this is the truth. I believe that P escalation and novelty would have accentuated my P usage, but the fundamental, root reason for why s***y P resonated with me and why I found it 'comfortable' would be the interalisation of my traumas. If it was entirely P escalated, I feel that my brain wouldn't be suffering from having these thoughts literally every 10 minutes after 120 days of P free, and not to mention it is exclusively s***y thoughts. *Since my 90 days my brain no longer thinks about P entirely (huge win), it only thinks about fantasies of being s***y, not s***y P.

But this scares me even more. This means that no matter how long I stay away from P, no matter how long I do cold turkey and even quit MO, I'm scared that this fetish will be a lifelong fetish that I can never get rid of. I am heterosexual, I've never had sexual attraction to males and only had it towards women, but what I am experiencing now is what I can only call HOCD and is causing me stress and it is severely affecting my performance like working out, even when I'm just eating or watching something it just comes up, my brain keeps telling me to just go search for s***y P.

TL;DR: Is it possible to get rid of a fetish which resulted from childhood trauma rather than P escalation? Is there any hope for me, or should I accept that I have this fetish, recognize it but still stay away from P?

Your mother has treated you really badly amigo. I feel sorry for the things you had to experience.
You was a young boy and you needed a loving, caring and most of all safe relationship with your mother and your father.

It seems that your father was absent, at least emotionally.
And your mother treated you in a dominant way.

Answer on your honest question: Yes, when a mother forces a boy to wear explicitly feminine clothes, she causes indeed a trauma for the child. It's not only the embarrassment and the shame, she is also expressing something from herself to the child. My guess: a deep hatred towards everything that's manly. Means: she has been traumatized too and has projected that on her child.

In stead of connect her child to her own healthy heart, in such a way that the child can drink in the safety and care from the mother (what the child then can internalize to create its own safe world) the mother pushes away her own child and damage/confuses its identity.

It's quite extraordinary that you have found out these things at such a young age.
You are right in everything you have found out. Our traumas ask for such a genre of p-rn that it can relive the traumatic experience again.
In your search for p-rn what is a search for healing, you found out that s***y p-rn fits your trauma.
I've studied the book "Unwanted" from Jay Stringer, he perfectly explained how this mechnism works. How the genre of p-rn can lead us to our traumas.
But you already have found that out.

Once you discover the truth under your p-rn usage, you have made a huge step.
Every time you feel the urge to run back to s***y p-rn, you now know: it's my trauma that asks for attention.
In that way, you can totally forget the s***y p-rn and focus on the healing of your trauma.

You say that you have all these pictures in your head. These pictures have soiled your imagination heavily.
The pictures are connected to your trauma, and to your inner emptiness because your manhood never was woken up by your father.
As a Christian, it was possible to clean my imagination completely, but I wonder if that was possible without the love from Christ, I believe in.
My faith has played a huge role in the healing of my traumas.

I think you have a lot of inner work to do. And as @UnholyConfessor mentioned, not every therapist can handle this kind of issues.

Alright, I hope this few words helps you a bit further.
Feel free to respond. Also check out my journal as I wrote my whole healing process there.

 

[Deleted Account]

I looked deep into my childhood memories and realized that throughout my childhood including kindergarten and primary school, I was forced to wear feminine clothes like skirts and dresses by the teachers and my mother (single parent). I distinctly remember I hated it as they forced me to wear it and I remember having grown-ups having a laugh at my expense, basically humiliating me.

My friend, it sounds to me like you being abused. I've even watched documentaries about Mothers who wanted a daughter, and began cross-dressing their sons to make up for it. You mentioned a single parent; some mothers will project their own disdain of men (from their failed relationships/bad choices) onto their children, and this could've been what your mother was doing.

Either way, remember that this wasn't your fault; none of this is your fault at all. You were brought up in an abusive home by a mother who didn't know or care how her behaviour would affect you in the long term.

I have a fetish for older women; that is to say women between the ages of 50-70, and they almost always did scenes with men half their age or more. Most of my PMO was directed at this. I have my own messed up reasons for gravitating towards this, mostly the frustration at women I own age, who rejected me in favour of "bad boys" (a.k.a attractive guys with poor behaviour). However, like yourself, I quickly learned that indulging fantasies through porn (stemming from trauma) will eventually take you to very dark/strange places. Your personal fanatsy/fetish could lead to cross-dressing, gender role-reversal (to keep it G-Rated), whereas mine has extremes as well.

I'll give an example: One of my fantasies was a frustrated younger guy, who would cheat on his chaste/overly innocent/cold/rude girlfriend in favour of her more "experienced"/seductive mother. Almost like a Jerry Springer episode. It was clearly based on my frustration with women my own age (addicted to phones, social media, and rude to every guy she doesn't want to sleep with), whereas older women are the only ones who are truly nice to me, and the only women who think I'm handsome (hence the reason why 95% of my current friends are older women; I even reconnected with one today). I thought of asking out an older woman, but I decided to forgo relationships altogether; most older women are already married anyway.

However, don't feel bad about your fetish; if anything, it helped you to realize where you went wrong (or more specifically, where you mother went wrong), and that's the first step to recovery. If it wasn't for my extreme fetishes, I wouldn't be able to realize my own character flaws.

My older woman preference is still part of me, and for all I know, it'll never go away. I came to associate older women with all these virtues and women my age with vices. Meanwhile, the male actors who often played acted in these videos were usually weak, short, lanky, cowardly, socially inept with girls their own age and/or not very attractive. In a way, my fetishes made me realize how I took shelter in older women's company to justify my own weakness, which is part of the reason why I recently joined a boxing gym.

I think there are tiny steps you can take, just like the one I described above, but it has to be tailor-made to your speciifc situation.

"Unwanted" from Jay Stringer,

I will definitely grab a copy of this book when I get the chance.