Talking about self-harm and abuse to others may force a therapist to commit you into emergency self-care. Meaning they’ll reach out to emergency services to have to come get you if they feel you’re a threat to yourself or others.

What if it’s other people who may be a threat to me? Could they send the cops to my house if I talk about the fact that a couple of my family members tortured and killed pets and I repeatedly overheard them talking about their fantasies of mass murder, genocide, and their nonchalant willingness to kill me?

As you can see, I have very good reasons for being in therapy.

what are you smoking?

Emotional abuse, isolation, and mainstream porn lol.

I was gaslighted by my family into believing that I was fundamentally different from everyone else and didn’t fit in, so I socially isolated myself in childhood and basically got my sex ed from slop porn, which further compounded the feelings that something was wrong with me and I didn’t belong.

I’m working to challenge those beliefs by coming up with more positive theories, then asking online to test the waters, and finally asking people in real life to see if the consensus changes. So far, this has helped me to recognize that I have been living in a delusional solipsistic bubble that not even my own abusers recognize anymore.

It’s been helping me a lot. Things keep getting better because I’m questioning all of the assumptions that make me feel defeated and hopeless. I’ve never been so happy to be wrong about everything. Thanks for the feedback.

He’s definitely the golden child. There’s an illusion of fairness, but I am viewed far less favorably than he is despite his numerous crimes and transgressions. They are usually spread far enough apart that things “reset” and I seem to be the only one who understands how messed up he is. Nothing sticks to him. He his held in positive regard no matter what he does, and I am held in negative regard no matter what I do.

I am doing online college because it’s cheaper than in-person. I am worried about accruing too much debt because I am anxious about my ability to pay it off in the future.

U.S. Sorry for the late reply.

My original plan was a CS degree and try for a remote job, but with the direction the tech sector has been going, I’m not sure that I like my odds. I’m looking at possible majors I can pivot towards, but I haven’t decided yet. I’ve just started classes, so I don’t have that much of a sunk cost yet.

The big issue is that I have a condition called POTS that gives me brain fog and can cause fainting if I sit or stand up for more than a couple minutes. That makes it difficult to do most in-person jobs. So I have to find something that works with that and will still exist in the U.S. economy once I graduate.

I haven’t. I’m worried that doing that would be taken as an act of aggression and would lead to retaliation.

Also, my brother hasn’t physically attacked me yet, not since we were teenagers. He’s just being threatening and intimidating right now. But I also know that he suffers from fits of uncontrollable rage and has the capacity to kill. In one episode where he killed his girlfriend’s cat, he said that he lost control of himself and started wailing on the poor animal. I haven’t heard of him doing any premeditated violence; it always seems to happen in the moment. But he doesn’t seem to feel remorse for his victims after the fact. There is also no criminal record of the things he has done.

There is something deeply wrong with him and I think that he is a ticking time bomb.

• Fetishizes female submission and powerlessness
• Shows interest in “petite” women almost 2 feet shorter than him
• Values women for how “pretty” they look
• Says the Epstein situation “doesn’t matter”
• Likes to sneak into other people’s private spaces without consent

I gotta hand it to you God, I think you might be onto something

I’d guess they are very sexually repressed.

My dad DOES have a tendency to make an unusual amount of phallic jokes, to the point where one day I responded with “You know, it’s okay to be bi, you can just say it” and boy he did NOT like that

But i wonder why dad was upset op isint gay.

Every day, my dad liked to call me the f-slur and threaten to kill me or kick me out of the house “if he found out” I was gay. Apparently, I wasn’t in on the joke: in his head, he ALREADY KNEW I was gay, and so his words weren’t meant to prevent me from being gay, but rather to make me terrified of him.

It seems like he was angry because he lost a critical control mechanism over me and desperately sought to bring it back. I will never forget how shocked he looked when he saw me actually happy for the first time in years and I playfully deflected his insults instead of engaging with them. He sort of shut down and became depressed for a couple days before he came up with a new way to control me.

It seems that there is nothing that he and my brother hate more than my genuine happiness. Since they believe that they define who I am, how I feel, and what I am capable of, any feelings I am “not supposed” to feel will be violently crushed by them.

I am not supposed to feel happy.

What has therapy been like for you? I’ve never done therapy before, and I’m kind of worried they’ll try to criticize and gaslight me into playing nice with people who I’m 90% sure are narcissists or try to get me to ignore the limitations that my health problems give me. (But then again, I can’t help but notice that I was socially conditioned to expect shame, punishment, and destructive guidance if I ask for help.)

I just thought I had to be seen as “sufficiently masculine” in order to survive. I thought that it was too dangerous to be authentic because people would constantly fight me on it. I used to see that as a universal thing, but now I’m aware that some people are vastly more tolerant than others, so you can just hang out with the ones who accept you.

Funnily enough, in my case, I couldn’t hide my “deviant” traits because they’re written all over my demeanor. Nobody has ever seen or treated me as a manly man. Not one. My gentleness is obvious no matter how much I try to suppress myself. That means that every friend or acquaintance I have ever had liked (or at the very least tolerated) something about me that I thought would be universally shunned. Theory debunked. I just ignored the evidence.

What’s the alternative? Pretend to be someone you aren’t and end up in a situation you hate where you aren’t happy?

I used to think that I had to, because I was afraid that nobody would accept me for who I was. It seems like the beliefs in my post are a last-ditch effort by my fear to hold me back (“You can’t be yourself because everyone will despise you (which also means that nobody can be attracted to you) and a small subset of people will react violently while bystanders watch.”)

My worldview over the past decade, the one that I’m actively trying to dismantle, has been that, despite having the right to free expression on paper (in the U.S.), we unfortunately live in an intolerant authoritarian culture that stifles that free expression through social shaming. Deviations from traditional masculinity, I believed, would lead to one being universally shunned in everyday settings, and may lead to severe social consequences. As you can imagine, it’s hard to change a belief if you’re too scared to challenge it (going outside, talking to people), which is why it stood for as long as it did. But now I understand that I have to challenge it because the downstream consequences are literally ruining my life.

Basically, I grew up in a right-wing echo chamber, so my brain learned to expect everyone to be intolerant of deviations from stereotypes.

I like sweet and dominant women

Have you found some? I probably shouldn’t put too much stock into anecdotes from Internet strangers (that’s part of what got me into this situation in the first place), but I think it would be encouraging to hear if you did!

It has actually helped me a lot, but only because the people here helped me to build enough confidence to talk to real life people about this and realize that I had fooled myself.

I used to think it was literally too dangerous for me to go outside because I didn’t fit a world of hyperpolarized gender norms, which I convinced myself was how reality was. I used labels like “submissive” or “GNC” to mean “likes confident women” and “isn’t a macho alpha male” respectively, not knowing that these were common characteristics that didn’t need special labels. In that stage, the questions I asked were me trying to poke holes in my theory and see if there were exceptions to the hyperpolarized rule I imagined.

As my language became more accurate and I talked to online friends about my feelings, they kept saying that I was completely normal and not weird at all. That gave me the courage to come out about my feelings IRL to some of my conservative family members, and even they said I was normal. The more I probed real people, the more I realized that I had been catastrophically wrong this whole time, and this fascination with gender norms made no sense.

I asked this question to see if there was any shred of legitimacy left in the way I used to think, and I think it’s safe to say that it has been fully discredited at this point. I only thought that way because some assholes in the past convinced me I was unlovable and I developed an elaborate pseudoscience to explain why. Maybe I should have just listened to the nice people who told me to my face how much they love my soft side.

I feel like I’m ready to go outside and make some friends now. And see a therapist if I still find myself struggling. The Internet has served its purpose for me, and I will not miss this era of my life.

Honestly, judging by the responses here, it really seems like my social anxiety selectively absorbed negative information and created a self-defeating worldview based on inflammatory social media posts. I really need to take a hard look at what I’m consuming and ask myself if it’s really worth it.

It’s embarrassing to be this wrong, but I’m grateful that I have this community to help me understand that this is a self-imposed social dysfunction rather than a legitimate worldview. It’s just fear.

Well, the issue is that I have circulatory problems. Mine used to work better, but after my condition developed, I can only get around 60-80% there. I think part of the reason I want a non-penetrative relationship is because I don’t want to get attached to a function that I might not be able to perform, if not now, then in a few months or years if my circulation worsens further.

You’re probably right about the ignorance thing. I’ve never done this before, so I just assume that a softer erection is unusable or wouldn’t be accepted at my age. I don’t have anyone I can really talk to about this stuff because my family doesn’t want to talk about it and they expect me to figure everything out on my own. So I kinda just read and ask questions on the Internet. It sounds kinda pathetic, but it has helped me a lot.

I’ve actually had a few fantasies about using my fingers. I think for me the main thing is that I enjoy sex that is sensual and massage-like compared to something rough or vigorous (like thrusting tends to be). Fast pacing or forceful movements, no matter what the activity is, are turn-offs for me, but something deep and slow-paced that feels like you’re melting into one another is wonderful.

Maybe it isn’t wise for me to fully write off penetration, because I might implicitly be assuming that penetration can’t be slow and melty. And even if it isn’t my favorite thing, maybe I can enjoy the emotional atmosphere and feelings of closeness. So perhaps the most important thing is having that compatible slower-paced energy and being willing to try things rather than completely relying on my flawed human intuition.

I have a habit of casting the things that make me unique in a negative light and getting very doomer-y about them isolating me from everyone else (or at the very least being a major liability), rather than believing that my differences can be appreciated or compromises can be made. Maybe that’s the real issue here.

So I don’t disagree that this is the best way to do it, and I find your suggestions helpful, but… what about the phones in people’s pockets that could be recording and the security cameras inside buildings?

Doesn’t that data end up in the hands of a corporation that aggregates data about everything you do, or am I being way too paranoid/conspiratorial about this? I assumed that machine learning algorithms would make it trivial to automatically parse and aggregate all of that data for every individual, but maybe I’m overestimating the scope and accuracy of these systems.