this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025

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Mental Health

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How can I get rid of the shame/regret from being accused as a pedophile? (self.mentalhealth)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by flowing_water to c/mentalhealth

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hello there. I'm a 21 year old guy with strong depression and many insecurities. I'm always trying to be perfect and my biggest fear is to be a bad person. I'm not a pedophile at all. For me it's the exact opposite because I hate pedophilia and think it's the most disgusting thing in the world.

So I accidentally did something stupid that I shouldn't have done and due to my paranoia and overthinking I can't stop thinking and worrying about it.

Recently I played this game called Roblox that I occasionally like playing. I played some online game (within Roblox) where you are a cartoony lion and roleplay with other people. Idk why but sometimes I'm quite childish and troll on the internet. So in the game I thought it would be funny to play as if I want to make a baby with another lion so I jumped on other lions and did this mating motion. I've seen other people doing this before and didn't think too much about it and just thought it was funny. But there is this text chat in the game and when I jokingly asked if someone wants to mate and jumped on them they called me a pedophile for doing this and the fact that I'm 21 cause they were saying it's a kids game and they're kids. Somehow I just didn't think about that at all that they might be kids (I must've assumed they were adults) and felt really bad about it. Idk how serious they actually were cause I later experimented in another game by just telling my age and they also called me a pedophile literally just because of the fact that I play the game as a 21 year old even though the game has no age limit and I know many adults playing Roblox who experienced similar things since that game literally came out in 2006 where many of the adults were kids themselves and grew up with the game (I was 2 at that time). It's like someone calls you a pedophile for playing Minecraft as an adult.

But now I deeply shame myself and regret that I did this. I literally just wanted to do something funny and didn't think about that they might be kids. But it was stupid that I was doing that. And it really hurted me of what they accused me of cause they were saying I'm a pedophile, that I'm Drake, that I need to get a job and need to shower etc.

I know that I don't have the slightest pedophile thoughts but this experience made me extremely paranoid and I can't stop thinking about this every day. I wish this would've never happened.

Idk how I should deal with this and how I could get rid of these thoughts. It feels like since that happened I ruined my life and made my soul dirty and can never undo this!

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[–] zoostation 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It's fine. You didn't mean anything bad by it. I give you permission to move on and forget this.

[–] flowing_water 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

You're right. I think I somehow needed to get this off my chest and get someone else's opinion on this to convince me that I'm not a bad person and that I'm allowed to forget this because it's hard to carry this alone with me everyday. I hope I manage to move on/get over this and forget this cause I'm very paranoid about these things and generally have strong shame if anyone criticizes me about the smallest thing and thinks something bad about me that I'm not. And that was basically the worst accusation I could possibly get especially if it's from children (even though I'm not sure how old they actually were cause their way of articulating things and insulting me made me feel like they were at least 15 or something. I think someone said he was 16 or so)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If you have an obsessive element to your personality then it might be worth talking to a psychiatrist about it.

OCD is debilitating, and there are effective treatments (both medical and non medical).

[–] flowing_water 3 points 4 days ago

Yea I definitely have that. It goes to the point where I'm checking my door multiple times in a row and when something bad happened I can't stop thinking about it. Thanks for the tip, I will definitely talk with my psychiatrist about it!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Since you have OCD, the fact that you despise pedophilia is why you can't let go of it. You grasp onto the worst possible thing and obsess over it. I can't give you advice, because I don't know what helps with OCD specifically, but I can tell you that that particular thoughts you're latching onto are incredibly common. I have seen many many people with ocd admit to thoughts of being a perpetrator, and it's always because they are so disgusted by the possibility.

https://www.sheppardpratt.org/news-views/story/moral-scrupulosity-ocd-part-three/ some advice from professionals?

https://www.tumblr.com/scrupulosity-comics/726298023477542912/i-feel-like-a-many-headed-hydra-monk-of

This person personifies their scrupulosity in their comics as a monk

[–] flowing_water 5 points 4 days ago

That's exactly it, you hit the nail on the head!

[–] sumguyonline 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Fuck em. Those kids are probably pedophiles.

[–] Pilferjinx -2 points 4 days ago

Wait a minute. Could underage masturbation be considered pedophilia? I'd say no. But if you record it, it changes.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago

Yeah. You realize you made a mistake. You are truly sorry about it. That's all anyone can ask of you.

You can't change the past so all you can do from here is move on.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Apparently, you have forgotten what teenagers and tweens are like lol.

Kids are idiots that do exactly what you did, all the time. Making dumb jokes while gaming is essentially the definition of gaming for most kids.

Roblox in particular is not exclusively a kid's game. See, it's been around long enough that the kids that played it years ago are now adults, and still playing. They only reason it was mostly a kid's game originally is that it was not matching adult gamers' preferences. Afaik, they've never had an age limit.

There have been problems with adults messing with kids on there though, so you definitely need to be aware of that and avoid behaviors that are sexual, or sexual jokes. Not because joking about that is bad, because it isn't. Again, kids can and do make those jokes themselves. It's just because you can't tell what the intent is when it's an adult, even a young adult, is the one joking with a kid.

It's kinda stupid tbh. Expecting people that have been joking around with other players for years to suddenly stop doing the exact same thing because they hit a specific day in a year that makes them older. But, that is part of becoming an adult, where you have to recognize boundaries between adults and kids even though that boundary is arbitrary. We're all expected to respect those boundaries about driving, drinking, smoking, voting and such that are part of reaching an arbitrary age where we can now closer to do that you'd. And we're also expected to respect those boundaries that are prohibitive. You take the good with the silly; you take the responsibility with the rights. That's how it is.

So, now you know better. Don't do it again, and you'll be fine

[–] flowing_water 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yes you're right I definitely have this behavior left from being younger and besides trolling I had no other intend. But of course I'm aware of there being people having other intends and that there is a responsibility that comes with getting older. I really need to mature in that regard. It's just that something in me just still wants to play like a kid and sometimes wants to do silly stuff (except from what I described in the post of course cause that was really stupid).

I don't get how these kids generally call you a pedophile just for playing Roblox in the first place (I was talking about this on Discord and many other adults where saying they experienced the same thing). I bet that many of these same kids who are saying that will keep playing it as an adult too. I think many people still have an inner child and just wanna have fun sometimes. Heck I even still enjoy the first 3 seasons of SpongeBob cause the humor is just great and I'm sure it was also made for adults in mind.

It's like they're complaining about stuff that they do themselves. It's not like any generation owns some type of internet content or humor. And most of that stuff actually started in my generation being Gen-Z.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

It's all part of the overreaction that's seeped into culture. The whole "protect the kids children" thing that led to false memories and satanic abuse scares back when I was a kid.

Since kids are now more dialed into the overall culture, they pick up the idea, but don't know what it really means, to the extent of what you ran into. They think that because they're kids, everyone else has to toe some imaginary line when they're around, whether or not it's actually a place/time where kids are assumed to be the default.

They also have massively skewed ideas about what is and isn't legal, what is and isn't a grounds for civil suits, etc. Which is fine, kids always have had skewed impressions of what adult life is like because they rarely get informed about it until way after they should. But then it turns into stamping out bad information left and right because of the internet. The bullshit spreads faster than fact.