MAP Forum

How and when did you discover you are paraphilic? And how did you feel about it at the time? Did you ever try to suppress it? Did you have romantic feelings, too?

Just a few warm-up questions to understand what (other) paraphilias are like.

In my case, I discovered my paraphilia even before I gave it a sexual meaning, before I knew what sex was; I liked certain scenes in some movies and I replicated them on myself. I engaged in "playful" masochism, I entertained myself with games and fantasies involving restraints or ideas (but not actual acts) of hurting myself. Stuff that at puberty immediately turned into my main sexual interest. I've always been a little sadomasochistic brat.

It was still purely playful at the beginning, so I didn't have particular feelings about it, it wasn't different from when I played with Play-Doh. Maybe I had a bit of frustration because I had no one to ask to tie my arms behind my back.

I never tried to repress it, I never gave it a moral judgment, but by nature I didn't go around blurting it out either, having always been reserved by nature. I never felt "romantic" feelings, since I was attracted to situations but I may have idealized those situations.

Also an important thing: It's not the result of any trauma. I've often heard interviews with people who connected their interests to episodes from their childhood, but I've always considered that way of doing things very contrived. Everyone has experienced everything, it's really very easy to find a triggering cause, but the fact that there was a singular event doesn't prove that singular event is the cause. I was once attacked by a dog, I once almost drowned, I was once beaten and choked by a peer and so on... many things have happened to many people, but this doesn't mean there's a correlation. From this point of view I consider myself lucky that my "negative" experiences happened after I noticed this interest of mine, thus being able to say with peace of mind that these experiences weren't the cause. (And then given the nature of my paraphilia, I didn't even consider them very "negative".)