BBgirl1977,
Thank you for your message and sharing your travails. If your profile name suggests your vintage, there wasn't much info available 1970-2005 and the psychological and psychiatric literature was sterile, scary, and the "scientific" vote of the APA held that fetishists, homosexuals, and transpeople in the DSM I (1954), II (1968), III (1980) , IV (1994) (homosexuals were depathologized in IV...graduated to a lifestyle....they had been decriminalized mostly by the 70's to 90's in most states), V ( 2013) we fetishists, and transpeople were freed from the bonds of psycho-pathology, free to be different in most states but the south, North Carolina, Montana and others (cultural not governmental sanctions in Montana...even California had killings of remarkably beautiful transwomen who had the audacity to make out with men who picked them up at parties or social events, wanting to be someone they thought they were, (and the men thought they were) yet had not anatomically achieved.
https://understanding.infantilism.org/surveys/rjl_doctoral_dissertation_ch2.php
With our psychological/psychiatric establishment pathologizing our behavior until recently, is it any wonder you felt you could not control impulses? If you weren't a criminal, you were mentally ill or at least a deviant or surely a sinner until 2013 when those who vote on mental health which is also medical health, said you kinda got an unusual interest, but you aren't crazy. It is not unusual for orphan diseases to be overlooked....except you don't have a disease. But in some circles you could be a sinner,
This is the vacuum you learned in, if you grew up in the 70's-2000's. Now there is literature and thoughtful psychological research to a degree and sympathetic psychologists who essentially say you need therapy because you have internalized the mistakes of the quasi-scientific establishment, religion and older parents who simply have no experience to judge what you are doing. They got caught up in very basic issues and fears about sexual identity, age play, reversion to infancy for any reason or need to be vulnerable to find intimacy and evoke intimacy by being Little from a partner.
So, if you have some confusion about some of your desires and interests, and you admit those interests to yourself, or god forbid, to someone else...confusion is not rare. The nice thing about a site like ADISC is empathy is encouraged, all of us on the site have been kicked in the teeth by someone, at least ourselves, and you are among people who have experienced being "other." Good place to be if you have felt you had to adjust behaviors to conform, and to recognize some people (among those on this site) find those behaviors you wanted to display not only attractive, but very compelling,
And I don't mean to suggest there were no thoughtful psychologists/psychiatrists who felt the classifications were both inaccurate and/or unhelpful from diagnostic or treatment point of view. They simply could not sway the medical congress that votes on mental illness. Kinda like in their time, the people who decided scientific people were heretics, who thought women were witches, who voted for slavery and left the country their forefathers and mother joined 90 years before, or for segregation, or against mixed marriages, or criminalized people who loved people of the same sex. There will always be people who are afraid of anyone who is different, and god knows we are. And you are. This is a good place to find people who think your being different is pretty terrific.
Lattimore
