Experiencing sudden and compulsive urges to secretly spy on and watch my sisters and others in my neighbourhood.

The start of a ‘secretly watching’ others Voyeur Compulsion?

I first started experiencing this when I was about 15. I would be in my room and have the urge to walk around the patio and look through my sister’s window or watch them from the skylight on the roof.

I would suddenly just get the feeling that I wanted to watch them, and be very excited by this idea. It felt wrong-my stomach hurt and I felt kind of sick and bad but at the same time I was very drawn to do this. It was almost automatic. When my stepsister would get home from work, I would go to her window and watch her undress.

After a while I also got urges to watch my neighbour and a girl who lived down the street. I liked the feeling of being free and wild and running around my neighbourhood. It was very strange but it felt like something I had to do.

The Trauma, embarrassment, humiliation and guilt of getting caught

I would do it probably 4 times a week when I was at my mom’s house. Eventually, I got caught. When I got caught doing it once and it made my family very upset. My sisters changed rooms because of it. Things settled down for a while and I stopped (I think I stopped-or maybe just did it less?). It started up again, and I was caught a second time. The second time it tore my family apart. I think it was actually my step dad that caught me outside of her window. He was very hurt, disappointed, and upset.

My sisters, my mum, and my dad felt very uncomfortable with me. It made me look like a liar and a pervert and eventually led my mum to send me away.

This issue had a HUGE and ongoing impact on my life

It split my family apart, and split me away from them. My mum sent me away to military-like outdoor recreation program for three months and I got a battery of psychological stuff. People told me I was psychologically unstable, did not have a conscience, and that I was a bad human being.

It affected me tremendously, and made me do and say whatever people wanted me to just to get out of that place. I just did what I had to just to survive-in the end I just felt nothing because in no way did I feel a connection or guilt for the original thing that I had done wrong, just a sense of absolute slavery to a family and society that would judge me as unworthy to participate as a citizen and human.

I lost the sense of who I was even more and grew completely isolated from everyone in my family. It took away my confidence and sense of self.

It felt like I was being misjudged for something that wasn’t even me. I didn’t know why I did this, and since there was no explanation I just reacted fearfully. When I did all this to my sisters and others, I knew that it was wrong but felt powerless to stop it.

My mum and father’s reaction the only reaction they could have had, but was equally senseless, in the sense that it didn’t SOLVE anything. They resolved the problem by ignoring the problem, and pushing it away. The truth is that I wasn’t JUST the problem. The issue and the way that it affected all of us was the biggest problem. I was made to apologize to my sisters but they were so clearly put in a position of superiority that it didn’t mean anything. If you force someone to apologize for something that happens and they don’t even know why they will apologize it will not change anything. Apologies in situations like this don’t mean anything.

Engaging with this Peeping Tom part and clearing it

When I first re-entered these feelings in late 2006, I blocked off from them and became VERY scared. Obviously, I HATED what I did in the past and didn’t want to relive this. The urge to watch people came on suddenly and VERY strong, and I fought it as best I could. What resulted was some half-hearted attempts to look through a neighbour’s window, and afterwards a lot of pornography (some voyeur-themed) and masturbation. After three hours of mixing clearing focuses (to address this issue) and pornography, and feeling VERY forced / manipulated into these feelings, the feeling suddenly left me.

This first phase was by far the most intense-although other urges to watch people come up and these kinds of feelings, mostly they are in the background and mostly I feel that I am now clearing my fear in regards to these because as some of you might imagine there is a huge fear when I’m grabbed by these impulses.

Obviously, this issue was HUGE in my life . . . .

This caused a family split and falling outs

It split my family up, made me feel like a bad human being and permanently affected my life. I have lived with the consequences of these actions for many years and EVERYTHING in relation to my family interactions has been tainted by these feelings and these past events. In the initial three hours of intense fighting with this issue the greater chunk of it has been resolved.

In retrospect, I realized that I made a LOT of excuses for what I did;

  • They were just my sisters . . . .
    • and
  • I don’t have a problem, etc. etc . . .

. . . . but in the end there was no excuse for what I did because no excuse was needed. What was needed was to understand that something was MAKING me do this. That’s what this healing process made me aware of. It also changed the bedrock of who I was by clearing the things acting to cause me to be like this. So, I cleared in a day what perhaps a lifetime of therapy or trying to push this away or keeping it hidden could not do.

I had energetic crap MAKING me compulsively watch others

I have done more than apologize, I have done more than simply force myself to NOT be a voyeur or MAKE huge efforts to block it out or forget about it or keep it hidden. Within the healing process I had the space to engage with this issue as it was happening and rather than panic or dissolve in fear or shame or humiliation we found something acting to CAUSE me to BEHAVE LIKE THIS.

When you find the origins of something and you resolve issues AT THEIR ORIGIN you don’t have to keep using a combination of guilt / lying to yourself / desperately covering it up / or forcible adjusting to negate these impulses in an attempt to deal with something. You also learn to realize that while it’s not your FAULT (in a larger sense) that these things happened, although it is very definitely YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to resolve these issues.

Unlike other systems such as counselling or some other method, I did not ‘get past’ my issue by ignoring it or disavowing ANY part of myself. Rather, I courageously stood in myself as I watched what I HAD in the past considered a very scary side of myself that allowed us to identify this as something being DONE TO ME. Which was then RESOLVED by me working to GET RID of what we found. Other paths/ ways/ system often tell you that you are WRONG or BAD in some way, and that YOU are the one that needs to force a change. The approach I am using now says that;

  • We ALL have these kinds of CRAP
  • We can ONLY attempt to resolve them by engaging with them; facing them
  • Then using tools that do ALLOW you to RESOLVE the ORIGINAL cause of these happening.

Clive’ comment. I can imagine that some reading this page will have some quite strong reactions to this type of example in public space. So, have a think about this? I’m resolving as in GONE, FINISHED / IT NEVER RETURNS worse issues than what is described in this example here in my clients ‘relatively’ easily. So, I applaud this person for having the courage to allow this up on a public site. People with this type of issue are in a catch 22, because it wont be easy to let anyone know that this is how they are? BUT if you don’t these issues will continue in the population and probably get worse. Hence although this is the most viewed page on this site, it took a year before anyone with this issue left a comment . . . or got in touch to have their own issues in these areas resolved . . . is that a surprise?