My obsession with my sexual attractiveness is killing me

CW/TW: Expressing Experiences with Sexual Assault, Elaboration into Incestual Dynamics, Hypersexuality, Sexual Compulsory Behavior, Self Harm

Preemptive thank you to anyone who reads through this very long vent. I've never been able to talk about this. I'm sorry for bad wording or hard to understand sentences.

I (20M) am going to therapy, I had to cancel a therapy appointment recently, and I am medically uninsured in the US. So there is a lot on my mind. Forgive the vent, and my apologies if it's not appropriate for the sub.

I don't know how to start this but ever since I was a very small child I have been obsessed with myself, my mom was a photographer and I grew up having photos taken often and getting dressed up. One of my favorite things as a kid. I received compliments and praise on my appearance often. I am FTM, I presented as a girl until I was about 12, for context. I was also preyed on as a child, and had that attributed to appearances. I have very minimal memory of my childhood beyond photos and what I've been told, I suffer from severe disassociation and I have long term gaps in my memory. Somewhere along the plot of my childhood I was violently assaulted and my life was threatened. My dynamics with family, beyond my immediate mother and sibling, have always been odd in nature. To be so real, I have a family where everyone but 3 people (my mother and brother included in this, thankfully) are arguably sexual predators. My dynamics with them after such experiences never quite felt the same, and the seuxal undertone of my relationships to them became more apparent and I grew anxious in their presences the more I recognized it, and due to the issue they took with my mom's opinions on SA, they cut us off. I became more closely knit to my parents after that. But my dynamic with my dad got increasingly stranger as I got older. Nothing ever happened in that time, nothing I am aware of, but there were ways he would speak to me and look at me, judge what I wore, get uncomfortable and stiffen when I was braless or in shorts, watch when I slept, and have lapses of judgement and kiss me on the mouth over the course of my preteen and teen years until his drug abuse led into psychosis, and he was eventually evicted form our home, after my mom discovered he'd slept with an adolescent girl I'd gone to highschool with that we later found out he groomed. Telling her she reminded him of me to lure her into a sense of safety. I read the messages later and overheard the conversations (unknowingly).

I have to establish now, my dad was a master manipulator, with serious signs of NPD. Not in a stigma driven way. His obsession with himself and his performances were what led him to substance abuse and drove his psychosis when he developed it. For 17 years he kept himself hidden from my mom (who's also autistic), his friends, his family, her family, my brother, everyone. People found him a little weird, but everyone has always liked him and everyone has always found him atrractive. My dad got away with things due to pretty privilege, and because he was a present father in our low income brown/black household.

If I think about it. My issues really started to show when I was probably 4 or 5. I was extremely self conscious, I hated my body for reasons I'm still unsure of. By this age I was already insecure about my sexual attractiveness without really knowing what that meant. I had already wanted to appear attractively to older men. I am uncetain for why. But the evidence is in childhood drawings, I always drew. And I often drew idealizations of myself. As a kid I never drew my family or house or pets, I drew myself and idealized characters of myself.

By 7 or 8 and would present sexually for my dad. It was after he and my mom split up temporarily, and when he first moved back in. I did it mindlessly at first because I was just doing things I knew he liked. This behavior was not stopped. It took weeks before my mom noticed and told me not to do the things I was because it "would make him uncomfortable", I am still not sure what to make of this. But she assumed I was just experiencing something normal with curiosity and tried to be supportive, but I only developed a weird sense of shame and rejection. I have large gaps of memory from this era until I was maybe 12. By this point of time, my dad had been suicidal and started abusing substances and my mom became preoccupied with him. And with the lack of attention I sought it out online.

I don't know how to put all this in a way thats pretty, but when I was 12 and had started middle school I had it normalized to me that "12 year old boys can't control themselves" and having this rule in mind (I am also autistic, and assumed this to be just normal) I didn't realize anything was actually wrong when I started being sexually harassed. And when that sexual harassment led to assault. And eventually 4 years of abuse almost every day I attended school, unless he was sick. This was about the same era I started to realize I had gender dysphoria of some sort, and that I wasn't heterosexual. I had some friends at the time validating the dynamic and openly would witness and laugh when he shoved my head under tables into his crotch or openly groped me, some of them thought it was consensual since I didn't really do anything about it for a long time. I'd convinced myself that I liked it. Somewhere in the mix my self esteem became reliant on it. Like a daily hit. Growing into my body, developing in a way that wasn't the sexual ideal (small boobs are a win now but back then? nah), and having an awkward phase I was intensely insecure and I sought sexual validation however I could get it. This led me online and in chatrooms, especially Amino for anyone familiar with that, where I almost intentionally got myself groomed. I don't know if I can call it grooming since I actually did inflict it on myself, knowingly admitting to being a 12 year old girl to older men and sending them photos. Friends at the time called me narcissistic for the way they say how I'd play with men or other boys. Around the same time I developed an addiction to self harm of the cutting variety. And I developed an insane relationship to maladaptive daydreaming.

Thats pretty bad. And this is where I start to suspect something to be more deeply wrong with me. My maladaptive daydreams took hours of my life, standing in front of mirrors and staring at myself and putting myself into these characters I'd produced as idealizations of myself as a kid. I daydream being characters who are better than me, or ideal versions of myself doing grandiose things. It was the only means to ground myself between events and episodes. I can't explain the way i would exist in a blur, fast heart heart, hunched to vomit, taking every sexual favor, message, touch like i was trapped in my body like an unskippable cutscene or a waiting room. It was a purgatory of sorts that I kept coming back to and remained paralyzed to stop. I became intensely suicidal over the 4 years. And eventually my only motive to live very literally became: "It would be a waste of my attractiveness if I died." As it was the only point I saw. I was 15 when Covid started, and that was what stopped the cycle. The isolation and the lack of validation killed my self esteem and sense of self, and I did not talk to anyone including family in my home for months. I could not stand being percieved. And I became intensely avoidant of touch of all sorts. This era led into probably my healthiest period of life. I began to understand my gender identity and realized I was asexual, I developed a healtheir relationship to my appearance and the isolation eventually made me realize I didn't need the validation and I saved myself from those abusive dynamics. But then I became obsessed with this narrative in my head about myself, and who I was. As I resocialized, coming back to public school, the only way to get past my social anxiety and fear of rejection was to play a character. This character has been built up and played to this day, but is currently crumbling.

In this healing period of time. I got into a committed relationship, where I felt understood and accepted in myself with my trauma and sexuality and appearance. But my partner proved to be jealous of my sexual attractiveness, making comments or insinuations about how I'd been lucky to be assaulted. He never meant it so horribly, he was projecting his insecurities which are very similar to mine. He became insecure because of my asexuality, even though we did have sex, and had even tried to test if he could change it by encouraging threesomes with a 25 year old woman he thought I'd find objectively sexually appealing. He made it clear how lucky i was to get any praise or compliments and how i was entitled and on a high horse because I didn't really... want it? He would accuse me of narcissism. And this culminated. He had very superficial friends and friend groups, which he pulled me into. His superficial friends saw me as his hot goth boyfriend (to help the sexualization, I'm also a goth.). And he would get upset with me in groups when his friends were more physically drawn to me, even though I wasn't really comfortable. This would follow everywhere. My sexuality was continually invalidated and made a problem or flaw with me and my character. Eventually with this, and other reasons, I broke up with him. But I hadn't realized until after going through such things for 3 years, that I'd been retraumatized. And I slipped into very intense impulsive behavior.

At about the same time as this was when my dad was evicted, and my dynamic with him disappeared. In the last months since I'd broken up with him, things started happening. His friends immediately seiEd the opportunity to steal me as a token "hot friend" (their terminology not mine). All but 1 of my closest friends came forward with their feelings towards me and sexual attractions, and these formed very small situationships where which... neither of them seem to perceive me as a whole person? I'd felt seen by them before but I'd very clearly become an idealization to them when I was available. In the same time, my partner had begun to really focus on his issues in therapy. And our relationship has been substantially mended. Although my lingering issues from it have come to an intense crescendo in the same time that we've grown emotionally intimate again.

I was very far from myself and something deeply terrible in my need for validation had been brewing over that time. I started doing SW online. And I found myself relapsing into an old behavior and started talking to older men online again. And I knowingly met a sketchy older man, and I was assaulted. I did not tell anyone. And the action was stupid and unsafe. But I made myself enjoy it and I fantasized about it later because at least it meant I was attractive to him. And I have it in my head that I have to take advantage of that, because one day I wont be sexually attractive anymore. And I should be grateful for it. Not two nights later, I attended a party with the aforementioned friends and I had gotten intensely crossfaded. And after telling his former best friend what had happened to me nights before, she initiated sex with me. And I didn't say no because I was too scared to reject her and in some twisted way I wanted the validation. Mind you, she had propositioned me the day after we broke up and because of my bitter feelings after being mistreated I flirted with her. But I later admitted to my issues wih hypersexuality and compulsory behavior and told her I didn't want to have that dynamic with her ever at all. And promised the guy I wouldn't sleep with her, because he found out she was bragging about it to everyone and people talked shit on him as a result. Which created a lot of consequences when I got triggered after while in his company and told him what happened.

This was 3 weeks ago. Since that episode, I've not been able to go to work or leave my house without panic attacks in weeks. I haven't spoken to much of anyone in weeks. I don't know what's wrong with me. I've come to worry it may be some form of narcissism. I don't want to make this longer than it is but I cannot begin to express the obsessive nature of these problems and the distress it's put me through. And I don't know what to do now.

But if you read this, thank you :((