There's no way to explain this easily, without also sounding crazy.

Oh wait, this is a site for crazy people. I mean this in the best possible way.

I have a lot of guilt, too often accompanied by a feeling that I deserve awful things. I don't know where it came from, but I know I've had it since pre-adolescence, around age 10 or 11.

For a long time I called it "auto-empathy", because my single biggest trigger for it is other people suffering. Real suffering - hearing about someone falling off their bike doesn't mean anything to me. An account of someone being abused, bullied, assaulted, or tortured, however, that's liable to leave me, almost automatically, imagining myself in the victim's position, or at least thinking that whatever it is should happen to me. With the former reaction, I basically learned to detach myself enough that I don't walk around for the rest of the day with a thousand-yard-stare because all I'm thinking of is myself being beaten half to death, or gang-raped, or tortured in some elaborate fashion. I don't want to be thinking about any of that, but once it's there it's difficult to extricate myself.

More often, though, it's just guilt. Just a feeling like I somehow did something bad, in that this person suffered and I didn't. I deserve it more! Why am I getting off so lucky? It's....not fair.

I can't imagine how sick this sounds. In my worst moments I've truly had this desire for someone to hurt me, to abuse and harm me, to break me physically and mentally and subject me to the worst anguish - I've even considered hiring someone to do it. But I have no money and I'm not sure I ever really want to go through the hassle or the shame of explaining what I want. Doesn't stop me from considering it though.

Before anyone asks, no, it's not sexual. There's nothing sexual about it; it doesn't turn me on in the slightest. The fact that I'm probably a sexual submissive by nature actually scares me a bit...then again, I expect sex to be painful and unpleasant and maybe even a punishment of its own. I'll stop there and point out that I fear pain as much as any other person, I'll flinch if someone goes to hit me. Like I said, it's all pretty irrational.

It's guilt more than anything. Guilt that someone else is suffering, that I should be harmed in the same way. Supposedly I've had guilt about other things too - at home I used to lie a lot about little things, and often felt the need to hide things like what I was reading or what and when I ate. To me, it was a boundary thing. I saw my mother as overbearing and overinvolved, and wanted something to myself that I didn't have to report or talk about. That, and there often was irrational shame about my media tastes and such; a fear of criticism. At least that's how I saw it.

I tried explaining all this to my mom one day when we were getting along, and she told me she experienced a similar thing, with similar triggers (particularly in regards to other people's suffering). Then she elaborated and it's actually nothing like me at all. For one thing, her reactions and machinations were never violent. She "punished" herself for no apparent reason by, say, denying herself treats or fun. I lack the willpower to do that, and besides, it's not enough, unless I were to outright adopt an ascetic lifestyle with an emphasis on near-constant deprivation of pleasure (indeed, I've contemplated it before...the stress of thought managed to drive me to minor self-harm).

Also, she had discernible reasons: she was the child of a closet alcoholic, and the guilt arose from carrying that secret around for years. All that fear and confusion manifested against herself. Fine. I have no such experience. I've never been hurt or abused, by anyone. That's almost the core of it - I don't deserve this kind of luck.

Conventional self-help is largely useless because I don't know where any of this comes from. It's not like I can link it back to an event or series of events. It just...is. I deserve to be hurt. I deserve to suffer. There's something bad about how others' suffer and I don't. I don't know where it came from, but I know it's been around for a while.

I tried posting about it elsewhere and someone suggested it could be a kind of pure-O OCD. My issue is that it's not constant enough, nor does it come out of nowhere. Rather, I read or see something that "triggers" me (despite this, I don't believe in trigger warnings and, in fact, I hate the idea of saying "I was triggered". In fact, I often go and deliberately trigger myself, like I'm trying to get past it).

Anyone have any insights?

I know there are self-esteem issues tied in - I often get a very similar anxious feeling from reading things that, basically, set off an inferiority complex. Things that leave me thinking, "I should be more like that; why couldn't I be more like that? I'm a failure, I'm inferior, I'm useless and no one will ever want anything to do with me because of that."