Basically, I feel like a child. I was an extremely naïve and innocent child who was determined to cling on to childhood throughout my teens. It was only when I started the world of work that I started to mature a bit but I still have a number of child-like traits. My recent bit of maturing has suddenly meant this is bothering me as if I suddenly am seeing myself with a more adult perspective and realising quite how child-like I am. I am an adult person with an adult life but inside I seriously am a child.

I had a difficult childhood. My father was a very controlling, volatile and verbally aggressive (rarely physically although I often felt he would be) man who liked his drink and my mother as innocent person as you could possibly get who did everything for me – she was still washing my hair at 14 and I slept in the same room as her even when I would come home from university (I suddenly became terrified of my room when I was about 9 and so would not sleep by myself in my room). I am still scared of the dark and think someone is going to attack me in the dark. I went to school obviously but socialised very little with other children outside of school because of my home environment. I was also bullied at school. Probably at around 10 years old I became absolutely dead against growing up or seeing myself as a sexual being. I was completely in denial about any physical development. I bought clothes in men’s sizes to hide any development despite being a a little girl and didn’t want anyone to touch me, even hug me. This continued well into my teens. I secretly found men attractive when I was 15 but in the way that someone in junior school would – thinking they looked nice rather than thinking they had great abs or feeling sexually lustful about them/wanting to do anything physically with them. I didn’t even know what French kissing involved in theory. I basically lived in this little fantasy world of my own.

I don’t want to make this next part the focus of my post to sidetrack it but when I was 16 the only friend I had made made some sexual advances/comments and kept persisting with that even though I said I did not want to do these things. I ended up going along with what they wanted and this went on for some time as they made the behaviour seem normal. The way in which I went along with these things was in the way that children play kissing and touching in the playground. Not seeing their actions as sexual. I did not have any sexual interest in the person or in doing sexual activities or experimenting or anything like that. I did not see these things as sexual actions because of my complete lack of being a sexual being but now, with my adult glasses on, I see that they were and it makes me feel sick what they did to me. I have been trying to make sense of this situation and why on earth I was so child like. Is there a name for such a developmental condition?

I have no idea what to classify this. Is there a name for it? I would really appreciate if someone could suggest some term I could search on Google to come up with relevant information for this kind of development issue as I really want to try to understand what on earth was wrong with me so I can make sense of my past and try to address the child-like qualities I still have.