About a year ago, I found three pictures of underage children in their underwear on a hard drive in my home. I confronted my husband, in a blind panic, and he said that he had used that hard drive to back up files when fixing his brother's crashed computer a couple of months previously.
I asked his brother if this was true, and his brother said that the pictures WERE, in fact, his, and that he had accidentally picked them up from a spam pornography site.
So it would appear that my husband was being truthful (thank God). My husband is a great person, a doctor (for elderly patients), an attentive and loving husband, everything seems perfect. We've been married for only 6 months, but together for almost three years. He isn't ever around kids, and we don't have any of our own.
His brother, though, has had run-ins with the law, trouble with girlfriends accusing him of inappropriate behavior, and I've seen pornography in his apartment.
I need to know if it's possible for files to download onto a computer by "accident" from a spam website.
And, my husband and I are thinking about starting a family. We're both older (late twenties, early thirties) and have talked about it at length. Since we started discussing it, I've been having nightmares about those pictures. I'm anxious to the point of almost vomiting, and I feel depressed. Seeing a hard drive or a flash drive puts me near tears, even in a store. It's like the memory has come back from the dead to haunt me.
Is it possible to have PTSD from just seeing some pictures? What can I do to feel better? I wrote a letter to an investigative team about child pornography to tell them about it, but that hasn't helped me feel any better.
The hard drive was immediately erased, and the brother has apologized. His mother was informed (he's still in his twenties and is oddly accountable to his parents). But I still feel like I'm harboring this dirty secret.
So is it possible for that to happen accidentally? And what's wrong with me? Why can't I stop fixating on this?
Please help.
