WharfRat Member Profile

A History of Unrequited Love

50 & Over Community / by WharfRat

November 16th, 2023

...See more All of the people’s names in this piece have been changed in order to protect their privacy. My situation comes mostly from the various forms of abuse I experienced while growing up. I was sexually abused by a doctor when I was seven and eight years old. My father emotionally and verbally abused me for my first 20 years. I was beaten on a regular basis when I was in junior high. These experiences, among others, told me that I was a worthless piece of garbage. I knew that no girls or women would ever like me or love me. I was a little chubby, and was very self-conscious about it. I knew it didn’t look good. I didn’t want anybody to see my bare belly. I was terrible at sports. This was embarrassing and humiliating. Gym class in grade school was coed, too, so everyone saw how bad I was. They were all bigger, faster, stronger, and more coordinated than I. I was shorter than everyone else. I was the butt of many jokes in school, by girls and boys. It strengthened the belief that no girls or women would ever like me or love me. This ridicule continued all the way up through high school. I saw a few other boys’ penises. They were all much larger than mine. My *** has stayed small all my life. I’ve always worried about what a girl (in my childhood) or a woman (in my adulthood) would think if she saw it. This also has made me feel unworthy of love. Only health professionals have seen my genitals during my adult years. I had a couple of minor crushes on girls in first and third grade. My biggest childhood crush came in fourth grade. My shyness made me turn red and stammer whenever I was around Jill R. My hands shook, too. I knew she would never like me. I was overwhelmed with regret for never telling Jill how I felt, and ashamed of myself for not having the courage to tell her. I spent two years admiring her from afar. I never saw her again after fifth grade. In seventh and eighth grade (junior high school), I was bullied constantly. I was small and weak, with no fighting skills. I’ve had digestive problems ever since, because they punched me in the stomach many times. In those two years, I got a stomach ache and diarrhea almost every school day. I would have to make several trips to the bathroom each day. I quit eating lunch, then breakfast, too. It didn’t help. I wondered about the impression I made on my classmates. I figured they would think of me as the boy who had to run to the john every twenty minutes. The girls probably thought I was disgusting because of that. I had a crush on the sister of a friend of mine at that time. She was a year younger than my friend and I. I got over her as I went into high school. There were many cute girls in high school. Most knew they were cute, and were very conceited. There was one girl who was different. June was one of the cutest girls in the school and was friendly. We were in home room together, so I saw her at the start of every school day. June would actually say hi to me. She would talk to me like I was a human being when we sat in home room. We were in a few classes together. I embarrassed myself a few times in front of her, doing or saying stupid things. I wondered what she thought of me after that. In sophomore year gym class, a teacher’s assistant filmed me without me knowing it. I was trying to shoot a basket and kept missing. I tried well over a dozen times. He showed that film in the study halls he monitored. Many students, boys and girls, saw that film, and I was the laughing stock of the school. By junior year, I had fallen for June – very hard. I was nervous around her because of that. In the second semester of senior year, I grew about three inches. I was finally not so short anymore. Only a few people noticed, but it didn’t matter, anyway. School was over. I hated myself for never having the courage to tell any of the girls I liked that I liked them. I never got to know them well. They showed no interest in getting to know me. I was crazy about a woman who worked at Allstate Insurance with me. When Stacy was near me, my hands shook. We worked together for two years. After she quit, I was over her pretty quickly, but still had my feelings for June. When I was at Southern Illinois University, I met an international student. We became friends. I wound up being crazy about her. I knew her for only about two months when she had to return to Japan. I never heard from her again. She had told me she wanted only to be friends. I was broken-hearted over her for several years. I continued to have feelings for June from high school, and daydream about her, throughout the 1990s. It hurt constantly. At the dinner/dance of my high school 20-year reunion, there were three of us who were the last to leave. There was Jill X - a woman who lives in Boston - Mike, and me. The three of us sat and talked for a while. They had been friends since high school, but I didn’t really know either one of them. She gave us each a hug as we left. It blew my mind. I had been starved of affection since I was a little boy, over 30 years before. That hug felt like waves of sweetness and warmth were flowing through me. I didn’t know hugs felt like that. I’ve never forgotten that hug. To her, though, the hug was just one of many she had given at that reunion. Twenty years later, at the 40-year reunion, I saw Jill X again. I shook her hand. She said something like “I have no idea who you are” or “I don’t remember you”. I had understood there was no reason for her to remember me, 20 years after one conversation, but still hoped she would remember me. It felt like a knife through my heart. I kept shaking her hand. Her reaction could have been much worse. She could have been angry, gotten nasty, or whatever, but she didn’t. She was probably just confused. I think she handled it well. She remained polite and calm. I was lost, not knowing what to say. I cried that night for the first time since I was a little boy. It hurt more than anything I’d ever experienced. I tried to go to the dinner/dance part of the reunion the following night. I drove there and walked in. I couldn’t take it and turned around. I went home and cried again. The next two months were the worst. I couldn’t function. I felt like all of the pain of my life, all of the abuse, came back at me at once, and joined the pain I felt over her. I’ve had Jill X on my mind since that reunion, along with daydreaming about impressing her somehow at some future reunion. My daydreaming has been the same since I was a boy. Having this daydream for over 50 years makes me feel like I haven’t matured. I’m stuck in this rut I formed in grade school. I’ve known for many years that my daydreams were a waste of time and energy. I wish I could stop my feelings for her. It feels like unrequited love is getting your heart broken over and over and over again, throughout your life. It seems pointless and a waste of emotion – my love for someone who doesn’t want my love doesn’t do them any good, and it certainly doesn’t do me any good. It would be nice if my love for her could at least do her some good, help her in some way. I wish my love could cure her arthritis, her skin cancer, and anything else that might be affecting her health. I wish it could keep her warm when it’s cold out, and protect her from all harm. I’m scared of what would happen if a woman actually was attracted to me. I wouldn’t know what to do. I don’t know how to be romantic or have a love life. I have a fear of intimacy. I don’t know how to have sex. I don’t know how to cuddle or snuggle. I don’t know how to kiss. I think if a woman got her face next to mine for a kiss, I would cringe, out of instinct, or reflex. It wouldn’t be because I didn’t want to kiss her; it would be out of fear of messing up. Any woman would be disgusted by this, and that would be the end of everything with her. I wonder how many other men could relate to this. No one has been through the same exact set of experiences as I have, but many have led similar lives. I’m not trying to speak for everyone. I want to be understood. I need empathy. Men have emotions, too, and we hurt.

Disgusting Video

Trauma Support / by WharfRat

February 15th, 2023

New Rewrite of My Story

Trauma Support / by WharfRat

May 14th, 2022

...See more Last year, I posted my story, telling of the sexual abuse I suffered when I was a little boy. I was asked to write a shorter version of the story to read out loud to some therapists. This draft still tells the truth, but goes into more detail of my emotions, as well as the effects of the abuse. It leaves out other details which are in last year's post. This is what I read out loud to the therapists this Monday: I believe it’s important for me to tell my story. I hope that by sharing it today and posting it on various websites as I have that it will help other male survivors of childhood sexual abuse to speak out and get help. Also, I hope by getting more men to speak out, we can help others to see that sexual abuse of males is a real thing and something that needs to be taken as seriously as sexual abuse of females. We need just as much understanding and support. Before the sexual abuse, I dreamed of what adulthood would be like, being married and having kids, having a job and coming home to a loving wife. Those thoughts disappeared when it happened. I’ve never been married, never had a love life, though I’ve always wanted one. I’ve never even been on a date. I’ve always loved one woman or another from afar. I could never imagine anybody ever wanting to have anything to do with me. I’ve never been able to be intimate with anybody in any way, or have a meaningful connection with anyone. All of my interactions have been at a superficial level. My social ineptitude and inability to communicate with the women I liked or loved made me hate myself more. In the spring of 1969, I was sexually abused by a urologist in Waukegan, Illinois. This abuse included genital torture. The torture happened several times. I turned eight years old during this time. He knew how to make things hurt, as he was an expert in the male reproductive system. I looked in his eyes while he was doing it and he grinned at me. It helped me understand why he was doing it. He enjoyed it. I was horrified. My viewpoint changed. I no longer saw people as good, but evil. I didn’t feel like I could trust anyone anymore. I was right about that a lot of the time, too, as people I had thought of as friends turned out not to be friends, but people who just wanted to use me. I trusted the wrong people for many years. While I was a boy, I thought my parents wanted to get rid of me. The world was much darker and dangerous. It was scary now. There was risk of being hurt everywhere, and no one to protect me. I’ve often wondered if the medical stuff I went through, along with the torture, had anything to do with why my body is the way it is. It’s very humiliating and embarrassing. I’ve been impotent for over twenty years. My genitals seem to be mutilated by the torture. I’m ashamed of them, for the way they look, and for being so vulnerable and sensitive. I wish I could get some answers about that, but the doctors don’t take me seriously. I can’t stand to be examined by male doctors. I try to see female doctors. When you’re a man asking a female doctor about problems with your genitals, they get suspicious and think you’re a pervert of some sort. They don’t want to examine you. This is so wrong and unfair. I haven’t had a thorough physical exam for many years. I didn’t tell anyone what happened because I thought my parents would punish me for talking about that part of my body. That was against the rules. Also, it was a very embarrassing and humiliating experience, as well as horrifying and painful, so how could I talk about it? I was taught that boys weren’t supposed to complain, to whine, or cry about anything. It wasn’t about being seen as less of a man, as some people claim: it’s just what we were taught: boys aren’t supposed to cry. Our teachers punished boys for crying, to teach us to be quiet and hold it in. If a girl cried about something, she would be comforted. If a boy cried, he got spanked or had to stand in the corner. They drilled it into our heads to keep silent and stop our tears from coming. As time went on, it was just too embarrassing to talk about and I had no one to tell. Girls had places they could go to talk about sensitive topics, such as school nurses and student counselors, but boys did not. We weren’t supposed to go to anyone about any personal problems. Over the years, I’ve found that most people don’t take men’s emotions or feelings seriously. They don't take our personal problems seriously. They think of us as superficial, simple-minded creatures. This makes it hard to find someone to talk to. They tell me to “man up” or “grow a pair”. My father called me a worthless piece of shit for the first twenty years of my life. He was my father, so I believed him. I don’t know what his problem was, but he was very angry most of the time. He was obviously not someone I could ever talk to about something that was bothering me or to ask for advice. When I’m sitting still, I can imagine my dad calling me lazy again, though he died in 2006. I can imagine him insulting my housekeeping skills. At all of my jobs, I had the feeling that he was there, looking over my shoulder and criticizing me and my work. In school, I was beaten up on a regular basis by a group of bullies because I was the smallest boy there. I was an easy target. I got good grades from time to time and would get beaten up for that, too. This led to chronic stomach problems. During and after all of the abuse, I came to the conclusion that my dad was right: I was a worthless piece of shit. That became one of my core beliefs. I would be lucky if I had any friends. I knew no girl would ever like me. No woman would ever love me. I was certain that girls and women could see through me and see me for the garbage that I was. I was going to be stuck alone for life. I saw three different therapists from about 2000 to 2006. I couldn’t talk about the sex abuse with them, so I was just wasting time and money. In the spring of 2019, I went to my fourth therapist. She was the first I told about the sex abuse. She almost sneered at me. She didn’t think that sex abuse of males was a serious thing. She thought it was trivial. This experience was almost enough to make me give up trying to get help. When you're male, no one wants to take you seriously when you tell them you've been sexually abused. They either don't believe you or they think it just doesn't matter. This was 50 years after the abuse took place that I first told someone what happened. I feel that those 50 years of my life were lost. Later that year, I had a devastating experience at my 40-year high school reunion where I encountered a woman who meant very much to me. She didn’t even remember who I was. I felt like I’d been stabbed. This led to a two-month period in which I cried for the first time in 50 years. I cried several times then. I had never hurt so much. 50 years of pain hit me all at once. I realized I’d better find another therapist fast or I might hang myself. I saw a new therapist in December of 2019. She made me uncomfortable. Maybe there was a personality clash. She did nothing to make me feel at ease with her. Halfway through my second session, she said she couldn’t help me, but didn’t say why. I’m on my sixth therapist now and she’s good. I’ve been seeing her since January of 2020. The therapy has helped me in various ways. One way was she helped me identify my mental illness and its causes. Another way is that I feel like I’ve unloaded a lot of garbage from my mind. I still have a lot of garbage I need to get out and it may take a long time. The abuse affected me in many ways, profoundly and permanently. It has affected my ability to live in the world, keeping me from feeling like I belong in society. I haven’t had friends or a social life for most of my life. I never kept a job for more than six years and have been unemployed for over 13 years. I’ve had an intense pain inside me since I was seven years old which is emotional and psychological. This pain grew steadily like a fire burning inside me for 50 years until I couldn’t deal with it any more. My emotions have been a storm that I had to hide, repress and ignore. Thank You

Reading My Abuse Story Out Loud

Journals & Diaries / by WharfRat

May 13th, 2022

...See more Last summer, I wrote a testimonial of the boyhood sexual, emotional and physical abuse I experienced. I posted an abbreviated form of the story here some time later. A woman who facilitates one of the group meetings I attend suggested that I read the story out loud at one of my group meetings, so I went to work on editing it again to come up with a read-aloud version. With the help of my therapist, I wrote a new draft each week for about four months. Around the beginning of the year, my therapist asked me if I would be willing to read my story out loud to a group of therapists where she works. She made suggestions as to what should be included - she wanted more information concerning my emotions - what emotions did I have while I was being abused, and what emotions do I have now when I think about the abuse. She also gave me a worksheet that asked questions about the effects of the abuse. I finally came up with a draft we felt was good. On Monday (two days ago), I read my abuse story out loud to a group of six therapists, including my therapist, two other experienced therapists, and three new, inexperienced therapists. They were all women. My therapist had told me she thought it was important for them to hear my story because only one of the other five, beside herself, had experience with males who had been sexually abused. She said that hearing my story would help them understand other men and boys better and they would be better able to help those other men and boys. It was a nerve-wracking experience to read it out loud, and my hands shook some. My throat got very dry by the end of it (it was three pages long). I think I read some parts too fast, not pausing between paragraphs when I should have. It could have been much worse, though. My fears about it were because I expected the worst to happen. I didn't get anywhere near as nervous as I expected, though, again, I was nervous. I was afraid I'd get so worked up it would take forever to calm down again, but that didn't happen, either. I was back to normal within the hour, I think. The therapists were going to meet again yesterday, and one of the things they would talk about would be my story. My therapist would ask the others for feedback and questions for me. I will hear all of those next Monday. I wish I could hear them today. Though I already posted my story on this website last year, I'd like to post this new version, too. It has that other information in it - emotions, effects, etc.

Trigger Warning - Abuse Story - Torture

Trauma Support / by WharfRat

November 20th, 2021

...See more I’ve never been married, never had a love life, though I’ve always wanted one. I’ve never even been on a date. I’ve always loved one woman or another from afar. I could never imagine anybody ever wanting to have anything to do with me. Before the sexual abuse, I dreamed of what adulthood would be like, being married and having kids, having a job and coming home to a loving wife. Those thoughts disappeared when it happened. This is the story of the sexual abuse: One Sunday morning in March of 1969, I had to pee before I went to Sunday School. I was seven years old at the time - I turned eight years old in April. When I peed that morning, there was some blood in my urine. It looked a little red. Later, in the middle of the afternoon, I had to pee again. Then it looked like I was peeing nothing but blood. I said absentmindedly “It’s doing it again!” My mom was the only other person in the house. My dad had gone somewhere and my sister was outside. My mom said, “What’s doing what again?” I answered, “Come see.” She came into the bathroom and saw the blood in the toilet. She looked like she was ready to faint. I saw my pediatrician, then got referred to a pair of urologists. I don’t remember their names. One of them looked like the actor Richard Benjamin. The other one was older. He had salt-and-pepper hair and was stocky. The doctors determined that I was peeing blood because my urethra was too narrow. When I peed, the urine passed through the urethra with so much pressure, that it ate away the lining. So I was bleeding all up and down my urethra when I peed, along the inside of my penis. I had to have surgery to widen the urethra, but it could wait until the school year was over. They operated in early June. I had a roommate in the hospital who was there because he had “knots” in his armpits - strange lumps in the skin. His mom seemed snotty. I went in on a Wednesday, had surgery on Friday and was out on Saturday. When I tried to pee after the surgery, it hurt like a living hell. I was peeing through raw tissue. The other boy’s mother, whom I thought was snotty, held me, trying to comfort me, while I inadvertently peed on her while screaming in pain. They had told me that there would be no pain before or after the surgery. Liars! That was standard procedure when dealing with child patients in those days. They believed that if they told the truth about the pain to come, the children would freak out. In those days the parent would leave the child alone with the doctor, thinking that the child would want privacy. That meant that the child was left in the hands of the doctor, defenseless. Every time the salt-and-pepper-haired doctor got me alone in an exam room, from March through June, he did stuff to me. A lot of what I remember has the quality of a partial memory, like waking up from a nightmare. There’s a black void for part of each visit, but then I remember him grabbing onto my testicles. He would hold them both in his hand and twist the entire scrotum around as far as it would go one way, then the other, making it hurt as much as he could. Then, causing even more pain, he would squeeze them. He would squeeze them together and squeeze them one at a time. He would pull on them as if he were trying to pull them right off of my body. I would be frozen in horror and pain and when he saw that frozen look on my face, he would grin. That’s an image I will never forget. That expression on his face answered the question I had as to why he was doing all of this: he enjoyed it. He was torturing me for fun. These words do not do justice to the horrific experience or to the extreme pain. The testicles have a very high concentration of pain receptors. They are an incredibly sensitive part of the body, and the most vulnerable. This torture happened on more than one occasion, with some possible variation in technique. He knew how to make things hurt, as he was an expert in the male reproductive system. I do remember that I made sure I was fully dressed again as quickly as possible before my mom came back in the exam room to get me, and I was relieved to be out of there as soon as possible. I felt safe when I got back home again. At that age, I didn’t understand the function of the testicles, either. I didn’t know what they were or why they hung down outside my body. I wondered from time to time why some of my body parts hung down outside my body like that, in a little sack of skin. Why weren’t they up inside my body with the rest of my organs? We weren’t told until we were in sixth grade. We should have been taught about our bodies much earlier. A greater understanding of ourselves and our body parts would have led to much less worrying and anxiety, especially for those of us who had been sexually abused. If we knew more, maybe we would have been able to talk more about what was done to us. I’ve often wondered, though it might not make sense to others, if the medical stuff I went through, along with the torture, had anything to do with why my penis never grew much. It’s very small and it’s quite humiliating and embarrassing. I’m also impotent and have been so for twenty years. I wonder, too, if the junk done to me in 1969 has something to do with that. I also wonder if my testicles are normal, both in size and function. I wish I could get some answers, but the doctors don’t take my questions seriously. I feel like my genitals were mutilated and disfigured by what was done to them in 1969. I can’t stand to be examined by male doctors because of that experience, and so I try to go to only female doctors. When you’re a man asking a female doctor about problems with your genitals, they get suspicious and think you’re a pervert of some sort. They don’t want to examine you. This is so wrong and unfair. I haven’t had a thorough physical exam for many years because of this. At the risk of repeating myself, our testicles and scrotum are the most personal, vulnerable and sensitive body part. Having someone torture me that way when I was a little boy was the ultimate horror. Everybody needs to take that seriously and not see it as funny. The modern entertainment industry and the media in general think it’s a joke whenever a man’s genitals are injured in any way. People laugh when they see a man clutching at his groin and writhing in pain. They laugh when a man is kicked in the groin. They laugh when they hear news stories of angry girlfriends or wives severing their boyfriend’s or husband’s penis. This is sexual assault and mutilation. It is disgusting and subhuman to do something like this, and it’s not funny. I didn’t tell what the doctor did to me because I was scared. I thought my parents would punish me for talking about that part of my body. That was against the rules. It would also be “my word against his”. I’d been in situations in school where people told lies and when I told the truth, I was called a liar and the liar’s words were considered to be the truth. I was taught that boys weren’t supposed to complain, to whine, or cry about anything. It wasn’t about being seen as less of a man, as some people claim, it’s what we were taught: boys aren’t supposed to cry. Our teachers punished boys for crying, to teach us to be quiet and hold it in. They drilled it into our heads to keep silent and stop our tears from coming. These teachers were women, too, who are supposed to be so sympathetic and compassionate. As time went on, it just seemed too embarrassing to talk about and I had no one to tell. Girls had places they could go to talk about sensitive topics, such as school nurses and student counselors, but boys did not. We weren’t supposed to go to anyone about any personal problems. During and after the abuse, I realized even more strongly that my dad was right: I was a worthless piece of garbage. I would never live the life I had imagined for myself when I was little. I would be lucky if I could have any friends at all, and no girl would ever like me. When I grew to be a man, no woman would ever love me. I thought for certain that girls and women could see through me and see me for the garbage that I was. I might look a little human on the outside, enough to fool guys, but not enough to fool girls and women. I was going to be stuck alone for life. Also, my viewpoint changed during the abuse. I no longer saw people as mostly good and nice, but probably evil disguised as good, especially men (even though I’m male myself) and doctors. The world was much darker and dangerous. It was scary now. There was risk of being hurt everywhere, and no one to protect me from it. In the early 2000s I went through three different therapists and talked about everything except for the sexual abuse. I just couldn’t get into that, so all that time and money was wasted. Then I went for over a decade without therapy. In 2018, it really hit me that I had been sexually abused and I had to deal with it. I finally saw a therapist in the spring of 2019 and she was horrible. Even though she specialized in sexual abuse, she didn’t take male survivors seriously. She didn’t seem to think that boys could be hurt as bad as girls. I saw her only about four times and gave up. In October 2019, I went to my 40-year high school reunion. It was devastating for me. I saw a woman I have very strong feelings for. She didn’t even know who I was. After that, I was then in the worst pain of my life, emotionally and psychologically. I knew I had to find a new therapist or I would hang myself. I saw a therapist just before Christmas of 2019. A few weeks later, I saw her a second time. She told me that though she worked with a couple other guys who had been sexually abused, she couldn’t help me. She didn’t say why. I found another therapist later in January of 2020. I still see her. I also go to group sessions which are a little helpful. It will take a long time, after holding a lifetime of pain building up inside me for 50 years, to see results. The beliefs I’ve had about myself and everything else have been a part of me since the sexual abuse and they’re not going to change easily. Now it’s November of 2021 and I’m 60 years old. I wonder what I’m supposed to do with the rest of my life besides the therapy.

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