Bullied, Growing up a Victim: The Abuse Starts

I turned 9 years of age during my 4th grade year.  It was this same year when the abuse that traumatized me most began.
The boys in my school had a “game” they thought was fun to play.  The game amounted to sneaking up on someone and grabbing the unsuspecting class mate (boy) between his legs with the goal of squeezing hard enough to make him fall to the ground doubled over in extreme pain.

For some reason, they kept missing with me, time after time.  Well, on this one day, a group of boys in my class was determined to see that I “got my turn.”  The way they tried to accomplish their goal was to attempt to force me into the boys bathroom with the stated goal of taking my pants off and making sure I “got what was coming to me.”

By some miracle of heaven I found the strength to get away from them, so as to not be forced into the bathroom that day and have my pants forcefully taken off me and my privates handled in a very painful manner.

It would be almost 40 years later, at the age of 48, while I was sitting alone in a studio apartment that I would finally come to the realization that the events of this day became the very power sub-conscious reason I spent the rest of my public schooling life so afraid to go into a public restroom that I would pee my pants in public instead.

For the rest of my public schooling, with this very intense fear being added on to the fear I got from my mother’s influence, I became the kid who got teased and bullied almost every day.  During the rest of my 4th grade and all the way through 6th grade, if I was in school, I got hit and kicked at least once a day.  I actually enjoyed, and even prayed to be sick so I could stay home away from the bullies.  In addition to the physical abuse, there was a near constant barrage of verbal and emotional abuse.

It was not uncommon for a group of the students who abused me to go up to the teacher’s desk, being careful to stand so that the teacher could not see me, and then one of their group who wasn’t at the desk would come over to me at my desk and hit me, or mess up my paper work so I couldn’t get in-class assignments done.  My only defense in these cases was to yell out so the teacher would stand up to look around.

The kid who was at my desk abusing me would quickly run away as I yelled, leaving me to get reprimanded by the teacher for breaking the study silence.  I didn’t like being publicly reprimanded by the teacher, but it was easier than letting myself continue to get hit and kicked during class to the point that I couldn’t get my assigned work done.

The immediate and long-term effect of this type of in-class abuse was that I quickly became convinced that I had to work much harder and do things a lot better just to try and be somewhere near equal to everyone else.  I believe that this was how I got started with an obsession with trying to figure out how to “make no mistakes.”  Because I wasn’t able to figure out a way to get the bullies to stop torturing me, I learned to not trust any of my other instincts.  I learned instead to doubt myself and to expect that I would get things wrong.  There’s an old saying that says “Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right.”  I learned to be one who believed I couldn’t.  So when the teacher would call on me in class, rather than trust myself, I kept assuming I was going to be wrong.

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Thank you for taking time to read my story.  If you are personally able to relate to any portion of my story, please contact someone you can trust and make the decision to begin the potentially long and painful process of learning how to believe in yourself in a healthy way, and how to reach a point where challenging and potentially painful situations in the present no longer sends you back to relive a painful past.

I have done this.  I do not consider myself to be better than anyone else, but I do believe in exercising my right to not stay stupid.

By Dave Kemper
© Copyright 2014 by David William Kemper.  All right reserved

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