My paradise is crumbling under the weight of this agony

This is what I've been looking for. Listeners are great, but I've found them to be more preoccupied with offering advice on how I should handle my own sensitive situation and while I have found a listener who is less likely to offer advice, it seems like nobody is really interested in actually allowing me to simply lay it all out on the table. Everyone has opinions and advice for how to handle my life, or ideas for bridging a relationship I don't want to fix, or sometimes it even seems like I'm just a bother and they are very busy. So, to the forums I have run to discover a place where I can lay it all on the table.

I have very carefully crafted this over the course of a few days. I'm generally a very thorough person and accustomed to writing detailed reports for work. This is similar, in a way, yet it's excruciatingly difficult and I would not recommend reading if you are very sensitive. I have worked through a lot of the physical effects this has on me in order to give a complete overview of my experience. It's been very rough and I sincerely hope that someone, even if it's just me, will benefit from this.

Hello, I'm Robbie. I have overcome a lot of hardship in order to build what I consider to be a perfect life. I'm an adult with over three decades of life experience. I have a great job doing something I love, I own a home, and I'm married to a beautiful woman. I enjoy quite a comprehensive list of hobbies and volunteer with several organizations in my spare time. All of this in spite of getting off to a rough start as a kid.

I was born and remained the only child of my mother and father. My father was a cruel and merciless animal. What began as a game of chasing me around the basement with a belt suddenly took a brutal turn for the worse as I grew into my early teens. He was regularly beating me as if I were an adult deserving of a severe and unforgiving punishment. At the hands of this beast, I suffered multiple broken bones, knockouts, bloody noses and agonizing pain. He was able to cover up his attacks with stories about a rambunctious, accident-prone kid who frequently started neighborhood fights. In fact, he staged fights with teenage bullies. I can't be certain, but it's my belief that they were paid pawns in his unrelenting war against me.

I spent years enduring the savage terror of this sadist. When he called for me to come to him, I remember feeling like an inmate on death row. It only took once for him to break the idea of avoiding the inevitable. The one time I failed to answer to his calling for me, he served me a beating I wouldn't soon forget and a broken collarbone. I remember wondering when, and sometimes wishing, that his beatings would end in my death. I can't recall how often the beatings ended in my apparent blacking out only to be awakened by pounding, throbbing, aching, unbelievable pain of being shoved into some unnatural position and locked away in the dark closet.

My childhood ended with a more celebratory note. In a desperate attempt to end his reign of terror, I bet everything on either getting him assault me in front of witnesses or kill me behind closed doors. I took a chance and risked my life by answering one of his commands with a big, "f*** you," in front of his work buddies at an employee family function thrown by the company he worked for. It worked and he swung at me, landing his fist to my face and breaking my jaw in front of everyone. It was the best day of my life. He went to prison and I never heard from him or saw him again.

I was on cloud nine, after that. I completely closed that chapter of my life. I never even told my wife, or anyone else, anything more than my father had abandoned my mother and I. I was done with him and I had won the war. I was confident, after all I had been through. I felt invincible and powerful for surviving and winning against my arch enemy. And, that confidence won me many more things in this life. I graduated high school, went to college, got a great job making more money than I could imagine as a kid, married a wonderful wife and never looked back.

That is, until a recent phone call for me at work. An ordinary phone call that started with an ordinary, "Hey, Robbie..." A voice I hadn't heard in 20 years sent me into an immediate state of humiliating panic. I pissed my pants, at work. "Do you know who this is?" questioned the voice as my head swam and I stuttered back an answer in disbelief. Of course, I do. It hit me like a tsunami, as he continued with a weak apology and a request to meet up. Shocked and shaking, I managed to stutter, "f*** off," into the phone before hanging up and locking myself in the bathroom to hug the toilet for the next hour.

Since that first call, he has followed up with another plea for forgiveness and another invitation to lunch. Knowing his sick and twisted mind, I can't help but to think he knows what this is doing to me. I have spent hours vomiting and dry heaving, waking up in the night soaked in sweat, panic-stricken and feeling like I'd run a marathon in my sleep. My mind is overwhelmed with a range of emotions I'm not sure I could describe. My time is consumed with the past as I find myself frequently losing control over myself. I feel as if my paradise is crumbling under the weight of this agony.

And that is where I stand, now