Violated in childhood, I only managed to talk about it after my pregnancies

I was 15 when I was sexually abused in a burglary gone wrong. My family was there, but they didn't know at the time that the attacker had raped me. Following this ordeal, I kept silent for 20 years. I felt like keeping quiet was the best thing to do, to protect my family and protect myself. I then went on with my life, burying this trauma deep inside me.

Traumatic amnesia: forgetting to protect myself

However, even if I had decided to put it aside to forget, this trauma had an impact on my daily life. I was in hyper-vigilance and control, with everyone. I had a hard time letting new people into my life because they were potential abusers, in my subconscious of course. So I was very suspicious and I gave little confidence. I had also totally dissociated my body from my mind. I had locked myself in my mind and I no longer experienced my body. I had to come across my husband, a good, patient man, who knew how to go at my pace to succeed in trusting a man again. After months without sex, I felt compelled to briefly confide in my reasons for taking my time. He didn't ask any more questions than that.

Pregnancy, as a reminder of memories

I was then lucky enough to be pregnant. But during my third pregnancy, the memory resurfaced. I was pregnant with a girl after having two boys. I projected my fears and my trauma onto this birth. I remembered the events, I had flashes... but I chose to bury the question even deeper. When my baby girl was born, I had great difficulty sleeping, but I blamed these problems on my children. But the more they grew up, the more they spent their nights and the more my nightmares remained present. Busy with my children, my husband, my work, I once again decided to turn a blind eye to the problem. I had a fulfilling family life, but deep inside I felt like an emptiness inside.

Free speech and no longer project your fears onto your children

When my daughter turned 10, we were in the midst of #MeToo. The Weinstein affair had come to light and we came across a television report. At her age, I thought she was not even aware of these issues and I sent her to her room. I was afraid of my own trauma and realized it was time for me to deal with this pain. Following a series of deaths in my family, including my 15-year-old cousin, the age I was at the time of the rape, I asked myself: "How do you want to live your life today?" I realized how much this silence served me. I started to release my speech to a close friend and his words helped me a lot. I worked on myself a lot through personal development and ended up going to see a therapist. The therapeutic work allowed me to free myself from the weight of shame and guilt.

How can I talk about it with my family and children?

At the end of my therapeutic work, I opened my blog Les Résilientes and I created my association, to organize discussion groups. I often shared posts on social media and so I wondered about telling my children about it. I didn't want them to find out about it online or from someone else. My past belongs to me, I had made peace with it and I wanted to be able to share this experience with my children in the way I wanted. Thanks to the work I had done, it was not a traumatic story that I was able to entrust to them. I chose to go through the tale, to make them understand the moral of the story, tested by the little girl that I was: after 20 years of silence, she managed to talk about it and she feels much better.

The importance of resilience

I find that the choice of words is crucial and that is also why I often insist on the term resilience. I recognized myself there more than in that of victim. Being recognized as a victim is necessary to accept what happened to us, without minimizing it. But in the term victim, there is also a sort of fatality, passivity, a form of powerlessness. I didn't want to be a victim all my life, because I don't know any happy victims. For me, resilience shows that after a hard ordeal in life, we have the right to happiness, we have the right to exist. It doesn't negate the ordeal I've been through, but it's like a new start, full of hope. To be resilient is to choose to live. Whatever the ordeal, we deserve a happy, free and chosen life.