Here is a video that I share with you.
I listened to it and I find the journalist Charlotte Pudlowski very correct!
I have experienced incest in many different ways.
By my father, the one to whom I owe my genes, my birth, my father.
By the guru, who was my father in many ways. In the sect, he was considered "the father" of all, a spiritual father, the patriarch who guides and decides everything, and he told me that I was his "adopted daughter". When I was around 14, he took me away from my parents' custody so that I could live with him 500 km from my parents and he signed my report cards ... He was called by a name meaning " papa "in a dialect.
Priests, "spiritual fathers", guides in the faith, who were to absolve my sins, guide my soul ...
In this podcast, Charlotte Pudlowski discusses this taboo and complex subject of incest with her own mother and Julie and Daniella, two victims.
She asks the question: "Why such a long silence?" and explains that her family was built on the myth of the perfect family.
When I think about my story, my family story, this myth is the same.
In the sect, my parents were seen by other children as ideal parents, one of my best friends wanted to have my parents as a parent and told me so many times. The adults of the sect said that they envied our parents for having such beautiful children, so gifted ... We were constantly praised.
In my maternal family, the same image was conveyed, we were perfect, incredible, lucky, privileged ...
In my paternal family, we had a tense and complicated relationship. Far from them, my father criticized them enormously, belittled them. The guru demonized them in our eyes. When we were at their home, we played the role of the perfect, uncomfortable, angry, silent, distant ...
The sect pushed for this behavior constantly, it was "cultural". We all had to strive for holiness, perfection, self-giving, self-forgetting in order to help and love our neighbor, to sacrifice ourselves. The smallest gestures or thoughts of everyday life were dissected by the guru and all adults for this purpose.
Then she asks: "Why didn't you say anything?" and explains the fact that incest generally takes place intergenerational.
In my family, silence and secrets were the order of the day. I learned quite late that my father had had a first wife and other children. It was a secret and only the guru and a few members knew it. I also learned that my parents had "made a mistake" to have me because in the sect, to be able to engage in it, to receive the sacraments during the masses, they had to live like "brothers and sisters" and no longer have intimate relationships because they were "divorced-remarried" and it was forbidden by the Church.
My birth therefore began with lies and secrets, faults ...
Because of this secret, I hardly know anything about the history of my parents or my grandparents. My parents didn't talk about it.
Recently, I spoke with my mother and she told me bits and pieces of her childhood. When she went with her sister to her grandfather. The fact that they had to wash in an iron tub in front of the fireplace, naked and that her grandfather was watching them sitting in his chair. His constant escape attempts as he was always looking to grab them and put them on his knees to touch them. Once a teenager or she was in a cinema with a friend and a man had tried to touch her during the film.
As the journalist points out, I did not grow up in a normal family. I was not educated. My right to speak was denied to me. I learned to be quiet very early on and very quickly realized that no one would want to hear me.
I love my mother. She is a loving and tender woman. I never lacked love from her. She often told me that she loved me and I told her often. We were close enough, talked a lot, about everything, about nothing.
But from a very young age I knew that talking about rape or violence with her, I couldn't. Today, she is there, she accompanies me and supports me as she can. Again she tells me that she loves me, she tells me that she believes me today. She did not deny as some mothers face the horror of these revelations. It is the most beautiful proof of love that she could give me!
My mother has amnesia. Verry much. For some time now, with my sister, they have been trying to find the facts, the dates ... to help me. My mother remembers almost nothing.
Often it makes me angry inside. I blame her for not remembering, that my revelations don't "tilt" in her head and that she isn't able to corroborate what I'm saying.
Then I think of my maternal grandmother. A very loving grandmother too.
I was "her darling", her "favorite". I never lacked love from her when we went to visit her either. I could talk about anything and everything with her.
I once tried to tell her what I was going through. I must have been 11 or 12 years old. She immediately cut me off and said she didn't want to know anything.
I don't know anything about her life. I don't know if her father, my mother's grandfather did something to her. I would never know. Today they are both dead.
But I say to myself that maybe it comes from there?
This silence, this refusal to see and hear even the most obvious signs. My mother's journey, her life with an abusive husband, my father. The choice to live in the sect ...
She hadn't learned either.
"The silence that surrounds incest prevents us from seeing its magnitude".
It's true !
When I disclosed the incest that I had suffered and the rapes that I had been made to my family, many said nothing, answered nothing. I have no contact with them. My father's sister, his brother ...
What freed my word was the death of my father and the suicide of my brother. The death of my brother stirred up a loud scream in me and the death of my father made it possible for this cry to escape my lips.
I suffered incest, that's my story, but I didn't behave badly.
My right is to speak. I would not be silent anymore.
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