Here is Charlotte Pudlowsky's second incest podcast.
In this second part, she asks the question "Why do relatives not hear from victims of incest?".
A person who is the victim of sexual violence in his family will suffer more or less direct threats to silence him.
In my case, they were multiple.
Silence by physical, real threats.
The guru threatened me with a pointed knife under my right breast. "If you speak I will kill you and I will kill your family". He used a burglar intrusion in our home who threatened my mother and injured my father to back up his claim. Threatened by dogs, Dobermans who roamed roaring around the cages they had locked me in when I was very little. Threatened by multiple chokes, ties to my arms, my legs, my neck to show me that if they wanted to I could die, there, now. Threaten by punching me in the back.
Silence by threats to my family.
If you speak up, your parents will be banned from the cult. Because of you, they won't have a house anymore, nothing. Threat on my brothers and sisters, my childhood friends ...
Silence by putting the responsibility and the guilt of the rapes on me.
If you speak, you will destroy a good man who does so much good for the world, for the poor, for society. By your fault all this will stop, people will suffer, people will be abandoned. Because of you, after all the love we've given you, everything we've done for you, he'll go to jail. You will have destroyed, dirty it all. The guru loves you you know?
Silence by refusing to see the blatant signs of adults around.
The guru received me in his confessional room. There was his bed in this room. During the confessions with the priests, adults were in the room next to it, just behind the door ... He installed me just above his house and prohibited access to other people when he taken from his home and taken into the care of my parents.
Silence because when we speak, we are told to be silent.
My maternal grandmother told me "not to want to know anything". My father didn't believe me and repeated everything to the guru. And as a result, a rapist, a priest was added to the list of my executioners. My father later raped me.
Silence because when we speak, people forget or do not ask questions.
As a child I spoke to one of my friends. Following this, we had to move urgently. My friend had come to "make sure I was okay" and then disappeared from my life. An adult had caught my rapist on me and then ran away from the cult in the middle of the night. She was an adult and did nothing, said nothing.
I have had numerous injuries to my sex and anus. No one asked about how and why I had it. I was given something to treat, wash, disinfect, but nothing else.
I'm mad. And strangely enough, I'm more angry with the adults who let it go than my rapists themselves.
I was very close to my maternal grandmother and my aunt. But when I became aware of my dissociation, I was no longer able to go and see them. I was angry with him. I blame him for telling me to shut up. She could have prevented that. At his funeral, I didn't shed a tear. Only the anger was there.
I still feel angry with my paternal grandparents. They knew the violence their son was capable of and did nothing. They had come to see our living conditions in the sect and I had found letters exchanged proving it. They knew and did nothing. One of my cousins had been brought up by them. I did not understand why they had not taken the same steps for us. I was jealous. It was all unfair! Why had they abandoned me?
The cult members oscillated in their remarks towards me between admiration, jealousy, resentment. They constantly sent me back to the feeling of being an accomplice in the abject acts that I was undergoing. One of them even called me a "groupie" from the guru's family. I was criticized for my "privileged status", my proximity to their family.
Even today, these adult former members of the sect blame me for a certain responsibility in what I lived. I was part of this family, I married the son of the gurus. I am therefore guilty, I sought it, wanted it. For them, I said "yes". They forget that I was a child and refuse to hear that the violence started when I was very young. They refuse to look at their own responsibility, their active part in my conditioning from childhood. And thereby they refuse to think back to the past and reflect and analyze all the times they have seen me with the guru and become aware of all the signs that should have alerted them.
Speak, is also taking the risk of losing a relationship.
When I was around 11 years old, I spoke to my father, he was not the same. He stopped hugging me. Then he became one of my rapists some time later.
When I spoke to my mom a few years ago, it changed our relationship. We were both very "tactile". We often hugged each other, we kissed ... Now, when she looks at me or talks to me, I feel a fear in her. Fear of doing wrong, afraid of saying wrong ... Understanding what I had experienced, I had an extremely hateful passage towards him. I took a lot of distance. Now that our relationship has calmed down, she is very afraid of hurting me, does not dare to say or do anything. She doesn't dare call me anymore for fear of not knowing how to react, what to say to me ... It broke something in our relationship.
Just before my brother died, his suicide, I told him about the domestic violence I was experiencing. My brother said he was responsible for not saying anything at my wedding when everyone around whispered that my marriage was "arranged". A few months later, he committed suicide. I can't help but feel responsible for his death. Maybe if I hadn't spoken, her traumatic, dissociative memory wouldn't have rekindled? Maybe he would still be alive? Maybe if I had been able to understand, to accept my diagnosis of TDI faster then I could have explained to him what he was going through, why he was having these flashbacks ... maybe we could have we support...
How many friendships have I lost following my revelations?
How many told me "it's too hard for me"?
Since then, I have learned to make it "less hard" for people.
I keep saying but if the others remain silent, absent ... I no longer try to convince them, I no longer waste my time trying to touch them, wake them up, make them understand.
I learned to have almost no friends, to have only a very small circle around me. I learned not to justify myself, to feel guilty, to cry over abandonment and cowardice.
I learned to punctuate my messages and contacts with others with trivial and insignificant things. "My daughters are doing well, school is going well for them. What about you? How are you?" While inside I only have one question for them: "Did you hear what I told you? Did you read my article? Do you believe me? Hear me? Why don't you call me back? Why don't you tell me about it? Why are you pretending nothing has been said? "
Another way of telling me to shut up. Again, always, this injunction to silence. Move along, nothing to see...
And these observations and analyzes of the mechanisms of silence at work in the inces-killer rape make this ubiquitous question "why didn't you speak?" even more painful, even more generating anger, screaming and rage inside, a feeling of injustice ...
How? 'Or' What ? How DARE YOU ask this question?
Whereas the only question to ask in this case is "Why did I refuse to see?". "What have I been through that prevented me from hearing you, seeing you, protecting you?"
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