“In April 2019, I got into trouble at work. My Taking up my position was going badly, and I was faced with hierarchical superiors who did not take my alerts into account. My company suggested I consult a coach, with whom I only had one session. During our session, she said this sentence to me: “Married [le prénom a été changé afin de préserver l’anonymat], you are mistreated in your position, why do you let people talk to you like this? You have the resilience slider abnormally high… Do you know where that comes from?”
This remark acted like a trigger. I knew. I knew why I was resilient. Because I suffered repeated rape from my brother as a child. I never forgot them, I didn’t have traumatic amnesia, but until that moment I had never told anyone about them. I came out of this session, and I said to myself: I have to take care of this.
When I got home, I told my husband about it. We have three children, we have spent our lives together and we are very close, but in nineteen years of living together, I hadn’t said anything to him. He listened to me. He held me in his arms and we cried together. He told me : “I don’t know what to do, but I’m here.”
Then I told one of my best friends, who is a psychiatrist at the hospital, and she referred me to a specialist. I went to see him, and I started digging all this up. At 47, I started to take care of myself. From my first visit, I understood that I was ready to talk to my parents about it, and that it was necessary. I was mature.
A peephole between the rooms
So I decided to write them an email explaining what had happened, and why I had never talked about it until then. I was raped regularly by my brother between the ages of 7 and 14. He’s five years older than me, so he was 12 when this started. When I wrote them this message, they were still living in the last apartment where the rapes had happened, and there were still traces of what had happened. My brother had put a peephole between his room and mine, he had pierced the wall. The hole was still there, hidden by a painting. I talked to them about it. I also clarified to them that I was not considering taking legal action, that that was not the purpose of the message.
My mother called me. On the phone, she told me: “The three of us need to see each other, you need to come to your senses, it’s not possible.” She absolutely wanted me to go to their house, to this apartment, and to talk. For me, it was impossible, I needed a neutral place. We ended up agreeing to meet at a restaurant.
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