Remembering child abuse after a stroke at 47 years old

BarcelonaShe doesn't know if it was a smell, a feeling of cold in body and spirit, but on January 24, 2014, Marta Plujà says she almost had to die to be reborn. That day she suffered a stroke that helped her, definitively, to “wake up” and “break the silence” that she had carried since she was very young without even knowing it. Nor does she know when the sexual assaults and rapes by a relative began or ended. She calculates it based on the aggressor's biography, who is 10 years older and was already of legal age. “I would have been 9, 10, 11 years old,” she says.

No one around her noticed anything strange in the adult's behavior or in the sadness and loneliness of the child and adolescent Marta. Without realizing it, she finds herself between blaming her parents for not having known how to interpret their daughter's despair and understanding because there were other problems at home and that, to put it in context, in the late 70s nobody talked about it.

Plujà (Camprodon, 1967) is a journalist and as part of the therapy to recover from the trauma of recurrent rapes, she wrote Ca la tia Justa (Ediciones Oblicuas), in which she uses autofiction to explain the control and power the aggressor exercised over her, but also to delve into the painful process of becoming aware of the violence suffered to begin the path to recovery. “Right now, I have found peace, I have gone through the process – she explains while having an infusion –. I don't care if people know who the aggressor is or not; I also don't care what he thinks or what happens to him, it's no longer my problem”.

Next to her is Pilar Polo, a psychologist from the Vicki Bernadet Foundation, a reference entity in the care of sexual violence in childhood. They met when Plujà presented her with the proofs of the book, and Polo immediately saw that it was a useful text for combating these crimes, which affect one in five children. She highlights that it can help focus the attention of people who "have looked the other way when they shouldn't have, those who can't find the words to address the issue" or even, as in Plujà's case, "make those who have been silent speak".

For more than two decades, Plujà forgot the rapes, even though every time she saw the aggressor her soul was stirred. The lack of a safe space meant she never shared the assaults with anyone, not even with the personal diary she still keeps. It only contains one sentence connecting her to the man. Nothing more. It is "the law of amnesia" that covers up the pain, disgust, rage, and dissociates the person.

Until one day, about 25 years ago, she broke and verbalized her story for the first time. But it was a one-off episode because even with the therapy she started, she didn't bring up the subject again and buried the assaults. "There are those who want to remember and cannot, and there are those who want to forget and cannot. There are people who constantly have violence present, and others have very small memories that make them doubt whether it is true or if they are imagining it. Or, suddenly, there are people who remembered nothing and suddenly remember everything," explains the psychologist, referring to the brain's mechanisms and the fact that there is no pattern.

"14 pages non-stop"

In Plujà's case, the “helplessness and loneliness” she felt all alone in the emergency room due to the stroke was the turning point for her to realize that she could no longer remain silent and that, first, she had to explain it to herself, and then explain it to others. She admits that they were days of much crying, much pain, of being between ‘shame and guilt’ for having endured it, for not having known what to say to stop the assaults. They are two feelings, points out Polo, that "go hand in hand with silence".

Determined to reveal the truth, she wrote "14 pages in one go", encouraged by her therapist and for the next eight years she dedicated herself to shaping the narrative. "I have been silent enough!", she states. Once she unearths the rapes, the adult Plujà confronts her adolescence and youth in which she gets caught up in toxic relationships, which she now understands are "consequences of the assault". The violence, the lack of affection and love in the rapes –"games", according to the man–, the submission to the aggressor, the silence and the threats imposed by the adult –"it's our secret", "you'll like it when you're older", he repeats to her– "leave a mark on the body", points out Polo, for whom this second part of the book has an extra strength and value because it can be "the push to talk about uncomfortable things". And she indicates that while "everyone empathizes with a violated child", there isn't always as much understanding for the behavior of an adult who has been violated.

It is almost obligatory to compare Plujà's experience and book with that of the Frenchwoman Gisèle Pelicot, whom her husband offered so that "}unknown men could rape her while she slept. "Marta's book is braver because, unlike Mrs. Pelicot, she does remember everything she lived through and that is more painful", she points out. "Well, how lucky she is!", replies Plujà, who states she has "stripped herself bare" as an adult.