Yaiza was a victim of sexual abuse when he was four years old. The aggressor was his cousin by maternal part. The vexations lasted until it had six. Hell. A conviction that she would not be aware until the years passed. The aggressor continued with his life. She tried to understand and assimilate that she was a victim.
Even today he continues to work on his recovery. It is a life task. A scar that stops suppurating but stamps an indelible brand in the body and mind of those who have suffered childhood abuse. Yaiza Sanz tells us how his way has been to this day. He does it with strength and a dose of reality and pragmatism worthy of those who have looked at the pain in front. A brave who, without knowing that he was, took a step forward to continue walking along a spine path.
«I broke my silence at 18, at home. I didn’t know what I was saying or how to explain it, But I felt that I needed to tell what they had done to me when I was little because I wasn’t good. I told my parents and I had the great luck that they listened to me with love and respect, and that they believed me from the first moment, ”he says.
At that time his Second Viacrucis. Identify as a victim of child sexual abuse before others, defend what he lived, who believed her and fight to calm that pain she felt inside and prevented her from leading a life to the use of any teenager.
But, although his parents believed her, “nothing else happened,” he says. «Family gatherings continued, everything remained the same. It was like a “we believe you, but we are not going to do anything about it.” And I accepted that perhaps those were the conditions. So I lived for ten more years, in silence, until, with 27 years, I felt that I needed to do something with all that. I needed to place everything somewhere».
And so it was. There will be those who say that he armed himself with value to give way to his truth, but rather it was the beginning of a catharsis, a “enough” with an instinct of survival of which they use only those who have lived their face B of childhood. “Sharing it meant starting to put the pieces in place.”
Until reaching the point of needing to verbalize to cure, he raffled how the nightmares could remember that they crossed his mind in puberty: «You always feel it. You have memories, images that return again and again. But you don’t have a narrative clear. It simply comes a point where you say: I don’t know what this means, but I need to tell. You don’t know if it’s serious, if it’s your fault, if you provoked it. But what you know is that you no longer want to continue loading that silence.
It was time to tell. And its consequences. «Everything becomes much more difficult. One thinks that speaking it solves it, but in my case it was the opposite. By telling it and putting words, you realize the magnitude of what happened to you. Until then you had buried it, you had minimized it, but when you verbalize it, there is no turning back. You see the pain, the consequences, How your self -esteem, your relationships, your sexuality, your way of seeing the world has affected. It is very hard to become real awareness of all that».
As Yaiza describes, everything is affected. «When something like this happens to you at such an early stage of your life, everything you build is then conditioned by that wound. Your links, your way of understanding love, intimacy, your body, your limits, or their lack, everything is crossed by that experience ».
A fatal experience that, according to the Anar Foundation, suffers between 15 % and 22 % of women and between 9.7 % and 15.5 % of men. Data on children’s abuses shock: 60.8 % of victims are between 13 and 17 years old, 2.5 % suffer from some type of disability and in 75 % of cases it is produced by family, friends or members of the near environment. «It is an immense social problem because, in addition, many times, even if you tell it, families prefer to do nothing since accepting what has happened means breaking the family structure, and many people do not know or do not want to do that. It is easier to blame the victim than to assume the truth. To her already her parents, who supported her from the first moment, turned their backs on the rest of her relatives, “not because they did not believe me, but because assuming it involved too many things. They left me alone, making me feel that the fault was mine ».
He never denounced because «although I had that need, I also have to protect myself. I know the judicial system and I don’t want to expose a judge to tell me that I am not right. I understand social responsibility, but I also have the right to take care of myself. And many victims do not want to report for that. For me, telling and talking about it is a way of doing justice ».
So is the initiative that decided to stand up to help people who had gone through the same traumatic experience as her. Thus arose “we are great,” a meeting point in which to “know, grow and pamper all the plots of your life.” «When I made public my story I found something I didn’t expect: I wasn’t alone. There were thousands of people who had lived the same. In my therapy process I started sharing in networks how I felt, how the therapy helped me … and there I understood that it was not just a problem of abuse, so it was mental health. The need to create a space that people could go when they didn’t know what happened to them or who could help them were born.
Now, that small project on social networks has taken shape until it becomes a group of psychological support and monitoring professionals. In fact, Yaiza, 34, now studies psychology to exercise the profession.
((H2: “Born again”)))
She knows well what “living in constant therapy.” Yaiza has been hand in hand with your therapist seven years to get ahead. «It has been very hard and thousands of euros invested to achieve the total reconstruction of my life from the foundations. I had to break with everything from a very early stage and build again in all areas. But here we are. He acknowledges that it is not an easy path, but it is necessary since if not, “it would have allowed that experience to condition my entire existence. Infancy and adolescence have already stolen; I was not going to allow my adulthood to also take away.
For her, “We are great” is much more than a center of communion and help with people who face their traumas, «It is a way of understanding that being great has nothing to do with having a perfect life. Life is many times shit, and we do what we can with the tools we have. Being great is also accepting that ».
She has accepted it and a few weeks ago ended her therapy after four different processes. «I hope I have to return. Today I can say that what I lived does not hurt or condition my existence, but that has been thanks to many years of work, ”he says.
Years of looking inside and checking that, in doing so, to the mirror, the world falls apart. “It is very hard to know that the aggressor continues with his life so normal while you try to heal, therefore, the victims of children’s abuses live a lot of dissociated time, it is the only way to survive.”
Now Yaiza already lives. Look at life with desire. Share your life with your partner. Smile. He is not afraid or shame. His fight is now to help others.