Despite the challenges, Sandra found the strength to speak about her experiences, emphasizing the importance of communication to overcome trauma. Her testimony sounds like a call to give a voice to those who cannot speak.
“Hello, my name is Sandra and I am here to testify about the traumas of my childhood. I want to testify to give a voice to those who cannot or do not succeed. I have always been a person who is very open about communication and I have always felt that there is no taboo, that it is not our fault and that we need to talk about it. I come from a family of Spanish immigrants who came to Belgium in 1963, after Franco’s Spanish war. We were always used to our parents being silent and there was that taboo of “we are silent, we say nothing. But I always took the side of ‘I don’t keep silent and I talk about it’.”
Sandra continues by describing her difficult childhood, marked by her mother’s absence and care by the justice system. “From my birth to the age of three, I was placed in a nursery, often an annex of the maternity hospital. I lived in a group with other children. At age three, justice decided I could come back to live with the rest of my siblings.”
She talks about the complexity of family relationships after this early separation. “We don’t really have that sibling bond, we just share a common name. I am now a mother of two children and I see that the relationship is completely different. As a child, I had a sibling relationship but we were and are strangers to each other.
Sandra explains that her childhood memories are tinged with feelings of abandonment and mistrust. “I always had that feeling of abandonment, the feeling of not being wanted. The first three years of life are crucial for a child. I didn’t have that bond with my parents. That made me distrustful of adults and I’ve always had trouble trusting others.”
She explains how these traumas affected her relationships as an adult, especially her love relationships. “I was so afraid of being abandoned that sometimes I accepted toxic relationships. I was someone who came across as strong and very tough, but that was armor.”
Finally, Sandra stresses the importance of talking about her experiences so as not to let them eat up inside. “We are left with all these feelings inside and it eats us up. I was fortunate to be able to write and draw to express myself, which helped me survive.” This very thought is reflected in the design of the beads that will make up the artwork to be inaugurated on Oct. 10: each bead expresses a story and feelings….
