In an interview with the British daily The TelegraphCaroline Darian says she cut the bridges with Gisèle Pelicot. Her mother would indeed reject the hypothesis that she was also able to be the victim of sexual violence on the part of her father, Dominique Pelicot. A denial, who provoked a new wave of family suffering. But how to explain such misunderstandings? And why the fact of looking for the truth divides the members of the same family, instead of bringing them together? Amélie Boukhobza, a clinical psychologist.
“I will never forgive him”: the words that seal the breakup
Is Caroline Darian the great forgotten of the Mazan trial? Yes, to believe his statements. While she claims to have been a precious support for Gisèle Pelicot for almost four years, she regrets having been “abandoned ” by his mother in court.
“My mother refuses to believe that I could have been raped by my father too. And for that, I could never forgive her, never”, She admits in everyday columns The Telegraph.
Gisèle Pelicot indeed maintains that her father “was incapable of doing this“But she also criticizes her daughter for doing it”too much“Publicly.
“”Do you know what my mother told me several times during this trial? “”Stop giving you show. “So that’s what reality really looks like behind the scenes“Continues the young woman.
Dark but resolved, Caroline Darian nevertheless decided to file a complaint against her father, accusing him of administering him “psychoactive substances“And to have committed to him”Sexual abuse“.
Behind the mediated legal proceedings and interviews, the injuries therefore accumulate within the Pelicot family, making reconstruction – for the mother and the daughter – all the more difficult.
Cutting facts can appear “as the only refuge”
For Amélie Boukhobza, this explosion of the family unit is not really surprising: the overflow of suffering can completely weaken, even shake, the links.
“Behind these silences, are often hidden impossible injury to put in words, or too painful to hear. When a drama arises, everyone tries to survive as he can. For some, to speak and seek to be recognized in his pain becomes a necessity. For others, to cut himself and to refuse to face what happened appears as the only refuge”, says the psychologist.
Thus, it is possible that Gisèle’s pain is too large for her to accommodate that of her daughter. “What to blame a woman who was drug addict and raped without his knowledge ? Does it still have a sufficient balance to bring something other than its own survival? Nothing is less certain. Denial is a psychic protection which allows to continue to hold, even at the price of the link. Because recognizing the suffering of the other is necessarily confronting his own, but also her shortcomings as a mother. And in this case, everything can collapse “, recognizes the expert.
It is nevertheless difficult to fully understand the refusal to be able to hear the words of his daughter unless the denial does not unconsciously seek to preserve what cannot be … “It is both crazy to be able to say of this man that he would never have been able to do this to his daughter (knowing what he was capable of!), But ultimately is it a way of protecting his daughter by leaving the image of the “intact” father“advances Amélie Boukhobza.
Between support and betrayal, a relationship impossible to rebuild
Caroline feels betrayed, invisible, even denied in what she has experienced. “So she prefers to cut, rather than still colliding with this new wall of misunderstanding … and, in fact, we understand that she wants her mother, that she reproaches her for not having protected her”, concludes Amélie Boukhobza.
In this drama, mother and daughter share a common suffering, but seem condemned not to be able to recognize it together.