Globally recognised inspirational speaker, poet, and award winning author Lynn Hill, has faced many adversities in life, including being brutally raped at the age of fifteen.
On the Wellness Show with Megan Edwards, Hill shares how she found her path to mental health and turned her pain into purpose.
At the young age of fifteen, Hill survived a near death experience where she was sexually brutalized to a point that she lost consciousness.
“The level of brutality was so severe that the police thought a train had written over my face. It was a moment that was irreversible.
“While I was spared from death, as dead as I felt on the inside, I knew that I could not have gone through it for nothing. And I knew that my purpose was actually to find what that something was,” she said.
Hill had learned a few months after the traumatic event that she was not the first of her rapist’s victims, but rather she was the fourth victim in the church that she attended.
“I had to defend my truth in the Supreme Court ten months later. And I knew then that I was speaking already at the age of 16 on behalf of those who had not spoken out,” she said.
The man was released for the crime on R500 bail.
“Living in the same community, while obviously I didn’t attend the same church then, you are still living in fear, the fear of of being raped again, the fear of knowing that you’ve reported this person and he might send someone to come and kill you,” she said.
When Hill turned 17, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of the brutal rape. She decided to seek help and go to therapy.
“Therapy also didn’t quite work for me, because the therapist was someone that had not gone through what I went through. So when she said ‘I understand’, that was, in fact, the moment when my desire to study psychology was birthed. So out of my hurt, I chose to become a healer, which was part of the transmutation from pain to power.”
Hill later went on to obtain her Honours Degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of the Western Cape. Now she inspires women around the world to transcend adversity and deny victimhood.
* This article was published first by Magic 828. See original article here.
