The second half of Karen Paola

The year 2021, in the midst of a pandemic, Karen Bejarano (38) – better known as Karen Paola – was at home talking on the phone and suddenly she began to experience unpleasant physical symptoms: she was shaking, she felt nauseous and her heart was racing. He thought he was going to die, he was having a panic attack. He burst into tears . He tried with all the strength in his body to hold back the words that were about to come out of his mouth, but he couldn’t. Feeling vulnerable, accompanied only by her son, she confessed one of the things she had been hiding for years: The singer is a survivor of childhood physical and sexual abuse . Her attacker was a close relative who abused her from the age of nine until she was fourteen.

“The same afternoon, they left me hospitalized,” she said. “Just as a gunshot wound to the body can make you bleed, a wound to the soul that cannot be seen can kill you,” he says. These were weeks of soul searching and processing. “All this time, I carried the consequences of the abuse in my personality: I did not know how to set limits I wanted everyone to like me and do things well, but taking charge of that meant knowing myself again and being able to rewrite my story.

Was this the first time you said it?

“No. I told my mother, but she advised me not to say anything, to move on, and I trusted her judgment. We don’t have the tools, we’re not prepared as a society to contain others, no one teaches us that, and there is also the fear of the violence of the perpetrator, the insecurity, the questioning. Until that moment, I felt guilty, not a victim. And without any dispute”

No one around you noticed or approached you at any time?

“I have always been a girl full of activities: singing lessons, dance lessons, competitions. You couldn’t have suspected he was suffering from depression, you name it. Later, I became a functional woman, involved in many projects. I never stopped. I have always tried to see myself happy and make others happy. Quitting scared me a lot, learning that was also part of the therapy”

After this anxiety attack that paralyzed you, how did the therapeutic process go?

“Very complicated, because one of the things that scared me the most was telling my husband and my son. Fortunately Juan Pedro answered me ‘This is your story, I will not be an obstacle in your healing process. What you decide, we will do it and I will accompany you’ . A huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. Before starting the process, he didn’t understand certain things that were happening to me, he read my distance as if I had stopped loving him, for example. And I had no way of explaining it to him. The body also has memory, so certain caresses generated rejection in me and I didn’t understand the reason. When I was diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder with severe depression, we were able to start working on that and make everything transparent. »

She spent six weeks in the hospital, during which Karen, in addition to starting pharmacological treatment, began EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a technique that was initially applied to veterans and which, through reprocessing with eye movements or bilateral stimulation, has demonstrated positive results in trauma patients.

“As it was a pandemic, I couldn’t see anyone, but I shared with many people in hospital, who were going through difficult times for different reasons, but we connected from the same feeling: wanting to be better,” he remembers. During the treatment, Mekano’s former daughter was able, as she herself says, to build a bridge with this injured girl. “I found her and I promised her that everything was going to be okay, that I was going to make her dreams come true, that they were my own dreams.”

Between 2002 and 2004, Mékano It was one of the most watched television spaces by Chileans. Karen’s arrival on television, openly, at that time, took place at the age of seventeen and although the series was harshly criticized by the sexualization composed of women, Bejarano danced, sang and even starred in series, becoming a protagonist.

“I have good memories, but also It was the first time I felt ugly in front of the mirror. The first time I rejected my body “, counts. The teenager received a comment from a producer who looked at her and said: “Either you lose weight by Friday or you leave. We kicked you out and it was a Tuesday,” he recalls.

Karen suddenly reduced her food intake for a week. He says that he managed to lose a few kilos, but that he was fainting everywhere, without enthusiasm, without strength. Thus, a disorder that had tormented her for decades also took hold within her. “When I saw the things I could achieve, I didn’t stop, I set more goals with the floor, and that’s how I fought against anorexia and bulimia for many years of my life. We women have so internalized that being hungry is normal, that depriving yourself of certain foods is part of it, that I didn’t realize I had an illness. »

People on the street also talked about his body: “It happened to me several times that they stopped me and said to me: “Wow, you are very skinny, you don’t look like that on TV,” as if it was a compliment, and that then motivated me to continue losing weight. . It wasn’t until I had to be hospitalized that I saw this problem squarely in the face and it was part of this whole backpack of things that I needed to start solving. “I spent years feeling like my body wasn’t enough.”

Today you are no longer a teenager, you are almost forty years old, what is your relationship with your body?

“Today I question things and I see that I hurt myself. I ate poorly, I demanded too much of myself, I despised myself and I feel that I can no longer get that time back, all I have to do is take good care of myself and accept myself. When I was in Mekano, there was a very well-known show at the time called “Surgery of Body and Soul”, so in the corridors the producers approached you: “Karen, do you want to get operate? Would you like to have breasts? Would you like to get something?’, and This reinforced the idea that something was wrong with my body. . Today I have reflux from all the times I made myself throw up and it won’t go away. “I found myself with several gastric problems”

Do you think that in this day and age, a show like Mekano could be remade?

“The world has changed a lot and this was no longer possible. Today I see everything red flags. I remember we danced to a song called ‘The collarless” and we had to show the underwear thread on camera, we shook hands with colleagues because it was part of the show, we had to expose our lives even if we didn’t want to. I think we We all learned something from this period. Today I am the mother of a teenager and I see the generational changes. He’s a young person with the tools we taught him, he knows how to say no, ask for help and make decisions . As a mother, this calms me down a lot.

When you were hacked in 2017 and your nude photos were leaked, your former colleagues and people from the entertainment world criticized you, what happened to that? Has society punished you?

“A lot. It seems that a woman has a body and that enjoying it is a sin. I felt the judgment of the whole country. They said that I wanted to attract attention, that I wanted to appear, to create an impact , but the way my privacy was being violated was horrible, and no one cared or the effect it had on me, which was brutal. Plus, they were extorting me, so it’s a situation very difficult. Fortunately, the investigating police managed to find this person, but unfortunately the Chilean justice is responsible for cybercrime, there is no law that protects the victims. Today it is a pending case and I hope that when the resolution is handed down, the person responsible will be punished.

But the news was not the hack, which not only affected me, but also my father-in-law’s business, because once again the blame fell on me: “How come that you don’t take care of your cell phone? “Why are you taking pictures like that?”, people said. And this re-victimization is unfair. »

And today, being a more mature woman, after having gone through all these experiences, you decide to present yourself to the public again. Aren’t you afraid?

“I think I gained a learning experience and I don’t want that to stay with me anymore. . I think being an artist you have the opportunity to reach many more people. Music has a lot of power and I want to use it for great things. I also know that there is an excessive demand in this sector, where women in particular are expected not only to be talented, but also not to age, for example, but I feel ready .”

Last November 12, at the end of the Telethon, Karen Paola went on stage at Quinta Vergara and made a dream come true. As she listened to the screams of the audience and prepared to sing and dance to the hits that made her famous at the turn of the millennium, she closed her eyes and remembered a promise she made to herself since she was a child: that she was born to be a star, but also to be happy. It seemed like a new beginning .

With nearly a hundred thousand monthly listeners on Spotify and with a new video that exceeds 600 thousand views in a few days, she is not going to stop “I want to go international. May my music be heard all over the world and be a factor of change. Contribute to the lives of others. “Let people know that they can achieve their desires and overcome fear.”