Lady Gaga addresses the impact of her rape: 'I tried to erase it from my brain'

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Lady Gaga addresses the impact of her rape: Talks about PTSD

Lady Gaga has opened up about her struggle as a sexual assault survivor and how the experience left a lasting impact on her life. The 32-year-old singer talked about her plight in a revealing interview with Vogue Magazine.

Lady Gaga has opened up about her struggle as a sexual assault survivor and how the experience left a lasting impact on her life.

The 32-year-old singer talked about her plight in a revealing interview with Vogue magazine. Gaga opened up about being raped at the age of 19 and said "it took years" for her to come to terms with what had happened to her.

“No one else knew," she told Vogue. "It was almost like I tried to erase it from my brain. And when it finally came out, it was like a big, ugly monster. And you have to face the monster to heal.”

But this is not the first time the singer has candidly talked about the incident.

In 2015, Gaga told Howard Stern in an interview on his Sirius XM radio show that she has PTSD symptoms from the rape. And after years of privately dealing with her trauma, the singer decided to come out and address it head-on.

“For me, with my mental health issues, half of the battle, in the beginning, was, I felt like I was lying to the world because I was feeling so much pain but nobody knew," she admitted. "So that’s why I came out and said that I have PTSD because I don’t want to hide — any more than I already have to.”

The star even went on to detail the PTSD symptoms she deals with.

“I feel stunned. Or stunted. You know that feeling when you’re on a roller coaster and you’re just about to go down the really steep slope? That fear and the drop in your stomach? My diaphragm seizes up,” she explained. “Then I have a hard time breathing, and my whole body goes into a spasm. And I begin to cry. That’s what it feels like for trauma victims every day, and it’s . . . miserable. I always say that trauma has a brain. And it works its way into everything that you do.”

The "Star Is Born" actress also recently opened up about not feeling like the prettiest girl in the room and working to channel that feeling into her new movie role.

"I'm so insecure," she revealed to the LA Times. "I like to preach, but I don't always practice what I preach."

Gaga revealed that during her audition for the new film, directed by Bradley Cooper, her co-star wiped off her mascara, concealer and blush before the screen test, and she felt ugly.

"It put me right in the place I needed to be, because when my character talks about how ugly she feels — that was real," she said.

The Grammy award-winning singer also said she had a difficult time trying to tap into the introverted character of Ally in the film and said that Cooper helped her access her vulnerable side and embrace her insecurities.

“When I started out, I was not the most beautiful girl in the room,” the singer said in an interview with Variety, recalling her early days in the industry and the similarities between her and her character in the film.

“[Producers] wanted to take my songs and give [them] to other singers but … I held on to them. They made suggestions about how I should look. I didn’t want to be viewed like other women, be sexy like other women. I wanted to have my own vision.”