“The Nanny” actress Fran Drescher is continuing to open up about how being brutally attacked during a 1985 home invasion changed her life.

The actress previously told Larry King that two men had been convicted and sent to prison after breaking into her home, stealing her possessions and raping her and her friend at gunpoint when she was in her late 20s, according to a 2002 CNN story. The emotional scarring lasted long after.

“Afterward, I didn’t really get into my feelings or my vulnerabilities,” Drescher, now 61, told InStyle in an essay published Tuesday. “I never wanted to come off as ‘weak,’ so I just kind of buried it and got on with life. For the next 15 years I focused on working extra hard, making everybody else happy and being a caregiver. I was busy with ‘The Nanny,’ and I lived in the oxygen-thin air of other people saying how hard I worked and how nice I was.”

Drescher was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 2000.

”It was strange — and kind of poetic — that my reproductive organs, of all things, had cancer,” she continued. ”But it was also an amazing affirmation that pain finds its way to exactly the right place in the body if you don’t deal with it. Since I hadn’t been paying attention to my own vulnerabilities, my pain from the rape lodged itself in my uterus. No one else around me had cancer. That was a rude awakening.”

Moving forward, Drescher wants other women to learn from her mistakes and take active control of their lives.

”Don’t ignore something and hope it goes away or drive yourself into an early grave because you feel like you have too much stuff to do for everyone else,” she said. ”That is a pitfall women often experience. I’m here to say, ‘Stop that!’ ”

If you are a survivor of sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673) or visit hotline.rainn.org/online and receive confidential support.