The Hollywood Movie

Some years ago my life went through a real transition. Everything changed for me as a person. And although I am going to share with you some of my story, my goal in sharing is not about pity or wanting to be victim. It is about how sharing how going through adversity isn’t the end and that through adversity you can become stronger, you can see things clearer, you can learn and you can be more mindful.

I called this blog a ‘Hollywood Movie’ because when I finally shared my story with a friend one day, she said “OMG that shit just sounds like a Hollywood Movie”. She was right, but it wasn’t a movie it was my life and a struggle we had to go through to get to the other side. And I probably need to point out that I have worked hard at processing all this stuff but I am very mindful of my sensitivities and triggers to some things. Yes, my past does rear its ugly head sometimes.

So in the space of two years the following happened:

• In our quest to have another baby, I suffered five miscarriages. Absolutely devastating for me as a woman. I hardly spoke about it and after every procedure or loss, I got up the next day and went back to work. I suffered alone mostly and didn’t really talk to other people about how I felt. The inability to control my fertility and our desire to have another baby when we couldn’t, was just awful.
• We finally fell pregnant, the pregnancy was very tricky and I had a premature baby. Okay, we hear that people have premmie babies all the time but no one prepared me as to how hard this road would be and the emotional toll it would take on me and our family. For the first two years of our daughters’ life she was in and out of hospital due to breathing issues and viruses and there were days on end that I wouldn’t sleep because I felt I needed to watch over her so she could breathe. There were days I wouldn’t sleep at all and then get ready to go to work the next day and would pay someone else to watch her.
• We had previously bought an investment property as we were so keen to ‘be smart’ with our money and plan for the future. That plan didn’t go to plan as we hadn’t thought of variables such as having a sick infant. So as the financial pressure built up within our household and I was having so much time off on parental leave, I pushed my husband into selling the investment property. It had made a significant equity and my thought was that it would ease financial pressure. Oh how wrong I was……… The property had a fixed interest rate and although the house sold within a week, I wasn’t aware that I had to pay the bank back the fixed rate. So we sold the property and gave the bank $80,000 and walked away with stuff all. Lesson learnt – not a good idea to sell the investment property without advice. The financial pressure did not ease and my husband was definitely not happy.
• A close family member with a significant mental illness decided that I was the target of their rage. And despite my genuine attempts to help and support, I became the physical punching bag and emotional punching bag. Police and solicitors and psychiatrists were involved and it was messy! Having been physically attacked several times was pretty scary, but I never talked about it and kept going. I went to work every day and covered the bruises as best I could.
• My parents got divorced and that was really messy. I fought with my siblings and became passionate about my own views and values as I wanted them to be more involved than they were, in supporting our parents. That quest didn’t work. And as a therapist, some people leaned on me more than others and I felt it was my role to support them and hold their feelings.
• My husband’s parents got divorced too. And that was messy. Years of tensions built up and different family members took sides. We also fought with the family and my husband’s siblings. There was conflict all around us. We were so angry at everyone that it was hard to see the forest through the trees. My therapy skills were not so helpful during this phase as emotions take over and it is difficult to be impartial.
• My husband had a work accident and required months of physical rehabilitation and then was made redundant. Talk about stressful. No job and no income and no one wanted to hire him cause he had been on work cover. He did eventually get work, but the weeks in between seemed to go on forever and the financial emotional stress was definitely taking its toll.
• Then the big one……. a client at work tried to kill me and then threatened to kill my children. Yes, sad and confronting but true. I can’t say too much about it for legal reasons, but this event single handedly changed my life. Police and detectives and politicians and commissioners were all involved. It was a long process to go through the court system and get a crash course in how the system works. What I didn’t know was the lack of empathy and lack of understanding that those around me had about our situation (not entirely their fault though as I always greeted everyone with a smile and put one foot in front of the other). They never talk about it in movies, but the effect that this kind of thing has on you mentally and physically is underestimated and rarely talked about.   But in my true fashion, I waited for the dust to settle and in a few short weeks I went back to work. I kept saying to myself ‘I need to get back on the horse’. So the days began again working 8-5pm five days a week. No one ever asked me how I was doing (I sometimes think people don’t know what to say or aren’t able to handle what you say) and with all the family drama that was in the background, no one really understood what I was going though personally. My husband was angry at what happened to me and his perceived inability to protect his family. I was trying to support him and I cried in silence.
• Then a few weeks after going back to work, I get a phone call from my son’s school. They were having issues with his behaviour and he was apparently very emotional and teary (out of character for him). So I went to the school with the notion in my head that someone must be picking on him or hurting him in some way (definitely not my finest moment in reflection). I sat with my son in his teacher’s room and I asked him what was happening and why he was so sad. His words have stuck with me forever and it was a defining moment that changed everything……………. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “You look so sad mummy. I know that you nearly died and everything, and I would have missed you if you had of died. But I would have always remembered you as the mum that was always working” (I can’t even type that statement without crying). I began to sob, I hugged him and told him I was sorry and I promised that things would change. I promised him I would be more present and I would be a better mum.

What all this taught me was that although I felt I had to be strong and stay focussed for the family, my children had suffered too. I was so busy wrapped up in the business of my life, sweeping shit under the carpet and trying to move forward that I forgot that the children would have felt these tensions too. My whole family went through all this stuff in two years. Nothing by drama and stress. I didn’t need to be strong, I needed to show them that it was okay to cry and okay to have bad days. I needed to give them space to talk and share how they were feeling. And now more than ever I was determined to teach them that adversity doesn’t last forever.

So I made a decision to change everything. I found a therapist and I talked and talked and talked (okay I mostly cried). I had spent so long bottling all this up inside that I was hurting those around me that I loved the most. I was so focused on working and setting up our future that I forgot to live in the now and appreciate what I had and how lucky I was. I was actually very good at helping other people, but I forgot about the people I came home to every day.

Despite everything that happened and everything I felt I had endured, I became a better mum, a better wife, a better friend, a better sister and a better therapist. I grew to like and accept the new mindful me and I am okay with my past, my life and who I am. I began to see the world differently and I understood empathy at a deeper level. I changed my work hours, I changed the way I thought about things and spent more time with my children. I don’t regret my past because it taught me so much. I became stronger, more resilient and more focussed on what was important. There were times when I got angry and felt that the world was unfair, I remember thinking that I must have pissed someone off in my past life because I felt like I was being punished. But the skill was to focus on changing my language and thoughts about my past….. I could either get angry and think about ‘poor me’ or I could learn from it and change the language when I talked about it or thought it. By changing my language about these events, I was able to change the way I felt about it and thus change the way I behaved about it all. It was process……. And that is my favourite word (so my clients tell me). Everything about change takes time. Yes, you can decide to make changes, but to truly feel it and embrace it takes time. It is a process. A process worth going through.