“I live in fear of giving my love to someone who’s going to abuse it again.”
Meet Gracie*, one of 6 courageous Kiwis who shared their lived experiences with Authentic Storytelling for Mental Health Awareness Week 2021. This is her story.**
TW: Unwanted pregnancy, sexual assault, suicide, domestic violence
“I’m pretty good today. I had been feeling quite frustrated but then I had a big cry this morning and got out all that pent-up emotion and now I feel great, quite settled.”
26-year-old Gracie is the manager of a busy craft beer bar and lives with two flatmates in Ōtautahi Christchurch. “My nickname is Mama G. I’m sort of the Mum of the household. I think a lot of people take comfort in my nurturing side, even if it sometimes comes with tough love as well.” She says she is seen by herself and others as a worldly person with a lot of life experience. “For better or worse, I can really relate to other people’s feelings and emotions. I’m good at navigating my own way and helping others to navigate as well.”
She’s been in the hospitality industry for the last 6 or 7 years and thrives in the work, but acknowledges that it comes with some inherent challenges. “I love being able to provide a service and making people smile, but the downside is that it often comes with a sort of happiness hangover. You’ll have a really good and busy week; when it’s done you end up feeling quite depleted. Substance abuse is also rife and I’d be hard pressed to think of one friend in hospo who doesn’t struggle with some kind of mental health issue.”
When it comes to her own challenges with mental distress, Gracie is very matter-of-fact. “I had a really shitty 3 years from about 2016 to 2018. I was quite happy at the beginning of that time and in a really stable relationship, but then I fell pregnant and decided that motherhood wasn’t the path I wanted to take at that time. The partner I was with was very unsupportive of me and my mental health and he struggled with the possibility that we could have been starting a family. I had a termination and, a couple of weeks later, he broke up with me.”
While still reeling from the terminated pregnancy and the end of her relationship, Gracie says that she was drugged, sexually assaulted and left in a park in the middle of the Christchurch CBD. “I don’t remember ever interacting with the perpetrator on the night that it happened and I’ve only got very, very small glimpses of where I was. Afterwards, I visited the sexual assault clinic and did all the examinations and went to the police and everything. The person was found and the evidence was linked, but I had someone I knew in my ear telling me that if I pursued it I would ruin his life and any potential he had. In the end, the social pressure and the guilt got to me and I never pressed any charges.”
Remarkably, Gracie says that the worst of this traumatic period was still yet to come when, 6 months later, she met a partner “who destroyed the next 3 years of my life with narcissism, abuse and physical violence. I didn’t even realise how shit it was until I had come out the other side of it. I had no sense of how far down the track I was and how defensively I was living. It was only afterwards that I finally reached out and started looking after my mental health.”
As a self-described empath, Gracie looks back now and sees herself as an easy target for a narcissist. “Of all the things that happened over those 3 years, that abusive relationship and being a victim of Narcissism definitely had the longest-lasting effects on my mental health. I fell for it hook, line and sinker. It was almost textbook empath and narcissist. I was trying to look after him when my cup wasn’t just empty, it was smashed and burnt and I had literally nothing left to give.
“And as someone who has been suicidal before, myself, I was hugely triggered by the constant threat of him taking his own life. He lived in a halfway house for a while and I think we ended up in hospital 5 or 6 times because of his suicidal tendencies. The fear I felt then of losing someone I was so madly in love with was huge. It’s such a tricky situation because, of course, you never want to assume that someone is faking that mental state or taking the piss. But every time it happened, somehow I ended up being the one apologising for the situation that he was in. I understand now that it was a tool that he used to manipulate me. Because that’s how Narcissism works.”
When that relationship ended, Gracie sought counsel from her GP — who, unhelpfully, told her that all her problems could be solved with a 9–5 job and a good night’s sleep — and got a number of free counselling sessions through ACC. “I went and talked to a couple of different therapists, trying to find the right one. I did find quite a lot of useful information in the toolbox that is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and I was on anti-anxiety medication for about 3 years, but I decided at the beginning of this year to stop taking it. The ups and downs of coming off the meds have been fucking hard, but I’m really glad that I did it. The progress I’ve made since then makes me really proud.”
Gracie admits that she hasn’t always had a lot to feel hopeful about, and that she is still managing the repercussions of her past trauma. “I still have a big fear of giving my love to the wrong person and putting myself in that situation again. I live my life daily with the obsessive thought that my partner is going to leave me or my friends don’t really like me or that I’ll never be good enough for someone to love me unconditionally. Feeling not good enough has become a sort of core belief.”
She also reflects on the pregnancy that kick-started this period in her life. “Looking back, that was really the first of my adult trauma. I had been in a good space before that, but going through the process of wanting a termination and having to essentially declare myself mentally unfit to raise a child in order to qualify for one — back then, it wasn’t legal without that prerequisite — has really stuck with me. You could tell that the doctors and nurses knew all of the ways around it, but it was only last year that the law was finally changed to fully decriminalise abortion in New Zealand.”
Gracie now has a supportive partner who enables her to feel safe and heard without feeling embarrassed. She’s also learned that it’s the quality, not quantity, of the people in her life that matters. “I definitely have one or two confidantes that I can go to with anything, including my Aunty who does shift work with St John so I can text her at any hour and she’ll get straight back to me. I’ve also learned in the last year or so how to really get comfortable with my own company, which I think is something I kind of missed out on growing up. Creating time for myself and being reflective in my own company is a massive tool for managing my mental health.”
She’s also made the difficult but exciting decision to leave the hospitality industry she loves at the end of this year to pursue a career in nursing. “I’m not sure about the nuts and bolts yet, but I’m excited to get into mental health or triage nursing. I want to do hands-on treatment and emergency care because I feel like I have a really clear mental capacity for chaos and I want to use that to the advantage of myself and others.”
The same is true of sharing her story, she says. “I’m finally in a really good place where I’m happy to sit in my discomfort for the benefit of myself and other people. I don’t talk about my termination or my sexual assault or my abusive relationship with anyone at all, really. But I know that it can have quite a profound effect on others. There was someone who heard about my past relationship and reached out to me a couple of years ago to say that my story had helped them realise they, too, were in an abusive relationship and it had empowered them to leave. Those are golden box moments. I will remember that forever.”
Her best advice to others is not to look for kit-set solutions to mental health. “There is no cure-all answer. Counselling didn’t work for me and I don’t think it’ll ever work for me. But you just have to try different things and find what does. Look after yourself the way you need to be looked after, not how you think other people want you to.”
* Some identifying details in this series have been changed to protect the identity of the participants.
** The stories in this series reflect the lived experiences of the participants only, and are not intended to be used as a reference for diagnosis or treatment of any condition. If you are experiencing mental distress, please find emergency resources through Mental Health Foundation, contact Lifeline or a reach out to a medical professional in your local area.
