Anna Williamson, a former CITV presenter, shares her harrowing experience with psychological abuse and anxiety disorder, detailing her journey from a glamorous career to a breakdown and eventual recovery.
On the outside I was living the dream. At 25, I was interviewing Hollywood stars, footballers and pop stars such as former Spice Girls Geri Halliwell and Emma Bunton, working as a kids TV presenter for CITV Saturday morning show Toonattik.
My life looked exciting, full of glamorous assignments and people. In reality, I was close to a complete emotional breakdown. I was stuck in a psychologically abusive relationship and deeply unhappy. Back then, in the early 2000s, we did not really use language like coercive control or gaslighting.
Nobody around me really understood what was happening - and neither did I. Psychological abuse is subtle by design, to the point that you become dependent on the abuser. You become fearful of making decisions because you are always questioning your reality, which makes it very hard to leave and to name what is happening in that moment.
Over the course of the relationship, my confidence was horribly eroded by the abuse and I started to suffer debilitating anxiety and panic attacks. I was juggling my job on a flagship show, where I had to be upbeat, with a home life where I was constantly treading on eggshells. People who control others diminish their self-esteem to keep them compliant. I was not sleeping and was cracking under the pressure.
The first time I had a panic attack was about six months into the relationship, and it was the most terrifying experience of my life. We were staying with friends and I woke in the middle of the night bolt upright, feeling like my chest had a belt across it, constricting my airflow. There was a hot feeling in my head, plus a sudden desperation to get the hell out of there.
I ran out of the house at 3am, feeling like I was not in my own body. I felt like I was having a heart attack. I ran to the end of the road and paced around in a daze until the panic subsided. With panic disorder, people become fearful of the next attack and create avoidant behaviours to stop it happening.
I felt like I had lost my mind and I was terrified of my own skin. I developed so many harmful coping strategies, including becoming obsessive about my work and timekeeping, because controlling every detail made me feel safer when internally everything felt chaotic. I had no appetite because my body was permanently in fight or flight and I developed globus pharyngeus, which is the inability to swallow.
I survived by picking at food and in a few months I lost about a stone. Ironically, everyone kept complimenting me on the weight loss. All the while, I remember thinking, I cannot eat! I was not sleeping either.
It would take me hours to nod off and then only for about four hours. I did not understand what was happening to me and I ignored all the signs without realising I was right on the edge.
Finally, everything became too much. After barely sleeping for days, I arrived at the studios exhausted, panicked and unable to focus. I tried to pretend everything was normal until I burst into tears in my dressing room and told my co-presenter Jamie Rickers I was not feeling right. He was so helpful and so were Lorraine Kelly and Fiona Phillips who were sharing a dressing room corridor with me and showed such kindness for my obvious distress.
No one knew that I had already left my lovely London apartment and moved back to my parents home in Hertfordshire. There I was, a Bafta nominee and so crippled with anxiety I was climbing into my mum and dads bed at the age of 25, before getting up and going to work. Thankfully, my mum had a job in healthcare and after I was signed off work, she managed to find a consultant psychiatrist who specialised in anxiety disorders.
At the appointment, it was like a light bulb came on. Being told I had Generalised Anxiety Disorder was a godsend - suddenly I did not feel insane any more. I asked the consultant, Am I broken? and he replied, No. You are one of millions experiencing this. You are having what we used to call a nervous breakdown.
Your nerves are in tatters. I felt such huge relief. Therapy - and finally getting rid of my ex, which I did a few weeks after my breakdown - completely changed my life. I had Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and psychotherapy and was put on a short course of anti-anxiety medication to help me sleep.
I also had regression therapy and hypnosis, and during one session recalled a repressed, but real, childhood memory where I had become trapped beneath a huge floating mat in a swimming pool. There they were: the exact same feelings of panic, fear and not being able to breathe. It made me realise how our brains store experiences and that old fear responses can reappear when we are emotionally under pressure
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