Video Transcription
Ann and Steph’s story
This is my daughter, Stephanie.
Hi, my name is Stephanie, and I’m 18. I’ve just finished high school, and I’ve started at a new school, which is scary enough as it is. Then from that, developed a really unhealthy relationship that made me feel very isolated and very down. It affected everything because we were at school together, and I spent a lot of my free time with them. So, every aspect of my life was almost taken over by the poor treatment from them.
I was never really honest with Mum about how bad it was. A lot of people made me feel as if what I was concerned about wasn’t that big of a deal, and looking back on it, it was.
The signs that I would say I saw were probably so much more crying at nighttime, and then she sort of stopped wanting to go to school. She’d say, “I don’t want to be there,” and I’d think, “There’s something not right here.” Then she started not wanting to go to parties. She’d say, “I don’t want to go here,” and I’d think, “Okay, this is weird.” It was just… I don’t know. Little things like that.
Yeah, I just noticed that, you know, the bubbly person, mainly bubbly, just wasn’t there. She was just grumpy, sad.
Thinking about having conversations with her, I know one of my things was, I’d go for a walk, and I’d kind of plan out a scenario in my head of how I was going to do this. Never, never goes the way that you want it to. When we joke and jive and all that sort of stuff, I knew that that’s a way to break the ice.
I know that having that conversation is really hard. I would have to force stuff out of her, so to bring her the lighter side into it by being playful, she could understand that I was there from a place of good, and we were gonna muck around. Then, when I got down to the heavy stuff, it was like, “Okay, I’m comfortable. We’re okay.” Then, she was able to sort of open up and say, “I don’t think this relationship’s good for me,” and I’m like, “Alright, so how do you… what’s the dream scenario for you? How do we get out of this? What steps can we put in place and how do I help you do that?”
Coming to realize that if I hadn’t have said anything at all, everything would have been ten times worse, especially with school. Coming to the end of the year, my teachers noticed that there was less work coming from me, and I was at risk of not passing this year. Then, things kind of got fixed, patched up. I got everything I needed, and now I’ve graduated.
There’ve been many bumps in the road. There’ve been times where I haven’t reacted well at all, and I know that I was feeling crappy. So, she copped it because I’m like, “You just need to get out of bed. You just need to do this, you just need to do that.” I walked away and went for a walk, and I’m like, “What are you doing? This is not helpful.” So, I took that time, went back in, and said, “I am so sorry.”
I think owning that you made a mistake, owning that you didn’t handle it well, is important because you’re not going to handle it well all the time. You’ve got everything else going on in your life as well. With everything that she’s been through, I see the strength and the resilience. There are days where she doesn’t want to get out of bed, but she gets out of bed.
I would say to family and friends, be persistent, but you’ve got to have the hard conversations, and you’ve got to push just to get that little bit more. But I think the biggest thing for me is: don’t go in there thinking that you’re going to fix it. You ride that wave, that ride, and go through that journey alongside them, just holding their hand. That’s all you can do.
Video by headspace
