Right.

My dear friend, Louise Gannon, who wrote the book with me, she, um, sat down in front of me one day and she said, "Have a look at this." And I was like, "Mm, it's got 15, like, bullet points." I was like, "Oh, that's the timeline of my marriage." And she went, "No, this is from a website, a charity called Women's Aid, and these are the 15 signs of what abuse looks like." And I was like, "I tick every single box." And at that moment, I was like, obviously I knew I was being abused, and I was so riddled with embarrassment and shame and guilt, 'cause I had kids that, you know, I'm raising and trying to protect them from this guy during that, that marriage.

And it's, it's a strange fe- it's a strange place that you find yourself, and that's why I have a lot of empathy why women go back, because in some ways, i- i- in a strange, ridiculous mind thought, you think, "Well, this person did love me, but now he's blackmailing me.

He's telling me he's gonna send pictures out to my work people, or try and take my kids away from me, or say that I'm a bad mum, or expose that I was self-medicating when I was with him.

You know, what do I, what do I do? How can I protect myself? Oh, it's just safer if I go back, because..." And it's never safer, because that's a death wish.

Abusers, they won't stop abusing until you stop them, until you get away.

But then that's a whole different journey you have to take on when you've finally removed yourself.

Mm

What was the story? Were you there from the very, very beginning, or were you, like, a couple weeks in?

No, I didn't find it till they were on book three back when it was Josh and Matt.

Yeah, they were on like book three when I found them.

I had just only recently gotten into listening to podcasts and I thought, oh, I want to do this.

Well, I want to do it about Harry Potter.

What are other people doing? So I went on a little quest to see what other people were doing and stumbled across Tales.

And I just fell in love with the concept of what they were doing with someone who'd never read it before.

Pick one of

No.

I had to put on that actor's face that I was okay, but I wasn't.

I couldn't grasp how to get the weight off and keep it off.

Did I share that? No.

But she put me through self-help groups, how to do this and how to do that.

It might have helped pull me out of the hole of depression, but it didn't stop the food.

And six years, I continued in that food after coming into OA because I ran that first night I went to OA.

listening.