HOW I TOOK BACK MY POWER

By Nompumelelo Runji

Iwas 31 when I had my first breakdown. It was the middle of the year when I started feeling a soul-deep exhaustion. I couldn’t focus, and my energy was depleted. I wondered how I was going to meet my obligations and get through the rest of the year. I was overcome by foreboding and a deep feeling of inadequacy – professionally, academically, and personally.

Yet while all this was happening inside of me, my life couldn’t have looked any better from the outside. I was at the height of my career as a researcher, project manager, and columnist. I was lecturing part-time at the University of Pretoria while pursuing my PhD under a scholarship. I was married, living in my dream house in a great neighbourhood. I was active in church and well respected in my professional circles. But my life was far from perfect.

For years leading to my breakdown, I had been plagued by chronic pain, unrelenting muscle tension, pelvic discomfort, and sleep disruptions that built up to insomnia. When praying my chronic pain and discomfort away didn’t show any results, I turned to medical professionals. I began to frequent GPs who prescribed muscle relaxants and pain medications. I also consulted specialists including a neurologist, rheumatologist, gynecologist, and physiotherapists.

Despite all of this, I still had a breakdown, and that was when I thought it was time that I explored a different solution. For the first time in my life, I mustered the courage to reach out to a psychiatrist. At the end of our first consultation, she told me something I didn’t want to hear - that I needed to be admitted. With the support of my employer, I went ahead, despite the consternation it caused at home. And it was the beginning of my road to discovering and facing the root cause of my symptoms.

Three weeks of intense trauma therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy revealed that I had suppressed the memory of a traumatic incident of physical abuse when I was about six years old, when my mother beat me all over my body with a belt for losing a new cap. But this was not the end of my experience of trauma. I had grown up in a dysfunctional home, where my parents shouted at and fought with each other. One day, I saw them get physically violent with each other. My home environment was very tense, and I was often alone, unseen, and unnoticed. When my mother did see and notice me, her looks and words were of cutting criticism and censure. My father seemed a little kinder, but he was hardly there.

I longed for the warmth of unconditional love and acceptance, but these have always alluded me. And so even in marriage, I found myself reliving much of the nightmare that I did in my childhood home.

After years of bearing the crushing weight of anxiety and depression fueled by invalidation, manipulation, and devaluation in my marriage, I decided to leave. It took months of intensive trauma therapy and weeks of life and business coaching to come to terms with my unhealthy situation. With the support of a few committed and honest friends, I realised that there was a way out, and that I had options. We always have a choice. No matter how difficult and harrowing the circumstances, we make choices. And those choices either serve to empower us or to lead us into a greater state of hopelessness, helplessness, and powerlessness. “

For me, it began with taking responsibility for myself. For years I was paralysed by the fear of the unknown. So I had to challenge myself: if staying wasn’t healing but harming me, how much worse could leaving be?

Then, I had to begin to set boundaries. The first one was accepting that I only have control over myself. I could never force or convince someone to do something they just weren’t willing to do. If I was staying because I hoped that my husband would change and that my family would be miraculously transformed, I was focusing on the wrong person. It was not other people’s minds that I needed to change, but my own.

Because I had been isolated for such a long time, I had started believing that there was no one I could trust. Opening myself up and being vulnerable to a few people, in my case my therapist, psychiatrist and coach, helped me to see that there were people outside of my family who are in my corner. And for the first time in my life, I could see that life is not black and white. I could take the risk of trusting myself and trusting other people – not everybody was out to exploit, hurt and abuse me.

Getting educated about my mental health, finding support, and taking responsibility for myself all helped to restore my hope – hope that I could get unstuck, that healing is possible, and that all is not lost. It helped me to find the courage I needed to walk away and to take back my power.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nompumelelo Runji is a political analyst, researcher, columnist, thought leader and author of How I Took Back My Power, published by Tafelberg and available at bookstores and online.

Model: @jessicafawn_

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