Dr Jeni Haynes

I'm the normal one.

You blow me down with a feather.

Well, the thing is that...

no matter who you are, the house that you grow up with, the family you grow up with, you think that's normal.

So if you have someone who's an alcoholic, you assume that everybody's an alcoholic or you just see alcohol as part of the day-to-day stuff.

We just saw what happened to us as part of the day-to-day stuff.

So it was very difficult for us to...

when we started to say, well, hang on a minute, I'm not sure this is what's supposed to happen.

And we have

such a contorted and distorted view of what is normal that we've actually spent a long time in therapy talking about, is this normal?

Because, you know, I am, I'm super excited about something.

Is that normal?

Is not normally the sentence that you're asking.

But when we, when we get excited about something, we're always checking, are we normal?

When did you realise that?

I would say it finally started to percolate through the system in about, well, let's see, 1993.

We were studying psychology and child development.

Oh, dear Lord, child development.

I went through that.

in like a haze going, but that didn't happen for me.