Vicki Anstey

And one of my earliest memories is that, you know, if I fell over as a child, my mum couldn't or wouldn't pick me up because she had neck ache or back ache as a consequence of this accident.

And of course, as a child, you don't know that.

You don't connect the dots.

How could you?

And it's, again, one of the key themes of the book is about openly sharing our experiences, having a voice, sharing our stories, connecting more, understanding one another's backgrounds, experiences, past experiences, traumas potentially.

And lifting the lid on those so that maybe we can have better relationships with each other through understanding of, you know, where those patterns come from.

yeah exactly um and there were lots of little fears around me um as I grew up and one of the I suppose one of the bigger ones uh again is is something that uh I tell the story of in my and I think the first chapter of the book uh about a near drowning incident that I had as a child um which is a difficult thing because I was six years old and that's a long time ago so it's kind of

Hard to try and piece the memories back together.

But, you know, it still remains definitely in my in the back of my memory where my sister and I were in a lake in the New Forest on a holiday with my parents and they were kind of setting up a picnic on the lake.

uh the bank of the lake and we'd gone in to paddle around and then suddenly got out of our depth and I couldn't swim um my sister could a bit I think but just the panic that ensued meant that my gut reaction was to pull her under the water to get myself above water and to be able to take in air um and my recollection is that she then had to do the same back to me understandably and

You know, obviously, I'm still here to this day.

So is my sister.

My dad pulled this out and everyone was fine.

But it left me with a lifelong fear of water.

And actually, what I discovered through doing cognitive behavioral therapy was that my real fear wasn't about drowning.

It was about harming someone else.

So when I came to do my Pacific row, which we might talk about in a minute, that was a process that I had to go through to unlock what that fear really was about.

So it is a really key theme in the book and something that, again, I think should be spoken about more so we can understand where those little fears come from.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.