Stockholm Syndrome
The Cycle of Mental and Physical Abuse Throughout my childhood and most of my adulthood, I was abused by members of my family of origin.
My passion and motivation to launch Change Talk Coaching come from my lived experience with trauma. I experienced ongoing mental abuse, being built up and torn down within my narcissistic family of origin. I also suffered several episodes of sexual abuse in my childhood by people I knew and relied on.
After one particularly traumatic encounter, I stopped eating and developed bulimia, a crude and complicated food disorder. Never allowing me to discuss or disclose the abuse, the family preferred to keep up appearances rather than admit to the toxic shame. As I got older, I used alcohol to numb my trauma and hid behind a ‘false self’ to escape my pain, creating a path of destruction and self-loathing behaviour. Undoubtedly, my profoundly complex trauma history generated a thirst for knowledge.
Working with my own coach/therapist, I have pushed through a pretty spectacular personal transformation, which I’d like to share. I want you to understand or appreciate the level of complexities that I have faced to achieve the self-love and inner peace I have today. I don’t want this to be my secret anymore – I don’t want to hide away in shame. And if you have experienced trauma in your life, I am doing this so you don’t feel so alone and you can have the courage to come forward and talk about what happened to you. Here is a glimpse into what has happened behind closed doors. (Warning- this is the only start of my trauma stories; there are more to come.)
The wonderfully colourful journey that took me from IT Outsourcing, running my restaurant in Singapore, to finding my way into the precarious world of food chemicals and managing global food brands across Asia Pac. All motivation and reason to retrain and regroup; I became qualified as a Nutritional Health Coach and explored more human behaviour and psychology studies – madly passionate about helping people have a better human experience with food.
I’m 50 now (my age when this was published). I have three fur babies – a Groodle and two beautiful Maine Coon cats that are like mountain lions. They are massive! Because of my trauma history, I have chosen not to have children and have chosen not to get married.
I live in Regional Victoria. I left the city because I couldn’t stand the chaos and wanted a place to heal and find my peace. I have opted for a tranquil life in the country; it’s a simple yet very pleasing life, which has been an absolutely fabulous change. Country life definitely agrees with me, I can tell you that. My garden looks like a nursery; I love watching what I plant grow, blossom and flower. I grow my own vegetables, and I love the daily ritual of picking many cherry tomatoes each night for my dinner.
My background with food was born from my Mum being a chef. I grew up in the kitchen with her, always at her restaurant or the catering company. She also had a cooking school, so I was always around food. Food had become a part of my DNA. It’s a part of who I am, my life, how I find peace – cooking for me is relaxing. Creating food is like meditation; it gives me a sense of calm. At the same time, it’s something that I have such a passion and love for. It’s fascinating that my whole world has centred around food, and I have had so many problematic issues with food and alcohol. (You will read a lot about what happened to me in this course.)
My Mum didn’t want me to be a chef. She said it was too hard – hard work physically and too antisocial, which I now understand. Instead, I followed my brother into IT. When the IT world was taking off, it was the dot com boom. I worked for some of the biggest Telecommunications companies; my clients were global oil, banking, and logistics companies. I was based in London for eight years and then in Singapore for nine years. Whilst I seemed to be quite good at it from a business perspective, it killed my creativity, heart, soul, and passion.
When I was living in Singapore, a very good friend of mine sadly committed suicide. She was five months pregnant and threw herself off an 11-story building. She was one of my friends who was always at me to follow my dreams and passions and get into the world of food. Her death was that big jolt, that big thing in life that I needed: “Okay, life’s short. I need to go and do this.”
As awkward as this sounds, the death of my friend opened up the capacity for change and a new, bold door opened that I could bravely walk through. I resigned from my big corporate job and opened a restaurant. My dream turned into a reality. It was this fabulous, overnight success; people lined up at the doors, and I was booked out for months. It was called “The Big Sheila” (my teenage nickname from my mother’s boyfriend – as I was bigger and taller than my contemporaries). I served gourmet home-style, scrumdiddlyumptious-voluptuous food.
The brand was a success. The food was magnificently loved, and so well-received by the locals and expats. Everything about the brand experience was about having a personal dining event with me at my table. I had a big shared table in the middle of the restaurant that seated 12 people; the entire restaurant sat 26; it was small, stylish and cosy. I would greet and talk with every person who dined with me each day. I was on stage and on form for all my guests – every day, no matter what! Locals would come in and take photos with me—it was a hoot! It was just the wildest and most crazy, wonderful experience.
I was regularly featured in the local papers. I won prestigious awards, one for being one of the Top 20 female entrepreneurs in Singapore (I was featured on the front cover of a published book showcasing these women). It was all shiny on the outside but, shamefully, an absolute disaster on the inside. I made every single mistake under the sun.
I was in a relationship with my best friend, a man I loved and planned to marry. When all was rosy, I took a brutal blow and heartbreak. He was cheating behind my back – or rather, right under my nose. I got pregnant, and with all this insurmountable stress, I lost the child. The relationship ended, and I disintegrated into a very dark place and felt incredibly alone. I begged my Mother to come to Singapore, pleading for her help. She refused; she was too busy with all her racing events and couldn’t possibly come.
My staff stole my ATM keycard and cleared out my bank account. My staff were stealing produce, wine, glassware, you name it. I was stone-broke. I had run out of money completely. Still performing daily, keeping up appearances, being happy and unshakable on the outside, I was living a nightmare horror movie on the inside. My life became very insular, and I battled daily with dark suicidal thoughts. The whole thing was way, way, way too much for me. After closing the restaurant, past midnight, I would stand at the top of my building, looking down 17 stories and thinking, “This would solve so many problems.”
I was deeply entrenched in a horrid cycle of drinking every night in the restaurant. Existing on coffee, hot chips, my finger-licking chicken gravy, and a glass of wine at ‘the pass’ (the section where the chef serves the dishes ready to be taken to the diners) that never seemed to empty. I was a highly-functioning drinker! I was suffering from massive anxiety, living on Xanax.
An incredible group of gay men used to frequent my restaurant. Adoring my Big Sheila ways, they adopted me as their new friend. A gift from the universe, perhaps; their generous kindness, grace and compassion helped me crawl out the other side. I call that whole experience my life MBA. I made every mistake humanly possible. I often said, “I hit every branch on the way down.” It was a massive kick in the teeth, leaving a hole in my heart for a very long time. However, I needed these tough life lessons and learning experiences to help me change and stop the destructive behaviours I was stuck in.
There were substantial life lessons about trust and giving my trust too quickly, being more responsible for myself, and the cost of the severe self-sacrifice I endured. In hindsight, I had opened my restaurant desperately seeking my family’s validation. Good Lord, I painstakingly put myself through this entire ‘shit-fight’ for validation from anyone and everyone.
Over the years, four men have proposed to me, and four times, I said no or either sabotaged the relationship to fail. I didn’t understand why relationships weren’t easy for me. Or why they were so hard for me to hold on to. It always seemed like there was such a chasm between my ability to be loved and a long-term relationship. I was always looking out for my man to betray me or hurt me. I never understood why I didn’t or couldn’t trust men. Otherwise, I would fall into affairs or be with unavailable men because ultimately (I realised some years and $10,000 worth of therapy later) I was the one who was not available. I had no concept of what hypervigilance meant, what the abuse I had suffered had done to me, or awareness of how the imprinting of my parent’s horrid divorce (that I was dragged through as a teenager) affected me.
My Mother’s ability to carry on an affair with my father’s fishing buddy (and my best friend’s father) for years whilst maintaining this sweet, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth persona was unreal. Then, she magnificently blamed my dad for their divorce and played the victim when he reacted to the news of her affair. Sure, he was mad; like any red-blooded man, he was outraged. However, she was the one who had caused his pain. She was the one who had betrayed his trust, their commitment, and with a close, trusted friend of his! Yet, she so innocently acted like she had done nothing wrong. Like a true narcissist, she deflected the blame and demonised him, doubling down on her lies and deceit, all the while playing “Poor me, he’s a mean man; he’s cutting me off financially!”
My Mother so beautifully created a narrative that his unpleasant emotional reactions to being emasculated in our small country town were him being an evil man and doing the wrong thing by our dear mother. (As young, vulnerable teenagers, we all believed her, as we didn’t know about the affair as children.) I hated my father growing up. I hated him because I believed the gaslighting tales my mother had laid out for us to gobble up at story time around the dinner table.
Finally, some twenty years later, realising what had really played out – what my mother had actually done and how manipulated I had been, I felt sick to my core. The depths of my sorrow for having my relationship with my father taken from me are indescribable. I still cry about it to this day. I can’t tell you how much this deeply scared my perception of the sanctity of marriage, trust and security.
I have to say, facing all that was pretty ugly and hard work; I didn’t like who I had become. It was a fascinating review of my life, one that also gave me clarity on how my motivations and automatic, erratic, or supersensitive behaviours (and my destructive behaviours with food and drink) were intrinsically linked to all the trauma that I went through. Hence why, I chose not to have children. I never wanted to bring a child into this world and have them experience what I went through. Nor did I want to pass any of this generational trauma that I carried on to another human being. And I think it’s pretty clear now why I never got married.
After the restaurant closed, I worked for a very large, global food production and food chemical company. I managed two of the largest food brands for Asia Pac, creating food concepts and managing them commercially. It exposed me to the big beast of global food production—the world of what goes into food on supermarket shelves, packaging, and fast-food chains. And wow, that was an eye-opener. It would horrify you to know what they can put in food today without having to put it on the nutrition label!
To cut a long story short, a lot of things go on behind closed doors that many people don’t understand. (Like why their food is making them so sick.) Why is it that before the 1980s, there were only rare cases of type 2 diabetes in children? And now, there is 1 in 5 cases in the USA. When I saw the impact processed food was having on the global health crisis with chronic disease, I began to question what my role in all of this was. What I was exposed to inspired me to return to school, retrain, and study Nutritional Health Coaching. I signed up with a reputable school in New York, Integrated School of Holistic Integrated Nutrition, which opened up this new world to me. (I later started looking at the psychology around why we do things and how to make change.) I wanted to educate people about what was in food today and how it impacted their livelihood and health.
Initially, I created a coaching program focused on how people’s work lives, personal lives, and spiritual beliefs all impacted how food played a role in their lives. I worked with people to create a pathway for transforming themselves, rewriting their stories and helping them achieve their desired health ambitions. I then helped them define their personal goals and the roadblocks that needed to be overcome to achieve what they wanted.
Now, with a firm grasp of my purpose in life, I have set up this online and print learning platform some years later because of my personal experience. My passion in life (because I am quite passionate) is to help people have a better human experience. This platform is to help women who, like me, have a background of trauma and abuse and have suffered in silence. It’s my ambition to tackle this whole topic and try and normalise the conversation of what happens to you after you have suffered abuse: the reality of what happens to you behind closed doors, when you are triggered, when you have an emotional meltdown, and why you use food and alcohol to self-medicate – to numb and distract.
I have learned so much in all my professional studies and found them profoundly healing for me, too. I have spent over 600 hours working with my own psychologists on my own issues and my own past history of abuse, and it’s been substantial. After my father passed, I was attacked. (There was a heated argument over money that led to my being pushed into a cement step, copping a right hook in my face, smashing my glasses, and resulting in my need for my hip replacement). My therapist in Singapore recommended a book to help me better understand my trauma bonding with my abusers. I was hooked when I first read Healing The Shame That Binds Us by John Bradshaw. I discovered how toxic shame is the core of dysfunctional behaviours, irregularities, dependencies, and addictions. The need to be an overachiever to get love – and how the family of origin is the core block of cement that keeps us all bound together in our secrets of abuse and shame. That book spurred me to delve deeper into what happens in the family of origin trauma bonding and all of that stuff.
Going down many more intriguing psychology rabbit holes, I’ve spent equally another 600-plus hours reading and researching psychology and trauma-related publications. I had an overwhelming feeling and drive to share with others what I had learned and how I had transformed because I knew I was not alone anymore; I was not the only person dealing with this. I didn’t want this to be a secret anymore. Hence, I have used the slogan, “This is not your secret anymore,” for my marketing campaign for the course and this book. I want other women who suffer in silence to know they are not alone, and they can talk about these horrid little secrets that have kept us stuck and afraid for so long.
I want to help others learn and benefit from what has profoundly changed my human experience. This is why I’m here. I’m very proud of myself today. I love the woman that I am today. This is no small thing because, for most of my life, I have felt so ashamed about who I am, what I have done, and what has happened to me. I never felt good enough or that I was even worthy of someone’s love. So, my self-love and intensely loyal relationship with myself today are the most precious things to me. They are golden. And all mine. I am a master at setting boundaries these days, so no one, not one single bad-ass-mofo can ever take this away from me.
I am incredibly proud of what I have created in this course. I love what I do, I feel so good about my purpose, and I know this is my life’s work! If I can reach women and give them access to this specialised education so they can be empowered to make the necessary changes, shift their lens, and grab hold of a better human experience, then fabulous. That would make me extremely happy.
“Nothing in life is ever a straight line!”
Peace, love and mung beans
Fleur Elizabeth xx
p.s – I love you, Dad. I wish I got to say that more often while you were alive.
***Be sure to check out the “Master Your Relationship with Food and Drink” online course at www.changetalk.coach
The Cycle of Mental and Physical Abuse Throughout my childhood and most of my adulthood, I was abused by members of my family of origin.
This is a glimpse into my traumatic experience with a family friend who sexually assaulted me – taking my virginity. This person was friendly and
As a young girl, I experienced a violation that shattered the illusion of security in a family-and-friends environment. This was a setting that, on the surface, appeared
“This is not my secret anymore.“ My passion and motivation to launch Change Talk Coaching come from my lived experience with trauma. I experienced ongoing