World Mental Health Day is taking place on Sunday 10th October and is dedicated to raising awareness and challenging the stigma surrounding mental health. At Excelcare, we wanted to honour and emphasise the importance of good mental health, so we have decided to share stories and advocate for mental health awareness all week.
Throughout the week, we are sharing stories from people in the Excelcare family, where doing one thing that has made a difference to their own mental wellbeing.
Yesterday, we shared Lily’s story and today, we share the story of Samantha Crawley, Director of Care Quality & Transformation.
“I’m an Irish mammy and that comes with a huge bag of guilt even before the child is born! I have been a single mammy now for almost 21 years – my youngest lad is 21 in December. There were times when the kids were younger that I felt like I wasn’t doing a good job at being a mammy and also working, but I was trying to show them that we have to continue on no matter what life throws at us.
When Ben was 18 months old, he was locked in the house by the nanny who lived with us and left alone all day, by himself. The other two children were in school. He was found by my ex, who had gone to the house with Sien & Sean, to pick something up. It was evening time and they had to break in because they could hear him screaming. He was unwell due to dehydration, had cuts on his feet from trying to get himself out of the house, and he was terrified due to being left all alone all day.
As you can imagine, as a working mammy this was literally my worst nightmare. I was in hotel management at that time, and I was floored. Following this, I was terrified to trust anyone with the kids and terrified that I couldn’t provide for them at the same time. My Mam rang one night, a week or so after it happened, and she said that it would probably be good for me to go back to work. My answer to her (which at the time, I believed was completely rational) was 'Aaah I can’t – my feet don’t want to go outside.'
After a while of course I had to return to work, so I went to Ireland and hired a police sergeants’ daughter to come and take care of the children whilst I worked. But the fear stayed with me and I ended up having panic attacks as I drove to any place at all. This panic soon evolved into not being able to go on trains, then airplanes and soon my world had become very small.
That’s when I discovered NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) & Hypnotherapy. These were able to shift my thinking, change my mindset and help me take back control of my world. After it helped me, I wanted to help other people, so I trained as an NLP & Hypnotherapy Practitioner whilst working for a large care home provider (Oh yes, I forgot to say I changed back to a care focused career whilst this was all happening! Lol) Later on, I trained as a business coach and Master NLP Practitioner and although life threw me even more major curve balls, I was able to get through them and achieve these qualifications.
Mental health is everyone’s business, and I am so happy we are talking about this as a group, because we care about everyone who works with us as well as the people who live with us. I would say, having not had a drink for 31 years, that you have to take things one day at a time. Focusing on one moment, one step, one day at a time, is key when we experience life situations. My takeaway would be – remember this is now – not tomorrow, not yesterday, not next week or last month – the only moment we have is now and if we focus on doing and being the best version of us right now, then we are doing the best we can – always."
We will continue to share the stories of people in the Excelcare family on our website and on Facebook throughout the week, in the hope that we can expand the conversations that we are having surrounding mental health.