This YouTube interview features Nikki DeLoach in conversation with Chris Collins describing childhood physical and sexual abuse beginning at age 10, which led to disordered eating (anorexia) and lifelong hypervigilance and trust issues. DeLoach explains how that hypervigilance helped her detect life-threatening complications in her son (diagnosed with multiple congenital heart defects in 2017) and ultimately saved his life, and how intensive trauma therapy in 2023 helped her integrate her younger parts and repurpose painful experiences into protective, purposeful strengths.
Questions this video answers
10 years old.
2017.
2023.
Chapters
Imagining a way out of no way. That's what books gave me as a kid who went through abuse. You know, I would lay on my trampoline and I would read, or in my bedroom, I was constantly reading. And books allowed me to imagine a world outside of that, and I would just disappear into them. And then I think I do the same thing. It's harder for me to be on a red carpet and just have somebody take my picture or do a photo shoot or, like, it's easy here for me to be myself, because you and I are just having a conversation. I feel much more comfortable when I'm getting to disappear into something, which is something I've, you know, been working on most of my life and is talked about heavily and untamed.
Do you think that there was something that happened in childhood that influenced that?
Oh, yeah. So there was physical abuse in my childhood, but it was the sexual abuse that really, honestly just made me want to disappear. And that happened. You know, one of the chapters, the first chapter in this book, which we can get into, that's not what happened to Glennon, but she talks about being 10 years old. And at 10 years old, that's when we're taught what it looks like to be a good girl. Right? And at 10 years old is when this happened to me. And I was silenced and wasn't allowed to actually say what happened to me. And so at 10 years old, I was told that being a good girl was letting boys do anything to you and keeping your mouth shut, to letting adults do anything to you. And you just keep your mouth shut and you take it that my life was not worthy of protection, that there was something so deeply broken and unlovable about me that I didn't deserve that. And that's when the disordered eating started. Just like Glennon, at 10 years old, she became a bulimic. For me, it was anorexia, and I just began to disappear. Because if I was small, that's what I was being told. Be small, don't speak, look pretty. Nobody wants your opinion on anything. And, man, did it take me decades to untangle that and to learn to love myself. And this book was such a huge part of me being able to do that.
There's something really powerful in a negative way that happens when you're a kid and the adults that you trust for basically everything can't be trusted.
Oh. I mean, I think trust was such a big issue for me my entire life, because.
So then you want to control everything later on. Right.
Well, that hypervigilant brain is wired. And that hypervigilant brain saved my son's Life. Cut to 2017 and in one week and I'm pregnant with my second child. I found out that he had multiple congenital heart defects. Without a life saving surgery immediately when he was born, he wouldn't survive. We went on to have more heart surgeries and it was years of just really intense, like just keep the child alive, you know. But I was the perfect mother for him because I knew how to do that, I knew how to survive and my brain was wired for that. Where I got in trouble was when I got, when things became okay eventually, but I, but she was still in the driver's seat. That little 10 year old girl was still driving the truck and she was gonna drive us off the bridge like what, 100%. And so I went through some much needed, really intense but incredible life changing trauma therapy in 2023. And what I learned is like these parts of us that are developed, these pieces of who we are, just say the brain, take it into sections, right? And there's the perfectionist and there's the hyper vigilant and there's the person that wants to control, which is all part of it. And then there's the person that wants to love everyone and then there's all the pieces of you that are wrapped up in it. And instead of trying to make them go away because it's hard when they're very alive in you get to know them and pull them super close and love them really hard. And I got to know that 10 year old little girl so well and I'm so grateful for her because she is the person who has helped me to survive and keep going. When I wanted to die at school, so many points in my life, like truly and tried. And she's also the one that kept Bennett alive, that saved his life. Especially the second heart surgery. I knew something was wrong. People told me I was just, you know, it was my ptsd. And I demanded another echocardiogram and sure enough, the kid had a giant aneurysm in his pulmonary artery. And I knew it. I knew something was wrong and I saved his life. I saved my grandmother's life when she had and knew exactly how to jump into action and do that. So what I've learned is like, would I take back the things that happened to me as a child? Obviously I wouldn't want that to happen to me or any little girl or boy. But also instead of making those parts of ourselves want to go away, how can we get really close to them and understand that we can actually create meaning and purpose, and they are a part of us that we can use for good in the way and in relationships. And that is what I've done instead. And now she sits in the back seat most of the time until I say, all right, sister, I need you to drive this track. I need you to, like, take over. And then she jumps into action. She knows exactly what to do. But that's kind of the way that I. And in a way, grateful is not the right word, but it's everything that's happened to me up until this moment. It serves the perfect purpose, and I've fortunately been able to use it to mean something in my life.
