Broadcaster and campaigner Charlie Webster tells new how hard it was to open up and face her childhood trauma
SARAH TULLOCH
As a child, Charlie Webster, 41, was physically and emotionally abused by one man then groomed and sexually abused by another – her athletics coach. Years later, after completing a 3,000-mile cycling challenge from Europe to South America for charity, ahead of the 2016 Olympic Games, Charlie became critically ill with malaria and was put on life support. After two weeks in a coma, she made a recovery that baffled doctors both in Brazil and the UK. Now, as she brings out a new book, Why It’s OK To Talk About Trauma, she shares her powerful story of survival and resilience…
I used to think there was something wrong with me. When I was younger, I felt very alone and thought that everybody else was happy and living a wonderful life.
Meanwhile, I believed I wasn’t good enough. We internalise the things that happen to us, especially from a young age, because that’s how we grow and learn.
From the age of seven, I was physically and emotionally abused by a man. We often talk about adults who are in domestic abuse situations, but the effect it has on children is so severe. We learn about ourselves from other people when we’re small, but there are so many that have been brought up amid domestic abuse. It is sadly very common.
In my teens, I was then groomed and sexually abused by my running coach and, for a long time, I detached from my emotions as a way to cope. I could pretty much survive anything. I was seen as a really strong person, because, from a young age, that’s how I had to be to survive. But as an adult, it became a problem because, to me, love was something that was conditional, not unconditional.
When we’ve been through these things and been raised in that way, it does cause a lot of mental health and emotional attachment problems, because why wouldn’t it?
Although I was doing all these incredible things and had a successful career, on the inside I was in the same place I was as a child, hiding, scared. These things are horrific but it’s the violation of who you are… that’s what stays with you, and that’s what you have to really work through.
In 2016, I fell critically ill all of a sudden, out of nowhere. I was doing a charity cycling challenge from London to Rio, but 24 hours later, I was in a coma on life support. While I was fighting for my life, I was getting flashbacks and nightmares of what happened to me when I w
