Carla

[00:00:00] Lifeline Australia pays deep respect to people who have personal experience of crisis and suicide. They are the reason our organisation and services exist.

We recognise the immense value that their experience and expertise bring to our work, helping us ensure that no one faces their toughest moments alone.

Michael

[00:00:20] If I had switched the light off then, I wouldn't have achieved what I've achieved today. I wouldn't feel so fulfilled as I do now. And I think if anyone can take away anything, it's that you've got worth even though you might not sense it.

Voiceover

[00:00:33] Welcome to Holding on to Hope, a series that shares the stories of everyday Australians that have experienced moments in crisis and found a path to support. Whilst all of the stories shared offer hope and inspiration, at times you may hear something you find triggering.

[00:00:49] If you or someone you know needs crisis support, please phone Lifeline on 13 11 14, text 0477 13 11 14, or visit lifeline.org.au for Lifeline chat service, which is 24/7.

Carla

[00:01:05] Hi, I'm Carla and welcome to this episode of Holding on to Hope. As host for this season, I feel honoured to introduce you to incredible humans who've navigated life's challenges, experienced struggle, but found hope on the other side. They're now sharing their stories with you in the hopes it will inspire you on your own journey. As a researcher for over 30 years, I've spent much of my life listening to people's stories, and as a digital crisis supporter volunteer for Lifeline, I spend time connecting with people during some of their toughest moments.

[00:01:36] It's taught me we may never really know where life will take us or which side of a conversation we might be on. Thank you for joining me, and I hope these conversations offer something meaningful for you wherever you are on your journey.

Michael's life journey is a testament to resilience and the transformative power of reaching out for help. After a traumatic childhood marked by neglect and abuse, Michael faced a crushing sense of despair following the breakup of his first meaningful relationship. Feeling overwhelmed and disconnected, he found himself battling suicidal thoughts.

[00:02:10] A call to Lifeline became his turning point, offering him compassion and the support he needed to begin healing. Today, Michael is thriving in a fulfilling marriage and career, using the tools he discovered through therapy and self-care to manage his mental health.

Hi, Michael.

Michael 

[00:02:29] Hi, Carla.

Carla

I wondered if we could start with childhood, if you wanted to talk about a few of the things that happened and how those experiences shaped how you grew up, how you looked on life as you got older.

Michael

[00:02:41] My parents had split up at a very young age. There was a lot of instability. As a result of that, an unstable household, everything else was always sort of falling apart in a lot of ways, it's felt like to me. For me, there was a lot of physical abuse. There was a lot of emotional abuse. Obviously, like I said, my father was a mess. That was a form of neglect. By age eight, I had really experienced every form of abuse, including sexual abuse. And that was at the hand of someone who should have been trusted. I think because of those events, I was always kind of a glass half empty kind of person because of that.

[00:03:11] So, moving from primary school, especially into high school, you start to develop in adolescence, there's just so many feelings of worthlessness, not good enough, feeling stupid. And that stuck with me. So, I think my journey in life was already on a pretty bumpy road.

Carla

[00:03:27] From such a young age.

Michael

[00:03:29] From such a young age, yeah. And so, I kind of really didn't care where I was going in life.

[00:03:33] It's only really been the past six or seven years I've started to sort of pull myself out of that with a lot of help. And it sort of finds a sense of purpose and fulfillment.

Carla

[00:03:42] As a young person, you found a relationship that was lovely and caring for a while, but then that ended.

Michael

[00:03:49] I was aware there was a hole of some sort. Yeah, I met this other person and there was a lot of excitement. There's all the emotion there.

Carla

[00:03:55] First love.

Michael

[00:03:56] First love, right? It's all that kind of jazz.

Carla

[00:03:58] Yeah.

Michael

[00:03:58] So, I think I was like, oh, 'wow, this is worthwhile'. As that's gone on, it just wasn't a relationship that was working. For the first time really in my life, I felt there was this sort of spark. And then that had gone again. I felt like physically inside, I was actually breaking.

Carla

[00:04:11] What did it look like for you day to day? What was the impact?

Michael

[00:04:14] Oh, pretty negative. There was a lot of days I didn't want to get out of bed.

Carla

[00:04:18] Yeah.

Michael

[00:04:19] Now, I would call it depression. At the time, I didn't really think of it that way.

[00:04:22] I didn't see any purpose. I'd call in sick for work. So, I wasn't going to work. Guess what?

[00:04:26] You kind of need work to get paid. And if you don't get paid, then you can't pay other things like rent and so forth. So, it kind of snowballed. This perpetual ball just kept getting bigger.

[00:04:35] And that's where I got to a point where I just thought, well, it's probably easier just to call it there, in terms of my life.

Carla

[00:04:40] And many people have been in that position. Some people find their way to reach out for help. And you called Lifeline. What happened there? How did you get to that point?

Michael

[00:04:48] I had made my mind up about how I was going to do things. So, there was a kind of a plan there.

[00:04:53] For some reason, I don't know what part of me it was, but something was like, maybe not yet.

[00:04:58] And I distinctly recall a lot of Lifeline's channels they've used to make themselves aware. I recall some of those. Obviously, the best thing I ever did was to call them because it was a moment of getting a lot of feelings heard without judgment.

[00:05:16] I didn't realize how many feelings I was actually withholding. I never knew how to talk about it.

[00:05:20] Never had any sort of safe spaces, really throw those feelings out there. All of a sudden, I could let feelings out. And I didn't feel judged for that.

Carla

[00:05:27] What happened then, after that call?

Michael

[00:05:29] After that call, yeah. Well, all of a sudden, those feelings were out. And I had begun to process them. So, that was a good step forward. I think I was just trying to get back on my feet in a lot of ways, slowly. Sometimes it was hour by hour, but I was making progress.

I began to sort of, wonder a bit more about why I was feeling the way I was, and why I had thought the way I was thinking. It sort of piqued an interest there.

[00:05:54] Not long after that, I started working for a guy. We've since become very close friends, a very emotionally intelligent guy. And he would start asking me questions about things. And I was like, oh, maybe this guy kind of gets things.

[00:06:02] And so, we began to talk. And then I'd be at work. I'd listen to a podcast. I got onto Psychology 101 from MIT. And listening to that was like, I would just see dots everywhere connecting. I was like, this is why I feel this way. This happened to me.

And all of a sudden, things made sense. I think as I was building education around basic psychology, that shifted things a bit more positively internally because I could start to connect dots.

Carla

[00:06:26] And it sounds like you're drawing together, you know, this friendship, this podcast. Really seeking out things and tools and people that could help you take these steps.

Michael

[00:06:37] I don't know if I was entirely aware of that, but I just noticed things were happening in interesting ways. After that, I'd gotten married. I remember still feeling, I don't want to use the word 'confused', but I remember feeling there was a lot of emotional turmoil inside. I still hadn't resolved everything. And we just happened to have a close family friend and, you know, we were having dinner one day and she went, 'if you need to talk about things, I'm here'.

Two weeks later, working again, I had a kind of a breakdown over the most simple decision I had to make, something I've done a thousand times.

[00:07:08] And I rang her up, I said, you know, I need to talk. And that's when therapy started. So, she's a professional therapist. And that's when, yeah, I really started making sense of a lot of things. I started to drop my walls.

While I was beginning to understand myself better, I still had a lot of emotional barriers up. I never used the word feel. I'd say, yeah, well, you know, she goes, 'how did this make you feel'? And I'd go, 'yeah, well, I would speculate that the emotion within me, you know...' [laughs] And then I went in one day and she said, I said, I'm feeling a bit light. And she goes, 'you just said the word feeling'. And I was like, 'so I did'.

[00:07:44] I guess Lifeline kicked off a process that, had it not been for them, I wouldn't have been able to get to it on a journey of healing. And even if it wasn't the smoothest journey, it was a journey nonetheless. And that was critical for me.

Carla

[00:07:54] Writing and music is really important to you. Do you want to talk a bit more about what's happened with those things for you over this time?

Michael

[00:08:01] I felt I was always a late starter. So, I was very late learning how to write.

Once I learned the process at primary school, most of my spare time was writing. And it took me a long time to realize why I was writing. I'd write poems, I'd write stories. When I got to high school, I was loving writing essays. Reflecting on those, again, over the same period that I've since began my healing journey, I could look at what I was writing and go, oh, there's some interesting themes there.

And they were themes of longing, themes of wanting to be rescued, themes of finding a sense of purpose. In the past few years, I've gotten back into that, particularly with poetry.

[00:08:33] It's evolved a lot. And now it's at a point now where I'm like, I want to put this into music. Because one of the few things that brought me a sense of peace, calm (in a sense) growing up was music. Now I feel like that's just the next logical step for me to move.

Carla

[00:08:49] What are you doing now to help maintain your mental health?

Michael

[00:08:52] I keep up with a lot of the learning I was doing. I said educating myself around mental health. So, I found some really key figures online. There's a guy called Tim Fletcher, who's a complex trauma specialist. That happens to be what I've been diagnosed with, CPTSD.

[00:09:07] Listening to that, gaining understanding of what normally happens in those situations, that's really helpful. Because again, once I have the understanding of what's happening inside, that's a big step forward.

Professionals, I can refer to. So, they're always really awesome to deal with as well.

Creative work, the writing is a very important way for me to journal or start writing a song to put that out there.

Carla

To find that voice and give it out to the world.

Michael

[00:09:32] So it's out there, you know.

Someone said to me the other day, maybe you should write a lot of negative experiences and then on paper put in a fire to burn. And that's been an idea for maybe getting some sort of closure from things.

Carla

[00:09:43] Anonymity is something that Lifeline offers through its service. So, making that first call, picking up the phone, not knowing who you were talking to, how did that feel?

Michael

[00:09:52] I think that's probably one of the key features of Lifeline.

I never really felt comfortable opening up. And I think anyone I knew, there is no way in hell I'd be saying anything.

[00:10:03] The benefit of Lifeline is I didn't see a face. So, I don't know who I spoke to to this day. I'd like to thank them if I ever knew, but I don't know who they were. And so, I didn't see them. I didn't know who they were. And I was like, well, chances are I'll never see them.

So, that was a chance for me to start letting things out. Anonymity was critical. Anyone in those situations, especially people from small town experiences, that's really helpful that you don't feel the stigma of a small community knowing something about you, gossiping, coming back, and usually it's 10 times worse than some wild rumour.

Voiceover

[00:10:37] We hope you're enjoying this episode. Lifeline's new support toolkit makes it easier to care for family, friends, and loved ones, and look after yourself along the way.

Visit us at toolkit.lifeline.org.au.

[00:10:48] Now, back to the episode.

Carla

[00:10:51] What do you want other people out there who might be, you know, who can hear your story and go, 'yeah, this is pretty similar to mine', what do you want them to take away from your experience?

Michael

[00:11:01] It was about 10 years ago when things were really bad. If I had switched the light off then, I wouldn't have achieved what I've achieved today. I wouldn't feel so fulfilled as I do now.

[00:11:10] If anyone can take away anything, it's that you've got worth, even though you might not sense it.

[00:11:15] A little while ago, I was in Florence. We saw the Statue of David. The story is, it's this well-known story that the marble was rejected by every other artist because it had flaws. Michelangelo saw that marble and said, despite its flaws, that's going to be a masterpiece.

[00:11:28] And hundreds of years later, this Statue of David is what remains of that marble.

[00:11:32] I think that's a pretty good analogy for how we often feel. We can feel because of our upbringing experiences, we're rejected by society. I know that's how I felt.

Carla

[00:11:40] There's obviously a period of time where you recognize things aren't going well for you and you have these deep, dark feelings of worthlessness or a hole. Was there anyone around that you could speak with or were you really dealing with this by yourself?

Michael

[00:11:55] Growing up, for a number of reasons, there wasn't anyone in my family I could really talk to about that. I had both parental figures and grandparents who actually had a way of sort of insulting us for having feelings as myself and the rest of the family. So that was kind of like, well, why would you do that? There's no point talking there. I think at one occasion, I tried talking to my mother about it and she kind of lost it and told me to get over it, that kind of thing.

And that was a moment, 17, 18 years old. It was kind of a pivotal period in life.

[00:12:22] So I think at that point it was like, well, you don't talk to family. I grew up in rural Australia, country town. It's a small community. So you're always aware that what you say can come back in one way or another, to you. And you've kind of got to live in that town. And that's the stigma there in itself is like, you really are concerned what people think of you all the time. It seems to be a theme I've noticed in myself and others. And if I had some other friends I'd try and talk to a little bit, they'd listen a bit, but it sort of came back to that same old, well, it's okay now.

[00:12:53] You kind of just don't think about it. I'm like, oh, heck, I never thought of that before.

Carla

[00:12:58] And there may have been like workplace assistance programs that people could reach out to, but could you really culturally, you know, as a male tradie, like how would that have been received?

Michael

[00:13:09] Yeah. Well, I went to TAFE for an apprenticeship and TAFE's got a lot of resources. I'm a TAFE teacher now as well. So we're very big on the awareness of that and helping students see those resources there.

Carla

[00:13:18] You made that first call to Lifeline and it was very emotional for you. First time you may have been talking about these things. What did you come away with?

Michael

[00:13:27] Yeah. They were very much trying to ground me. I think it's the right word because it was, I felt that they were a sort of a sounding board. So it's all out there.

And I was like, all right, it felt like someone was with me. And I think that's pretty important.

Carla

[00:13:40] Because it sounds like you were very, feeling very alone.

Michael

[00:13:42] Oh, I was, I was just completely lost and alone and turbulent. And I felt that, yeah, it was like 'just breathe, count the 10', the listening. And if I'm going to hang up on the phone, they didn't leave me in a mess and they were quite prepared to have helped me further if it was necessary.

It really got me calmed down, put a bit of a plan together, at least in how to sort of move forward. But I do think the biggest part of that was just helping me see that I had some value. Now I might not have been able to see that clearly.

[00:14:13] But it had shifted my mindset. So I think that was pretty critical.

Carla

[00:14:17] And after that call, you're at work, you're calmer. Do you have a plan of what you're going to do next to support yourself?

Michael

[00:14:23] Ensuring I was around a positive group of individuals, if not just one person. And I think now I kind of say that it's so pivotal to have that one person you can sort of start to lean on.

Carla

[00:14:33] And I think this is really useful for people listening to understand that people don't find themselves in such a dire predicament overnight. It's often years or decades of experiences that have led up to people feeling this way. So to live with that and we'll keep working on understanding it and having good positive responses to it, it's a sort of like a lifelong project for a lot of people.

Michael

[00:15:01] It is. Sometimes I talk to people and they don't get it. In a way, I'm glad they don't get it because it means they haven't been through it.

But the other aspect is, you know, I feel like it's an oldie but a goldie, you know, to kill a mockingbird. Atticus Finch, you know, probably the most beloved father figure out there. But he always says this thing, he's like, 'you don't know a person until you sort of walk around in their shoes'. And that's why I think it's very pivotal to go, well, what has led this person down that path? They don't just wake up one morning and go, well, that's it. There's so many experiences we each go through. They're all unique in their own way.

[00:15:33] But until you can understand the impact that that has on people, you'll never understand that. That's why I'm a very big believer in the help I've received at EMDR, looking at those experiences again.

Carla

[00:15:42] With the benefit of hindsight, if you could go back and speak to Michael as an 18, 19 year old, what would you say to him?

Michael

[00:15:49] I don't know what I'd say. I think I'd be very kind to myself and reassure me that the things that had happened do not have to define me.

Carla

[00:15:58] Thanks, Michael, so much for being here and telling your story. It's so important to have people like you who talk the talk, having had these experiences over life.

We're all trying to find people we relate to and understand and people sharing their stories is such a key part of that. So thank you very much.

Michael

Thank you Carla.

Voiceover

[00:16:16] Thanks for listening to Holding on to Hope, the podcast. Lifeline is grateful to all Holding on to Hope participants for choosing to share their personal lived experiences openly and courageously in order to offer hope and inspiration to others.

Your act of kindness makes for a better world. And remember, you don't have to struggle alone. Visit toolkit.lifeline.org.au today.