How To Fall Apart

The first episode of How to Fall Apart - The Support Series, sponsored by Dunnes Stores is live now. For this six part series we’re asking the experts for advice on how to cope with the challenges we’re all facing. This episode focuses on children - how this affects them, how we can support them. We spoke to clinical psychologists Dr Tony Bates, Dr Nicola McGlade and Dr Olwyn Finnegan, as well as clinical psychotherapist Dr Joanna Fortune, sleep consultant Lucy Wolfe, and parents Kate Gunn, Sophie White, Jackie Lynam and Helen Steele. We covered small children to teenagers. Huge thank you to everyone who spoke to me for this, and to Dunnes Stores.

Our guest this week is designer, artist and mother of three Helen Steele. Helen talks about having ADHD, how even from the first day of school she felt like there was something different about her, about the anxiety it caused which subsequently led to her developing an eating disorder. She talked about how sport and art helped her cope, about having a baby and isolation in motherhood after she moved away from Dublin, about her fitness range for Dunnes Stores and how for her exercise is about the mind rather than the body, and how she coped with a divorce after she and her husband separated several years ago.

Editor and journalist Yvonne Hogan speaks about losing her baby when nineteen weeks pregnant. “Grief is a physical thing, you can’t think your way out of it, you have no control over it,” she said in our interview. “Until something bad happens to you, you don’t realise bad things can happen. I just thought you got past twelve weeks and that was it.” We talked about the exhaustion of grief, about the decision to have another baby, figuring out just how to deal with this loss, how to talk about the loss of a baby. “There is no blueprint”, Yvonne said; she went on to set up a baby loss section on independent.ie which is full of personal testimonies from women of all ages, including some who decades later told their story for the first time.

We spoke to Jen O’Dwyer co-host of The Creep Dive and Mother of Pod, Soobie Lynch, @standingbythewall and all round creative genius, and Esther O’Moore Donohoe, host of podcasts the 80% and Esther is in Bits, about when Christmas isn’t all joy and festivities, and it feels like the rest of the world is having the time of its life.

We talked about when a family member is ill at Christmas time, about separation- both your own and your parents, about wanting to create new traditions or not wanting to for fear of things falling apart again. About having to reinvent your Christmas and getting over thinking things have to be a certain way for Christmas to be right.

We did our first panel! Aisling Keenan Sarah Rickard and Dawn Nolan talked to me about freelancer fear- what it is and how to deal with it. We spoke about making the decision to go freelance (or having it made for you by redundancy), anxiety and the ways in which freelancing exacerbates that, the isolation of working on your own, talking about money, valuing yourself, the never-say-no freelancer mentality, not getting paid, being self employed and single parent, and always being on.