The Therapy Edit - One Thing with April Pearson on why you should stop worrying that things are going to go wrong.

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

In this Friday guest episode of The Therapy Edit, Anna chats to 'that girl from Skins', April Pearson about her One Thing; on why you should stop worrying that things are going to go wrong.Trigger warning: April shares her experience of miscarriage and difficult pregnancies.April Pearson is best known for playing Michelle in the original cast of hit TV series, Skins. Her screen work includes feature films, Tormented, Home For Christmas, Tank 432, Tucked, Sideshow and Netflix Originals series, Kiss Me First. In 2016 she won Best Actress for her performance in Fractured at the British Horror Film Festival, which she also produced, and Best Supporting Actress at the same festival in 2017 for her role in Caught.April co-wrote and starred in Making Tracks, which premiered at Raindance Film Festival in 2018 and in 2021 she produced and starred in The Kindred, which premiered at Frightfest in 2021. Her podcast; “Are you Michelle From Skins?”, was also a huge hit.You can and certainly should follow April on Instagram here.

Hello and welcome to The Therapy Edit with me, psychotherapist's mum of three and author Anna Martha. Every Friday, I invite one guest to tell me the one thing they would most like to share with mums everywhere. So join with me as we hear this dose of wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's guest episode of The Therapy Edit. I have with me, April Pearson. April Pearson is that girl off skins.

I have such vivid memories of watching skins in my young years and absolutely loved it. And after appearing in the cult TV show as a teenager, April has continued to forge a career for herself as an actress. More recently, she has created a community on her Instagram, which I've been following along with and absolutely loving, showing details of her experiences of motherhood. with her son Woody, who is now 18 months old. And we've had a lovely chat before hitting record, because as I was brushing my teeth this morning, I suddenly had this realization that I used to babysit one of her co-stars from a slightly different season. So we've been chatting about Will Merrick, haven't we? And the fact, I used to have. Thank you for that introduction. That was very calm. Yes. Yeah, I didn't know that I was going to be hit with

the co-stars nappy changing rituals. But yes, yeah, I mean, it's weird that the show was, I keep saying 15 years ago, like it's 15 years ago, but I think it's actually more than that now. I just have got that in my head. But it's like people are still obsessed and like the younger generations are still finding it. And there just must be something better on TV, Anna. There must be something that they can watch. I don't know because I think when I watched it,

It was the first thing really that was gritty. It was the first thing that was really just putting some of the nuances of teenagehood and some of those things that would often be kind of kept behind the scenes and away from the parents and, you know, and actually it was just all out there. And it was, I remember it feeling quite shocking, but yeah, just the relatability of it and the insight. And there just wasn't anything like it. No, I think actually shocking probably is the right word, to be honest.

honest. Certainly there were some that, you know, there were some interviews that we were doing and they were like, how do you feel about the fact that these children in France have ruined their parents' house because of you? Oh gosh, yes. I was like, um, yeah. My media training doesn't quite cover this.

I don't know what to say. I had a pretend party on television and now everyone's wrecking there. Yeah. In fact, yeah, there were definitely elements of it that were not relatable to me in my little kind of village life, but were just incredibly insightful never had a never had a wild house party really but there was just yeah it was just knowing that that's what other people were probably up to and there were things that yeah there's still time but now it's my own house it's not my parents house so i don't really want to

don't really want to trash this one you don't want that clean up do you you just don't it's not it's not worth it um but the question that i ask all i guess well i asked two questions but first one i just ask how how are you today How are you getting on? I'm good, I'm good. Woody is in nursery for the whole day. So I have, I just feel like when he's not around, I actually have a bit of my brain back. When he's here, I feel like there is a corner of my brain that's constantly in vigilance.

And therefore I can't kind of give myself to a conversation with you, a conversation with my husband, you know, anything that sort of doesn't revolve around childcare and what he's up to. Yeah. And so, yeah, in a kind of guilty way, I suppose there's that. bit of like just a bit of being able to be me so that's um that's where i love that but it's uh i think i always like challenging that guilt that comes with that in myself and in other people because like why not like why not have that space just to be able to think and i don't know about you but when the kids around everything that i'd normally do when they're not around is suddenly kind of tinge with a bit of stress so say i'm just replying to an email

I'm suddenly then, you know, feeling like I'm juggling them and they might want something from me and then I feel guilty that I'm doing the email, but then I also sometimes feel frustrated that they're needing me whilst I'm doing the email and it all just kind of everything just gets so much more tangled up. So having time to focus on whatever it is that you need to do, be at work or just stuff that needs to get done. It's just so nice because you haven't got that. But also I'm sitting here having a conversation with someone who has three chill. children. And I always feel like there's a guilt to me that I'm like, oh, I'm only having to deal with one. And yet you're talking about juggling three and doing an email and I'm just losing my shit with one. So it's tricky. Yeah. It's really tricky. I think it's just such a transition, isn't it? And I wouldn't say that three is any harder sometimes than having the intensity of having one. And when I had one, I was just trying to still work it all out and work myself out as a mom and then I had another in it was a whole different way of parenting and I wanted to copy and paste the first time and it didn't work like that and I just think I found that the more kids I've

had the less control I just accept that I have and in a way I've become more relaxed to kind of counteract some of the extra stress that comes with it I don't know and I remember when I went to a play group after having my second and there was a woman there with three and I said oh my gosh you you just rocked up with three, and I barely managed to get out of the house with two. And do you know what she said? She said, I've got seven more. Shut up. Yeah, she had 10 kids.

Oh, my God. And then I thought, well, I can never feel anything now. I've got no right to feel anything. And I think, you know, it becomes that. What a hero? I know. Do you know what? She went up more.

I think she's had 11 or 12 now. And I just thought, in that moment, I thought, well, what right have I ever got to feel any kind of overwhelm or stress or anything when she's rocking around fully functioning human being with like that many children and I just think we can get into that game of top trumps can't we of like who actually gets to feel the woman with one kid or the woman with 12 kids or and actually we're all just growing as we go making it through learning juggling and it's hard for different reasons for different people so you know what I also just think that was like such a secret, you know. I thought, I knew that parenting was hard, but then I was a parent

and I was like, what? It's this hard. Oh, right. Okay. And you just have a completely different perspective for all of your friends who've gone before you and been like, guys, this is hard. And then you're like, yeah, okay, okay, I'll have a go. Let me take a crack at it. And then you're like, no, no, no, no, no, this sucks so much. Wow. It just strips you back, grows you and challenges you, isn't it, in ways that I just never even imagine that I needed to grow and be challenged and stripped. And yeah, which leads us into what is the one thing that you, April, would love to share with all the mum's listening. Okay, so I've agonised about this because you asked me to kind of tell you a little bit about what I was going to talk about. And so as soon as I said that,

I was then like, right, well, I've got to talk about that. And then I was trying to frame how I was going to say it. And I think the best way to do it is to speak to myself as opposed to speak to all the other mum's because what I want to say is stop worrying that everything's going to go wrong. And I want to say wrong as well in air quotes because how I have understood that word has changed so much throughout this process. And I also think directing someone to stop doing something is pointless. That's not advice. That's something that you can just say and then go, okay, cool. I'll stop doing that then. I'm just going to stop worrying about that. Thanks. But for myself, I think it needed to be a jolt out of a cycle of thinking for someone to actually

just go, you know what? No, you don't need to do that anymore. And I think some context would probably help, which is our journey to pregnancy was, was wrong. and I think you kind of, I certainly blindly went into it thinking, well, I'm going to have sex and get pregnant like I was told in school. And it's not like that. For some people, and certainly for us, it wasn't like that. And that started this germ of, well, there's something wrong with you. There's something wrong. What's wrong here? And I'm using wrong in a kind of air quotes capacity at this point. Then we got pregnant and I had a miscarriage. And I think in that scenario, you're being told by a medical professional that something is wrong. Something's

unviable. It's not going to progress. And then you have decisions to make around how to terminate that pregnancy. And again, compounded my, there's something wrong. Then I was told that I had, had a bichorne, your uterus, and that is when your uterus is a heart shape, and therefore it might be more difficult for you to carry a child, and certainly to have a vaginal birth. And so I found my white rabbit. The confirmation bias was there. There is something wrong. There is something abnormal. It's an anomaly. And all of these kind of terms set me up for ultimately a very, very stressful pregnancy, where I was in freeze. I was just frozen. in not wanting to do anything wrong ever.

It couldn't go wrong. I had to be perfect. I was holding myself to account. And Woody's pregnancy was also very difficult. We were told at the 20 weeks scran that he had a mild case of ventricular megaly, which is water on his brain. We were then closely followed.

We were already in the high-risk clinic because of my uterine anomaly. Now we're getting scans that are showing anomalies. wrong, wrong, wrong, negative. Everything's abnormal. It's going to be weird. It's going to be different. It's not your normal journey.

And so I was waiting. I would go to scans at this fantastically brilliant spaceship that was a fetal medicine hospital. And then they'd say, right, okay, well, it hasn't progressed. But if it does, we'll have to talk about, you know, what you want for this pregnancy and what the outcome to be. And then they say, off you go then, and we'll see you in. two weeks. And in those two weeks, you have to just sit in, what does that look like for me? How do I come to terms with that? What do I, how do I feel about the potential of bringing a child who has additional needs into the world? Am I doing that for me? What's all of those conversations that you

have to have? And I suppose my question to myself then is, do you have to have them? Do you need the worry. And of course, there are cases where awful things happen and I am counting my lucky stars that at the moment I am raising a typical toddler. But what it did do was, I suppose, set me up for constant vigilance, constantly waiting because it happened before. It did go wrong. it did something did cause this there were things to look out for and so now i i look back on that first year particularly at this woman who was just crippled by fear and honestly like you know i look at my body in photos like that and i can just see the worry and the stress on the kind of bare bones of the skinny body that i always wanted and then i'm looking at myself

going, that's not a healthy person. And I think this is going to sound really like woo-hoo and hippie, but my sister took me to a goddess retreat and we were doing yoga and, you know, heart opening cacao drink.

And it was the first, I think Woody was about nine months. And it was kind of the first time I'd been away from him and kind of the first time I'd sort of, you know, been with myself. And we were doing a meditation and she said she was kind of doing a body scan and I find those things very difficult anyway because I just my brain is so active and you know constantly what could go wrong um but it was something she said during that meditation that I think was my jolt out of cyclical negativity

and she said you are safe to see the truth and that mantra just really struck a chord because I'd felt so unsafe. I'd felt so wildly out of control and and you know my my fear response had kept me in this state of freeze for such a long time and that then became a comfort. I felt comforted by being totally just familiar. Exactly exactly and so I then had to sit and think of what the truth was and actually wrong is just normal for us what what goes wrong is what happens in your life and i think sometimes certainly with medical terminology and and often around baby loss and and just general pregnancy practice you know about how they how a mother is spoken to there's a kind of um i don't want to say coldness but

The emotion is taken out of it, I suppose. Yeah, it's just so clinical, isn't it? Right. The whole process at all stages of becoming or trying to become mother is deeply emotive, isn't it? Exactly. And so I just feel like that kind of, that side of things wasn't cared for in my experience. And therefore I was left feeling like there must be something I will miss as I did with my miscarriage. I don't want to miss the thing that's going to go wrong. So I'm going to

stay vigilant and start going to do everything right. Exactly. And I'm going to try and do everything right. And if something goes wrong, then exactly, why is it my fault? And so I suppose this isn't a piece of advice, but it's a share. And I'm hoping that, you know, if there is somebody listening who's thinking, I'm going mad and I'm the only one who's going mad, you're not. And your journey is continuing and however you need to get out of that way of thinking, you need to get out of it because what's happening right now, whether it's deemed wrong in society or not, is what's happening and you've got a fantastic being to raise and you'll miss it. That's what you'll miss. It's so profound, April, and I'm just, you know, so grateful for your generosity and sharing your

story with us. And I think those words will resonate and ringing people's ears, you know, you're safe to see the truth because I think you're so right when we have been told that things are wrong or when we've had to really guard ourselves against things being wrong or just process things that by the world's terms have gone wrong. It can feel like a really unsafe and scary thing to see the truth of what is right and what is good and to allow yourself to kind of lean in towards that and oh it's just so yeah just so powerful and I did a podcast the other day with someone and he was he was saying you know what could what's going right what could go right yeah it could all go wrong but also what could what could go right and I think what you're

encouraging us to do is just to kind of widen because we when we're just so fearful you know we're kind of just so focused aren't we on everything that could go wrong and it's so fear-based and actually just kind of widening our vision to also alongside it see the things that are right and see the things that are good and see the things that are yeah thank you you know that's the thing is it it it filters into everything and for a long time in our journey it was it was all around sleep and what could go wrong during sleep and and and actually it very rarely did go wrong you know what if he doesn't eat it Well, he did. What if he doesn't fall asleep in the car? Well, he did. What if he screams the place down for the whole trip around the museum? Well, he did, but we went outside. You know?

Yeah. Yeah. And redefining what wrong actually is because things happen all the time. And I think it's your right is when we take responsibility for things that are actually just not fault. They're not our fault. And then we feel like it's our responsibility to get it right. when actually a lot of life just happens to us and is outside of our control, whether our kids fall asleep in the car or not, if you've ever tried to keep a toddler awake whilst driving, it's incredibly challenging. And if they fall asleep out of schedule and it messes up, bedtime, it's not anything you have done wrong. It's life happening.

So, oh, yeah, amazing. Thank you. Also, I'd like to say that I'm not like overly living by this advice. I'm trying. You know, this is a work in progress. I have an 18-month-old. He always throws it up. I think that's it, though,

is grappling with these things and just becoming aware of when we're moving into that mindset of the wrongness and things that we're doing wrong and things that might go wrong because that's the way the world will often pull us, right? And that's the way our minds with our negativity kind of bias will often pull us.

But it's introducing the other side to that tug of war so that we're aware, that there is another side to it as well. There are things that are going good. There are things to remind yourself to feel safe to see the truth of what is also wonderful in your life, what is also going really well, and where your responsibility is and isn't lying and making it right or protecting yourself from the wrong. So yeah, I think are we ever going to be there? I'm not all the stuff I write about. It's constant. It's still stuff I'm constantly having to put into practice in my day-to-day life. And it's tiring sometimes to bring in that other

narrative. But it gets us to a better place and a more balanced place because of it than those. Well, I think the fact that I've even managed to talk about this out loud to a stranger who I, by the way, follow avidly and who constantly throws out things. And it's like, today, I think yesterday maybe said it's important to look up. I was like, I never do that. I never look up. I just look up. But it's the bigger picture, isn't it? And this is what you're talking about is, you know, wrong, wrong, wrong, but also feel safe to see what is true and what is right. So it's that broadening when we can just become so kind of focused down

and that pinpoint fear. And yeah, so it's kind of the same, singing from the same hymn sheet, April. Okay, great. What a great song. Yeah, it is a good song. It is a good song. Yes, girl. So, I mean, we could chat.

I honestly think we could chat forever. I'm loving talking to you. But in the nature of the 20 minute podcast, I'm going to quick fly you. I'm going to give you, which of my quick-fire question should I be? Oh, I love this one actually. It's the one I often go to

because I just think it gives us a little bit of insight into people. What's one thing outside of parenting that makes you feel good? Um, oh. Oh my God, the thing that's coming to mind, and I don't know what this says about me, but it might be like a deep-rooted sign right now. Getting a bit drunk, dressing up. Okay. And having a good time and having people be like, she's fit.

I like it. Just feeling like a different part of yourself, I guess, than the one that we're probably embody most of the time in day-to-day grind. Yeah, you know, feeling good. You know, she's on the dance floor. Yeah. She's on the dance floor. Yes.

She's got an outfit on that she's feeling good in. Tapping into that other side of you that is often just, yeah. She's maybe had a couple of tequilas, you know? I haven't had tequila in a long time. Yeah, don't do it. I did it last Friday. It was really, really bad. Also, terrible with a toddler.

No one told me that. Hangovers are bad and then you throw a toddler into the mix and it's like, oh no. They don't know. They don't. Literally, I came downstairs. I feel like I was, anyway. He just, he was sitting on my head. I was like, that is, that is not okay.

Oh. I didn't get that, no. Another day, but not this one. No. They never get the memo. They never get the memo. But thank you so much for sharing so openly and honestly, which is why I love following you on social media because you do just that.

So I encourage everyone to go and follow along at April Pearson on the gram. And yeah, just enjoy a lot of these kind of. of just really honest, relatable insights. So thank you. Thank you for joining me. Thank you, Anna. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you have enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and review for me. Also, if you need any resources at all, I have lots of videos and courses on everything from health anxiety to driving anxiety and people pleasing. They are all on my website, anamatha.com. And also, don't forget my brand new book, Raising a happier mother is out now for you to enjoy and benefit from. It's all about how to find

balance, feel good and see your children flourish as a result. Speak to you soon.