Outside I looked okay but inside I felt very deep sense of shame
As a child, Juliette Mullen remembers hiding under the bed to avoid the rows she could hear raging between her parents.
Although she couldn’t put it into words at the time, she was suffering from anxiety. What started in childhood went on to plague much of her adult life. Like many sufferers Juliette used comfort shopping as a crutch and she spiralled into £38,000 debt.
Having wed at 22, Juliette saw her marriage crumble before the age of 30 and the future looked too bleak to face as her anxiety spiralled out of control.
“I tried to make myself feel better by online shopping and I just didn’t earn enough to support that lifestyle,” said Juliette, 39. “You think that this coat is going to make you feel fabulous or that handbag will make you feel great.
“It’s all short term and you move on to the next thing, a hairdo, make-up, whatever.
“It really is comfort shopping. I had suicidal thoughts and that’s when I took the overdose.”
Juliette, from Carluke, admits it was a massive wake-up call but she still faced major issues.
A second marriage collapsed, she lost her dad at the age of just 57 and she faced weeks of treatment at the Priory Hospital in Glasgow. “The doctor diagnosed anxiety but I didn’t feel the medication was working and I didn’t want to try group psychology sessions.
“I didn’t want everybody knowing my business. You feel vulnerable and I felt a deep shame.” It was a secret Juliette managed to hide from the world, including colleagues at her highpowered job. “If you’d looked at me from the outside you would never have known what was going on. I’d go to work wearing nice clothes and with my make-up done.
“People would see what looked like a nice family life on Facebook and Instagram. No one saw the depths of the anxiety I was facing and how I’d drive to the shopping centre and be unable to get out of the car because I was having panic attacks.”
Juliette turned to studying life coaching, neuro-linguistic programming and more to help her deal with her anxiety. And it proved invaluable in the long and stressful recovery from a neardeath medical emergency.
Juliette fell pregnant for the second time but had a difficult pregnancy and then a traumatic birth, which saw both her bladder and womb rupture. She needed life-saving surgery within minutes of her daughter being born. Fully recovered and with Willow Rose, now one, a healthy baby sister to seven-year-old Annabel, Juliette has put her training and experience to good use.
She set up life and business coaching company ClearQuartz Clarity (clearquartzclarity.com) to help others with anxiety.
“All my clients say they chose me because I came through it and I know how to come out the other side.”