Everyone has their own personal stressors, and while Sandra Bullock always looks flawless on the outside, she gets real about what’s actually going on inside in a recent Red Table Talk.
Sharing with hosts Willow Smith, Jada Smith and Adrienne Banfield-Norris that her house was previously broken into, Bullock explains that this event was the main culprit behind her PTSD diagnosis. Speaking about her son, she adds, “It was the one night that Louis wasn’t with me. It was the one night that our nanny goes, ‘Let me just take him to my apartment, which is up the street, because you’re going to be out late.’ Had he been home, I would’ve run to the closet, which is now my official closet but that was his bedroom, and it would have changed our destiny forever.”
The Bird Box star says she was never the same after that one incident. Around that time, Bullock’s son also got a poisonous spider bite, which caused him to have a seizure. The two incidences combined were stressful enough to cause her to lose hair.
“I was looking at my body and I said it’s going to break,” she recalls. “It was not responding well to what was happening. My hair starts falling out. I have alopecia spots everywhere…I literally had to take inventory: ‘If I don’t pull it together, I’m going to die. Something is going to happen to my body that I can’t control,’ and I can control almost everything.”
To get her anxiety under control, Bullock visited a therapist, who provided a PTSD treatment called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy). This therapy, along with learning how to seek help, helped Bullock get out of that negative headspace. “I’m still not great at [asking for help], but I’m getting better. It was my children who showed me that, unless I pull it together right now, I’m not going to be around to have the moments that I want to add.”
