Amanda Holden: I needed therapy to cope with my traumatic labour
The Britain's Got Talent judge opens up about coming close to death when her daughter Hollie was born
Amanda Holden has revealed how therapy helped her cope with the traumatic birth of her 2nd daughter and her subsequent fears about her own mortality. After the delivery of Hollie, now 3, the Britain's Got Talent judge was ‘moments from death’ when she suffered a torn artery and her heart stopped for 40 seconds. Amanda spent 3 days in intensive care.
"It makes you suddenly think, I have to live," Amanda said in a new interview with Good Housekeeping magazine. "I’ve got to live, but I’ve got to try and live a good, happy life for me too, and I think that’s why I faced up to the fact that I needed to speak to somebody.
"My therapist has told me I had no more tools or coping mechanisms left. She was very good at giving me sentences to say to make me stop panicking about my own mortality.
"I think you have none of these worries unless you’ve got children. If it had just been me and Chris [Hughes, her husband] and I’d died, it would have been awful for him but nowhere near as bad as a child losing their mother."
Amanda has an older daughter, Lexi, 9, but between Lexi and Hollies, she had a miscarriage (in 2010), followed a year later by the stillbirth of son, Theo, when she was 7 months pregnant. She now says that she won't have any more children in the future.
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“I’m not allowed," she says. "I would be dead the next time. I’ve got the two I’m supposed to have. I just had to complete my family to feel like I could be me.”
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