'I'm not going to make it.' As her star rose, Rebecca Gibney had 15 panic attacks a day.

Australia fell in love with Rebecca Gibney in Packed to the Rafters. But behind-the-scenes of her incredible career, the actress was fighting a private battle. 

She was recently featured on This Is Your Life, and while the program featured sweet moments with visits from her co-stars, and a cameo from Hugh Jackman and Deborah Lee-Furness, Gibney also had some deeper learnings to share.

Now in her 50s, she has started to talk about the mental health battles she has faced throughout her life, especially a particularly dark time in her 30s, where she even contemplated taking her own life.

But long before that period, she endured struggles as a teenager as well, growing up with an abusive father.

Gibney began to open up publicly about her childhood in the late 2010s, writing about it on Instagram, and also speaking on Andrew Denton’s 2019 program, Interview.

“All through my teens growing up I really didn’t like my father, in fact I can probably say I hated him,” she told Denton.

“I blamed him for so much misery and not having a normal life. I could never bring friends home because he’d always be drunk. At that stage he wasn’t violent anymore, he was just a drunk, and he’d fall over,” she shared.

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A post shared by Rebecca Gibney (@rebeccagibneyTaking to Instagram just two years prior, Gibney shared a childhood photo of herself and her sister, Stella.

“No one would know that we were being raised in a family of domestic violence,” she wrote.

“I grew up in a household where violence toward our mother was a common occurrence - I am appalled that anyone can accuse a woman of ‘asking’ to be beaten. Domestic violence is wrong - domestic violence in any form is wrong,” she continued.

“Please let us remember how difficult it is for anyone that has been in this situation to speak out,” she implored.

“And for anyone in a similar situation there is always someone who will listen. And you can get through it. My mother and my family [are] a testament to that.”

Gibney has also shared that it took a breakdown in her 30s for her to fully understand the impact of her childhood trauma.

“I started seeing a counsellor, and I was able to fully understand then how [my mother] was able to forgive him. I realised that… he’s gone, you hating them or being angry at them is doing nothing for them and everything to you, it’s ruining your life,” she told Denton.

“You’ve got to cry and get angry, but when you finally let that go, it’s quite an extraordinary experience. And I realised that’s what mum would have done, a lot.”

Now, speaking on This Is Your Life in November 2022, Gibney has shared details of that time, including the nervous breakdown that led her to seek therapy in order to address the abuse she had faced.

At the time, her marriage to musician Irwin Thomas was falling apart, just as her career was taking off. 

“It was pretty tough,” she revealed. “And that was the hard thing, you do put on a front. My career was going great guns."

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A post shared by Channel 7 (@channel7)

She went on to share that at her lowest point; she was having up to 15 panic attacks a day. 

“I had anxiety attack after anxiety attack. I was in such a hole, and I thought, ‘I’m not going to make it’,” she admitted.

“I was struggling, and I couldn’t verbalise what was wrong. I just knew there was a hole inside me and it was getting bigger and bigger, and I was tumbling into it." 

She shared more details about the difficult period in a 2014 interview with the Sun Herald.

“I contemplated hospitalisation, but I didn’t want people to find out. I felt like I was in the bottom of a pit. Every time I tried to claw my way out, I’d slip back down.”

Gibney now credits therapy with helping her overcome her anxiety and depression.

“It’s so important that now, people talk about their struggles. Because if you get the help, you can get through it,” she said on This Is Your Life.

“Now I know that if I start to slide into that pit, I know that there’s a way out of it." 

Rebecca Gibney in 1990. Image: Getty.

These days, Gibney is based in her native New Zealand, living in Dunedin with her husband of 21 years, Richard Bell, and her son, Zac, who is 18.

“He gets me utterly, and we’re each other’s biggest fans,” Gibney said of Bell in an interview with The New Zealand Women’s Weekly.

“It doesn’t mean we don’t have issues, but we always work through them because I can’t imagine growing old with anyone else. He’s my rock, and I think I’m his,” she shared. 

As for her son, Gibney has noticed similarities between Zac and her own father.

“There was a moment in hospital when we locked eyes, and I saw my father,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2016

“I still see him in him sometimes, and I am like ‘Oh my god, it’s my dad’,” she went on.

“Zachary is confident, strong and secure and knows we love him. I promised to give him the life my father never had.”

Feature Image: Getty/Mamamia.

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