A Wild Child’s Buried Trauma

Life Changing

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.6 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sarah Fairbairns spent much of her life feeling she was a bit different. Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, she gained the reputation of a wild child – from travelling to India, to dancing on stage with the cast of iconic counter-culture musical Hair. And yet all the while, she faced bouts of sadness and depression, and a confusion as to why that should be. Later in life, Sarah made a discovery about a medical childhood trauma that changed the way she viewed the world – and wrote in to Life Changing to share her experience.

Now in her seventies, Sarah speaks to Dr Sian Williams about how confronting her past has provided belated but extraordinary relief.

Producer: Tom Alban

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Greg Jenner. I'm the host of Your Dead to Me, where the best names in comedy and history
0:05.5	join me to learn about and laugh at the past. You are a traitor. And in the new series, we'll meet
0:11.2	Aristotle. I think he might have been a time traveller. Someone who's like almost a glitch.
0:15.3	We'll dive into the causes of the British Civil Wars in the 1600s. In England at this period,
0:19.8	there's people can't get on the housing ladder.
0:21.5	This sounds familiar. And we'll discover the arts and crafts movement. I love the clothes. I love
0:26.5	the vibe. Yes, we're a comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it. You're dead to me.
0:31.3	Listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:34.3	BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.
0:41.3	You're about to listen to the latest series of Life-changing.
0:45.3	Episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts, but if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.
0:52.3	Hello and welcome to the series that hears from extraordinary people
0:56.2	who've experienced a moment that transforms everything.
1:00.2	There's a phrase from a 19th century philosopher that goes,
1:04.3	life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
1:10.0	Our guest today will recognise that.
1:12.7	A listener who lived life with intensity,
1:15.1	a teenager in the era of Woodstock and Hare and Joni Mitchell,
1:18.8	she took drugs, dropped out, then married, had children, got divorced.
1:23.5	But it was only then that Sarah Fairbairns looked back
1:26.9	and understood her life-changing event was deep in her past.
1:32.5	Hello, Sarah.
	...

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