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Go to P3 HousingWith a turbulent start to life, Harriet is learning to overcome her struggles and help others in need. Now a P3 Support Worker, this is her journey from accessing support to giving support.
Sitting with Harriet*, she exuberates warmth, kindness and laughter – immediately feeling at ease in her presence. Spending the day with her and the team at P3 Leicester Mental Health and Wellbeing Recovery Service, you can see they are all so natural in their roles – friendly and welcoming.
Past the threshold of the hub, anything goes – everyone is welcome. Moving to a quiet corner of the room, Harriet opens up about her life before P3, both before her role and before her support.
Born in Leicester, she has lived there her whole life – turbulent from the start, her early life spent with her parents and three siblings, was marked by domestic violence and abuse. Her dad eventually forcing her mum from the house. By the time Harriet’s stepmother moved in, she was regularly beaten, starved and abused.
She laments that ‘it was every kind of abuse you can imagine – apart from sexual abuse, that came from a different family member.’ Treated so harshly as a child, Harriet opens up about her struggle to recognise normal behaviour and its effect on her self-esteem as a young woman.
“I got pregnant at sixteen, I just needed a way to leave home – this was with my first partner. I was only fifteen when I got with him – I was in a domestic violence relationship with him for almost 10 years. I didn’t see his violence when I got with him because all I ever knew was violence. I couldn’t do anything – I had to wear certain clothes; I wasn’t allowed make up or to go to any events. The only thing I could do was work, only because he didn’t want to work.”
Harriet doesn’t tense up when she recalls being strangled, beaten up and getting black eyes – she starts to get uncomfortable when she talks of him touching her kids. For Harriet, this was the breaking point.
After learning to drive in secret, Harriet found that her license gave her the biggest source of independence – the ability to take her kids and get away from the abuse. Threatening her and her children, her ex-partner escalated the violence beyond the threshold of the home with stalking, smashing windows, and even spitting on his own children.
I had no choice but to get the police involved – he finally left, and I moved on with somebody else.
Getting pregnant quickly, her relationship with her new partner developed at a faster rate than she intended. Yet, she still looked forward to the pregnancy – being a mum was, and is still, the centre of her life.
Things, however, took a drastic turn when her son suddenly passed away. ‘He went to sleep, and he never woke up,’ to this day Harriet still doesn’t know what happened.
Out of everything that had happened in her life so far, this was the event that pushed her over the edge. She turned to drugs for release, maintaining that she would wait until her kids weren’t around. Though she never used with them insight, Harriet relents ‘I wasn’t being a good mum – I was a wild one.’
She says how people expected her to go back to normal, but life doesn’t work like that. While she was partying to numb the pain, her partner was cheating but she kept taking him back. ‘My self-esteem was so low, I didn’t know how I deserved to be treated.’
With her mental state in tatters, Harriet started attending clinical sessions surrounding her mental health. She was diagnosed with EUPD (Emotional Unstable Personality Disorder), often deemed too complex to receive in-depth care. She recalls ‘just managing on my own’ which was emphasised even more when her partner left, and her world fell apart once again.
Harriet says, ‘I wanted to die – my kids were my life, and I knew that I wasn’t being the best mum and that made me not want to live anymore. But I continued to live, for them.’ She had no choice but to be forced to think about practicalities. With her rent in arrears, Harriet’s mum reached out to P3 for help.
They had an initial assessment and assigned Mel as Harriet’s Recovery Worker. They helped her pay her bills on time, clean her house and look after her children. Even though P3 came to help with her housing situation, Harriet said her mental health recovered. Still to this day, Harriet is so thankful for the support she received: “At the end of support, I was devastated.”
Eventually, she managed to find Mel on social media – where Mel asked Harriet to apply for a role at P3. ‘They saw something in me, I don’t know how. I panicked, but applied for it anyway – I got it, and that’s where it started, my Advice and Navigation Role.’
Harriet is smiling now; it is clear she loves the role and the team around her. She also loves helping others, saying that she would never want anybody to feel how she used to feel.
She reflects on how though ‘Mel wasn’t there for my mental health, she did more for it than any other specialist – I want to be that for somebody else.’
Looking to the future, Harriet wants to progress in her career. She wants to continue to learn, promote kindness, and move forwards in her role.
She’s also started travelling more, learning to swim and striving for the best for her kids – this included an apology for the past and an effort to live for the moment going forward.
Harriet maintains that ‘even though my son has passed, I will always be a mum of five. I’ve changed – I want to do the best for my kids here but also for when I meet him again. I want him to see that I’ve gone from rock bottom to where I am now.’
She smiles, ‘this is the most stable I’ve ever been, and the starting point was acceptance.’ Her parting advice is to reach out, telling others not to suffer alone – and to anyone not suffering, don’t judge, you never know what somebody has been through.
Harriet is currently working for P3 as an Advice and Navigation Support Worker at P3 Leicester Mental Health and Wellbeing Recovery Service, she continues to thrive in her role and encourages anybody suffering with their mental health to reach out.
*Names changed to protect anonymity
