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During her recent appearance on “Peace of Mind with Taraji” on Facebook Watch, Tamar Braxton revealed that she first began to notice a change in her mental health after her public firing from “The Real.”
“If you could put a time stamp on when you felt like you were losing control of your life, when would you say was the moment?” asked Henson’s co-host Tracie Jade.
“‘The first time I knew that things weren’t normal is when everything went down with ‘The Real,’” Braxton confessed. “I was in my bedroom. It was completely dark. You don’t shower. You don’t eat. You don’t know what day of the week it is or what time. And you don’t care.”
As you may recall Braxton was let go from the daytime talk show in 2016 after hosting the series for three years. In hindsight, Braxton admits that everything in her life seemed to fall apart after her departure.
“I was able to hide it enough, to pull myself barely out of it. And then I go back to the same toxic lifestyle without dealing with everything that happened to me prior, and that is continually happening to me, right? From day-to-day, I was just barely sliding by, you know? I just felt choked ’cause it was no escape. I just didn’t see another way out. I wanted to die, everything was going wrong,” she told Henson and Jade.
After the firing Braxton admits that her relationship with her family also began to suffer and later, the relationship she would go on to build with ex-fiancé, David Adefeso, would also follow suit.
“I had no relationship with my family, I was estranged from my sisters, including my mother, and I worked with my family. We had no healing time. My relationship with my fiancé at the time was out of control,” Braxton admitted. “I saw no signs of nothing. The relationship with my child was surface, meaning like, yeah I check-in, but I wasn’t really checking in. I would make him some food but I didn’t know if he liked it, you know what I mean. And with myself, I gained 50 pounds, so I didn’t even recognize myself anymore. That should have been such a huge sign to me, that something is wrong, that things are not going well, at all.”
Though Braxton’s story played out for all the world to see, her experience is not uncommon. Even mildly traumatic and stressful events — including but not limited to divorce, the death of a parent, the loss of a job, or even being the caretaker of a loved one with a chronic illness — have been found to trigger mental health disorders.
“Trauma pushes your ability to cope, so if you have a predisposition toward anxiety, for example, it may push you over the edge,” Andrea Roberts, a research scientist with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health explained in an interview for Harvard Women’s Health Watch.
If you suspect that you may be experiencing mental health complications as a result of stress or trauma, do not underestimate the power that these experiences can have on your mental and emotional wellbeing. You may question why you’re unable to simply “get over it,” but the reality is that it’s not always that simple.
“You don’t have to be stuck,” said Dr. Kerry Ressler, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School. “There is a good chance that you can move past this.”
