Amanda Abbington considered suicide after her 16-year relationship with Martin Freeman ended. The 49-year-old actress - who has Joe, 17, and Grace, 15, with her former partner - was left feeling a "mess" after the 2016 break-up and was spurred on to seek help from a therapist after hitting rock bottom because she "hated" herself.
Speaking on the 'Full Disclosure' podcast about what she's now kinder to herself, she said: “It was breaking up with Martin and then realising I needed to sort myself out because I was a bit of a mess.
I hated myself. “It was funny because the other day, and I’ve never told anyone, not even my therapist, I’d had a row with Grace because she couldn’t find her uniform and was late for school. “So in the end I had to drive her to school instead of the bus and I was sitting in the car and I was having a go at her and I was getting nothing back from her because she’s a 15-year-old and she’s going through all this stuff. “She’s a girl, I’m a mother — rage, anxiety. “And I was sat there as I was driving, in my head, and I haven’t said this since I started therapy six years ago, ‘you could always kill yourself’. " Amanda - who is now engaged to Jonathan Goodwin - admitted taking her own life had been a "genuine option" for her several times over the years if she felt she wasn't doing things as well as she could.
She added: “And that was what my mantra used to be. “If you’ve let people down and upset somebody or if you’re not being the best you can or you’re a bad mother, or you’re not stepping up with your acting, you can always kill yourself. “That was a genuine option for me, quite a few times in my life.
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