Post-traumatic stress touches so many lives: Jodie Hill

But 27 June is PTSD Awareness Day, and this year I want to tell the truth about my own experience. Because I think it’s one a lot of people in Yorkshire will recognise, even if they’ve never had the words for it.

My PTSD didn’t begin with my well-documented breakdown in January 2017, though that was certainly the moment everything came crashing down. It began in childhood. With trauma that my memory had largely regressed. Experiences my brain had buried deep in an attempt to protect me, allowing me to keep functioning, keep achieving, keep going.

And for a long time, keep going is exactly what I did. I qualified as a barrister, cross-qualified as a solicitor, and built a career in law. On paper, everything looked fine. Inside, I was carrying something I couldn’t even fully see yet.

That unprocessed childhood trauma was compounded over the years by experiences in adulthood and the high-pressure environment of the legal profession. Layer upon layer, building silently. Until one day my body simply refused to continue.

In 2017 I couldn’t leave the house. I experienced panic attacks daily. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work, couldn’t imagine being a lawyer again. What I now call my breakdown was, I believe, my nervous system finally saying enough.

What followed was years of therapy and healing. And I want to be honest: it was not a straight line. Recovery fluctuated. There were setbacks. There were periods I thought I was through it, only to find myself pulled back under. Processing childhood trauma that has been buried for decades is not something you resolve in a few sessions.

But healing is possible. Today I can say that I no longer experience symptoms of PTSD. That has taken enormous work, and it has taken safety. A genuinely loving relationship with my partner. A team at Thrive Law built entirely on psychological safety and trust. And years of inner work to actually let that safety land in my body, which is harder than it sounds when your nervous system has spent a lifetime braced for danger.

I founded Thrive Law in 2018 because I wanted to build something different. A workplace where people didn't have to perform fine just to get through the day.

And what I’ve learned both personally and professionally is this: PTSD touches far more lives than we acknowledge. One in ten people in the UK will experience it at some point. That means it is in our schools, our hospitals, our offices and our law firms right across Yorkshire.

It isn’t weakness. It isn’t attention-seeking. It is a human response to experiences that overwhelmed a person’s ability to cope.

We owe it to one another to understand that better.

Jodie Hill is the founder of Thrive Law and is an employment solicitor.