WellBeing reader Danielle Mitchell shares her raw story of breaking generational cycles: from childhood loss and addiction to healing, motherhood, and coming home to herself.
Trigger warning: This story contains themes that some viewers may find upsetting.
If you’d told the 11-year-old girl who had just been told her mother died from a drug overdose that one day she’d grow up to be the kind of mother who heals instead of hides, she wouldn’t have believed you. My mum was a drug addict. I loved her deeply, but my childhood was chaos, grief and survival. When she died, everything changed, but I didn’t start living until much later.
For years, I tried to control what I couldn’t. Food and exercise became my coping tools and substances became my escape. What began as a desire to be “healthy” turned into obsession, binge eating and bulimia. I built a fitness business around the version of me that looked in control but felt lost inside. I thought changing my body would fix what was broken. It didn’t.
When I stepped away to recover from my eating disorders, the silence that followed was deafening. Without food rules or rigid control, I didn’t know who I was. That’s when substances filled the space. What started as something to take the edge off quickly became something I couldn’t live without. I chased numbness the same way I used to chase discipline. I told myself I was “just having fun” but, really, I was running — from grief, from guilt, from myself. There were nights I didn’t know how I’d made it home, mornings when I promised myself I’d stop and afternoons when I broke that promise again. It was the same cycle in a different costume. Control, release, shame, repeat.
Then I became