Silvia Freeman (Care and Career)
Silvia Freeman is a Wellbeing Facilitator and former sandwich carer who now supports working carers through practical, no-fluff tools like EFT, NLP, and breath-work. Drawing from h...
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Who are you?
Hi, I am Sylvia. I am a mum. I am a health and wellbeing facilitator and consultant. I am a good friend. I love learning new things about the topics that I'm interested in, how the body works. So in my spare time I do learn about always learning about different things, how the mind body works, things about emotions and neuroscience. I love Zumba, I love walking. I love running, So I'm quite active person. I was a sandwich carer for a very long time. I worked in a very big corporate organisation, network Rail for 11 years where I was a health and wellbeing specialist. And yeah, I love life. I love being active, I love being curious, and yeah, I'm generally quite calm and happy and yeah, love life.
What is your background?
So I grew up in Slovakia in a really small town, so beautiful. Everywhere you look, you can see the mountains. It's beautiful. I was brought up by my grandparents since I was two and a half years old. So I entered kinship care with my grandparents. They were amazing. They gave me everything they could. They gave me amazing values and everything they had in their resources. Later on in life, I moved to the UK and I got married, had my baby, and worked in a huge organisation as a health and wellbeing specialist. And at the same time, I was carer for my grandparents too.
What inspired you to get in to Mental Health & Wellbeing?
It was my own mental health and not really managing my own emotional state. Growing up with grandparents, I loved them dearly and they did the best they could for me. But growing up with grandparents, it's again very, very different. I had to make sense of why I am living with my grandparents, even though it was quite normal, very natural. But later on, as I was probably 14, 15, I had a lot of questions and build up a lot of negative beliefs about why my parents didn't want me, why they gave me up. And so I kind of thought, maybe it's my fault. Maybe there's something wrong with me. And I developed depression, I didn't know that it was depression. I didn't have words for this, But later on I've learned that that's what it was, and I developed this chronic anxiety and I just didn't know what to do with myself. It was really tough for me to understand why am I like this? I hated myself, to be honest with you. I absolutely did not like myself. Nothing about myself I liked, and that was painful for a very, very long time. And that was my motivation to get into the mental health and wellbeing and learn about where is these thoughts coming from and how do we deal with emotions and what do we do with them? And how is the brain connected to my nervous system? And all that kind of stuff really is fascinating. And yeah, that was a huge motivation, my own mental health to do what I do today.