Louise Thompson has said she has “come to terms with the fact that my life might never be the same again” following the traumatic birth of her son.
The Made In Chelsea star, 31, was diagnosed with PTSD after suffering complications while giving birth to her son Leo-Hunter, with her partner Ryan Libbey, late last year.
In her first Instagram post addressing her mental health since mid-January, Thompson revealed her son had turned 15 weeks old on Monday.
Sharing photos of her family, she wrote: “If I could use a few words to describe the past month they would be: SCARED, CONFUSED, PARALYSED, AND TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL.
“My brain keeps deleting memories in order to try and protect itself and it’s so scary. Trauma and fear have no understanding of time.
“I remember a therapist told me that a few months ago and I didn’t understand what she meant. Now I do.
“Extremely scary circumstances get trapped in your brain as a fight or flight response and they don’t get processed like other memories.
“They don’t leave with time. They get trapped in your subconscious.”
Thompson admitted she had been “too scared” to post about her mental health because she was “not even close to feeling like a normal person yet”.
She added to her 1.4 million followers: “I remember when I first posted about PTSD I got really triggered by comments saying it could take 6/9 months to process and I HATED hearing that.
“I stopped reading everything. I’ve had to block out any health related content to protect myself.
“Now I have come to terms with the fact that my life might never be the same again, but things honestly can’t get any worse than they’ve been over the past month so hopefully I’m at the beginning of my actual recovery.
“I have had to learn an incredible amount of patience (something I never ever had before). Perhaps one of the only good things to come out of this?
“The only other thing that might be beneficial one day (remarkable that I’ve even reached a point where I can think about my future) is that I might be able to help encourage other people to keep on going. DON’T GIVE UP. JUST KEEP LIVING. ONE MORE DAY.”
Ahead of Christmas, Thompson revealed to her followers that Leo-Hunter had been treated in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and she had been treated in the adult ICU after the birth.
On Christmas Day, she shared a heartfelt post in which she paid tribute to the NHS staff who “worked through the night to save my life”.
Thompson appeared in Made In Chelsea’s first series in 2011, progressing to become one of the E4 show’s main characters, while partner Libbey joined the cast in 2016 when the series was filming in the south of France.
The couple became engaged in 2018 after he proposed during a hiking trip in Los Angeles.