After the incident, she developed PTSD, for which she had to undergo treatment.
Sandra Bullock was recently on an episode of Red Table Talk, and she revealed a rather scary and traumatic experience of her life. One night in 2014, while she was alone, someone broke into her Bel Air home, according to PEOPLE.
"My house was broken into while I was in it," she tells Willow Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris. "I'm in the closet going, 'This doesn't end well.' I'm in the closet, [which is] not gonna help."
It happened on the night when her son, whom she adopted when he was just three-and-a-half months old, wasn't at home. She also revealed that she had been watching 48 Hours and Dateline on that night.
"It was the one night that Louis wasn't with me," Bullock says. "It was the one night that our nanny goes, 'Let me just take him to my apartment which is up the street because you're going to be out late.' Had he been home, I would've run to the closet, which is now my official closet but that was his bedroom, and it would have changed our destiny forever," she says. "So why was he not home on that one night? And the violation of that. I wasn't the same after that. I was unraveling."
The intruder was later arrested and identified as then-39-year-old Joshua James Corbett. according to The Hollywood Reporter. The police later discovered that the suspect had spent days stalking Bullock and they also found out that he had eight firearms registered in his name at the time of the burglary.
In 2017, Corbett pleaded no contest to one felony count each of stalking and first-degree residential burglary. He was sentenced to five years probation, in addition to having a 10-year protective order issued against him. He was also ordered to seek mental health treatment. Unfortunately, in 2018, Corbett died by suicide after a stand-off with the cops at his La Crescenta home. Bullock acknowledged that the system had “failed him.”
“What’s sad is that the system failed him,” she said. “There was an altercation with SWAT and he killed himself.” Later, she realized that the break-in had left her with PTSD, when she started crying randomly. “I would look left out of a car. Not right. I would look left, and I would start sobbing,” she recalled. “And I thought to myself, I’m a single parent and this child is going to absorb nothing but fear and trauma and shame from me in the most pivotal times of his life, and I was like, I don’t want to drop that load of baggage onto my beautiful child.”
To deal with that, she began EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy to help her process what happened to her. The psychotherapy method is used to help individuals recover from trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression, and panic disorders, and other similar conditions.
It was something Bullock said she was “scared to do” but has since helped her and “was the most healing.”
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Cover Image Source: Getty Images | Photo by Stuart C. Wilson
