When Gabby Logan moved to London to kick off her football presenting career, she didn’t realise just how much emotional baggage she was carrying with her.
The Match of The Day presenter was just 19 when her younger brother Daniel tragically passed away from an undiagnosed heart condition after playing football.
The shock devastated her family - and shortly after, her parents - mum Christine and her late father Terry Yorath - split up under the pressure.
Unaware the impact her own grief was having on her body, she went for a facial but it was something the therapist said to her that changed everything.
“I was about 21 and I'd first come to live in London after university, a few years after my brother had died,” Gaby tells Ateh Jewel on this week’s Second Act podcast.
“I thought I had hormonal spots, and I'd gone to see this acupuncturist. I realised actually what I was seeing her for was much deeper, I needed to talk through what was going on.
“She was using talking therapies while she was doing the needles.
“I probably wasn't eating properly. And I think the gut is so clever isn't it, the second brain, they call it.
“And so I think all through that process I learnt I needed to speak to somebody. Whether you call it therapy or whether it's counseling, I think it's so important, just talking to people, not necessarily a therapist, but just talking to your friends and being open.”
© Getty ImagesTalking of her parents' marriage breakdown she said, “I think it got to the point where it seemed inevitable because the relationships started to break down after my brother died and it was so awful and so painful for them that you almost kind of wanted them to, you know, just build their lives separately.
“My younger brother was only six when my brother died so he hadn't experienced the childhood we'd had. He didn't get the kind of life that we'd had with them. So that was also quite sad because there's like two chunks of memories almost for us of before and after.
“It is tough, divorce, isn't it? Whatever age. And, you know, people who can consciously uncouple, even even the happiest divorces, still have got a lot of sadness because as somebody much wiser than me once said, there's always one person that probably wants it a bit more than the other.”
Some may have crumbled under such loss, but for Gabby, she said the pain taught her one of her most valuable lessons about life, and helped her to carry on with a positive outlook.
“Daniel's death and my dad dying in January taught me that life is going to present things that are sad.
“If you learn to love and really commit and love somebody, then you're going to feel sad if you lose them. That is the way of the world that you want in a way, that you want to feel connected to all those emotions. But I think a lot of people get a bit scared of that.”
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