For KING & COUNTRY Star’s Wife Freed from Agony of Anxiety Attacks and Addiction: ‘God Is Healer’ by Joseph Stallings for CBN News
Courtney Smallbone, the wife of Luke Smallbone from the Grammy-winning Christian duo For KING & COUNTRY, was once trapped in trauma and addiction. It all started with a rare disease, and later in life when she needed medication for morning sickness, her prescription and unhealed pain soon took a dark turn.
“I felt so much shame for not being strong, and so I just didn’t talk about it. Especially in, you know, I come from generations of pastors and my husband’s in Christian music and so where do you have this conversation about anxiety and anxiety attacks and feeling overwhelmed by this doom and fear.”
“I was 18 and diagnosed with a rare disease called Lemierre’s syndrome,” she explains. “Lemierre’s syndrome is really rare, they say one in a million, and it’s an infection that starts in your artery and shoots off to all of your organs and starts killing them.”
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“And when you’re in ICU and people are operating on you and it’s a life or death situation, I started having post-traumatic stress. During that time I shoved it down, I didn’t want to talk about how I was having nightmares and how I was having panic attacks.”
Though doctors were able to get her disease under control, Courtney continued to suppress her feelings of anxiety. Years later, her post-traumatic stress re-triggered when she became pregnant with her second child.
“I had horrible morning sickness,” she recalls. “And so they gave me a prescription for it. And this prescription was interesting because, when I took it, I calmed down. So I would just keep taking it, high doses. My midwife was kind of questioning why I was still on it.”
“In that time I didn’t even share this addiction with Luke, with anyone,” she says. “Sometimes this prescription can mess with your serotonin levels. So I would take it, and I would feel better. So I kept taking it.”
