Australia loves Rebecca Gibney – her Gold Logie proves that. Yet her success has masked enormous pain, as she tells Wendy Squires.

It's hard to comprehend that the story Rebecca Gibney is telling could actually have happened. It seems impossible that the bubbly actress with the twinkling periwinkle blue eyes, easy smile and contagious laugh at lunch today is the same person who, she’s explaining, suffered a full-scale emotional collapse with agoraphobia, depression and panic attacks that kept her a virtual prisoner in her own home.

It also seems inconceivable that Rebecca was so full of self-loathing, regret and shame that she admits, “I needed Valium to go to the supermarket”, was so fearful that, if she stepped outside her front door, she would be overwhelmed by the belief that “people were staring at me and I’d have to run back inside”, and so unhappy that she couldn’t imagine ever laughing again.

Perhaps it’s because it’s hard not to compare Rebecca with her affable character, Julie Rafter, in the Seven Network's hugely popular series, Packed to the Rafters.

Or perhaps it's just that Rebecca is such a warm, friendly and gracious dining companion, it's simply too disturbing to imagine her in such pain.

Yet in a candid interview with The Weekly, Rebecca confesses her childhood home-life in New Zealand was vastly different to that of the loving Rafter clan. As the youngest of six children, Rebecca regularly witnessed her mother being beaten by her violent, alcoholic father, living in a constant state of fear as to when, where and who he would strike next.

The legacy of abuse left a dark shadow that clouded Rebecca's happiness until she turned 30 and which, like all shadows, badly needed to be confronted. Yet, like so many surviviors of chaotic childhoods, Rebecca's self-examination got lost in life's daily battle until, one day, she explains, "your past comes up and bites you on the bum".

To read more from Rebecca's frank interview with Wendy Squires see the June issue of The Australian Women's Weekly, out now.

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