Sarah Drew has finally revealed how her father Charles Drew’s advice helped calm her nervous system during panic attacks.
The 45-year-old actress and director, who shot to stardom with her portrayal of surgeon Dr. April Kepner in Grey’s Anatomy, gave an interview to Fox News, which was published on Saturday, May 23.
Sarah told the outlet that she had panic attacks when she was pregnant with her first child and she would have lost herself if her father had not given her life-changing advice.
The Everwood star said, “One of the biggest, scariest risks that I leaped into was choosing to become a mom. I took the risk, and I was pregnant. I was probably about six months pregnant, and I had been having panic attacks.”
“I’d been so caught up with anxiety about all of it. I was worried I was going to screw up. I was worried for my kids that I wasn’t going to have the necessary selflessness that’s required. I was worried that I was too self-absorbed to do this well. [I was worried that] I would resent the fact that [my kids] were … demanding things from me,” she explained.
Sarah admitted that she embraced motherhood with “so many big fears” due to which she kept getting panic attacks and when she failed to handle the situation herself, she asked for help from her father.
She recalled, “I remember writing to my dad and just saying, ‘Do you have any advice or any wisdom or any Scripture that you can point me toward that could help combat this fear? Because it’s really overwhelming.’”
Her father did not give her a lecture; rather, he advised her to sit with “aggressive gratitude.”
“I was like, ‘Tell me more.’ He calls it ‘aggressive’ because it’s not always easy when you first start practicing gratitude because sometimes you’re just in a mind spiral, and all you can see is the scary and the dark,” she noted.
It is pertinent to mention that Sarah Drew shares two children sons, Micah Emmanuel and daughter Hannah Mali Rose, with her husband, Dr. Peter Lanfer.
