**By Lucy Chesterton
The Packed To The Rafters star describes her fight against the emotional scars of alcoholism and violence.**
For Rebecca Gibney, last week’s TV Week Gold Logie win was all the more precious because it marked the end of a lifetime struggle against the emotional fallout from her tortured childhood.
By her own admission, the actress spent years in a downward spiral of depression, after growing up with a violent and unstable father.
“My father was an alcoholic,” Rebecca told Andrew Denton during an interview. “It scarred all of us.”
Rebecca, 44, admits her childhood was so traumatic that she has blocked many memories from her mind. She says it was her “extraordinary” mum Shirley, 74, who helped her overcome the “emotional collapse” she suffered when, years later, she started coming to terms with the abuse.
“My mother shielded us a lot from it,” Rebecca has said. “I remember her putting us to bed and I, quite often, would hear Dad come home but she’d always shut all the doors, so you’d hear the yelling and the shouting and the slapping but you’d never actually see it.
“When I was older, she said that, on the odd occasion, he beat her so badly she had bruises for six months.”
It was also Rebecca’s mum Shirley who gave the family a sense of stability throughout the confusion of moving house more than 40 times because Rebecca’s father Austin would “smash up the furniture”.
“Sometimes she’d wake us up and bundle us into the car and we’d drive around the block and we’d sleep outside,” Rebecca revealed to Andrew. “But she made it an adventure.”
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