Catherine Clark: You have a remarkable and harrowing personal story that involves going through something that almost no one else has really gone through. But what really struck me was that before that, you were a female journalist trying to make a difference in the world. Can you talk to us a bit about the “before Amanda” – about who you were before that, and about your goals and aspirations as a young woman in the journalism field?
Amanda Lindhout: Oh, I love that as a place to start. I often don’t get to share that part of my story.
Really going back, I grew up in a really poor household. We were on welfare. I was raised mostly by a single mom who worked at the grocery store, and so traveling wasn’t something that my family did at all. We had no money for that, but I always dreamed of the world, and the world to me was National Geographic magazine. This was back before everyone had a phone and the internet, and so I dreamed of being out in the world.
The way that manifested for me was first as a backpacker, saving up my money while I was a waitress and dipping my toes into travel, seeing some exotic, beautiful places, and thinking, “How can I fund this as a lifestyle?” because I wanted to see everywhere.
I had met others who were working as journalists, who were having lives of great adventure and meaning, and so that’s what I decided to do. I took a journalism program in Alberta, in Calgary, and then I went out into the world in a big way. I worked in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, through the Middle East and parts of Africa.
I had a lot of ambition. I also was, as you are when you’re in your early 20s especially, a bit reckless. In hindsight, I didn’t know as much about the world, certainly, as I do now. That ambition led me to take some pretty big risks, which ultimately culminated in this very dramatic story that I share in my book, A House in the Sky.
On what was supposed to be a one-week work trip into Somalia, which is one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in the world, I was kidnapped, and then held hostage for nearly a year and a half – 460 days, to be exact – in really brutal conditions.
I don’t think there’s any easy kidnapping experience, but unfortunately my experience was very dark – literally being held in a dark room. In that dark room, I certainly had a lot of time to think about my life, the decisions that I had made, the choices in pursuit of ambition and trying to build a meaningful life for myself, and the consequences those choices had for others, like my family.
Jennifer Stewart: I immediately go to your thought process during those 460 days when you were held captive. I think nobody can really relate to that. You were emotionally, physically, and sexually abused. What part of yourself did you draw on to get through that period? Because at the time, you didn’t know if you were going to be released or not, or if this was it. Where did you find strength – or did you find strength? What were those days like?
Amanda Lindhout: Well, one thing that I’ve learned through all the years after this big experience is that even though it’s true that almost no one will ever go through something this extreme – and no one but me will ever go through that exact experience – what I find really interesting is that most people go through something that could be labeled as traumatic, as a very overwhelming situation that they don’t know how to navigate.
What I do think is interesting is that people seem to go through the same kinds of stages and steps to get through it.
For me, initially, it was shock that this was what my life had become. Literally one morning I’m having breakfast and eating my eggs, and then an hour later I’ve been abducted, right? The life that I had known before that was gone forever.
So: shock, fear, disbelief. Then the situation starts getting really bad, and as the situation worsens and time passes, it really becomes about getting through – not the whole experience, because you don’t know how long the experience is going to be – but getting through the moments.
That’s where I think I have a lot to share with others who are navigating challenges in their life, because how do you get through those moments?
For me, what I discovered was that an enormous source of strength was realizing that I always had the power to decide what I was going to focus on and where I was going to focus my attention. Of course, despair was a big part of that experience constantly, but as time passed, I realized that I could place my attention, moment by moment, on hope – on the idea that a better future was coming, whenever that was going to be.
I didn’t know, but I reinforced that belief in a better future by remembering the good life that I had had, remembering that despite my immediate surroundings, the world was still a beautiful place out there – just out there – and I had to survive. I had to choose to survive to get back out there and be part of that beautiful world again.
It’s a lot of work. It’s a mental training. It’s a training of your mindset that, as the waves of despair come, you kind of ride those, and then when it’s available to you, you very consciously reorient yourself again and again toward reminders of your “why,” right? For me, my purpose, my connections in life, my loved ones, and the big picture of a life that I hoped I would be able to rebuild for myself on the other side.
Frankly, that’s how I got through those moments. And then, of course, you come out of that, and that’s a whole other scenario that you need to navigate on the other side.
But in that dark room, with chains on my ankles, it was about getting through the moments and choosing to orient myself toward reminders of what was good in the world and in my life.
Catherine Clark: I know that Jen and I want to talk about the “after” too, but you paint a picture of being able to really focus on the good. Were there also moments when you weren’t sure that you could do it anymore?
Amanda Lindhout: Oh, absolutely. Those moments were daily – multiple times a day. That’s just the reality when you’re going through something so overwhelming.
So thank you for saying that, because I certainly don’t want to paint a picture that you can just train your mind to overlook the difficulties, because that’s not real life. Certainly for me, in that dark room, I visited despair – the depths of despair – again and again and again.
When I would be in the darkest moments, two things stand out. One thing that I find so remarkable – and I’ve talked to other survivors of really extraordinary things, and this seems to be a commonality – is that when all feels lost and you’re really struggling to orient yourself toward what’s good, often, in this kind of mysterious way, the environment around you gives you these beautiful signs and reminders to hold on.
For me, that came on multiple occasions in the form of birds. I could either hear birds singing outside, and it would bring me back out of the despair and remind me that just out there is a blue sky.
During my lowest moment in there, which was at about the one-year mark, I had endured so much, and I really got to the point where I thought, “I just can’t. Maybe it’s better to try to find a way out of this, if there’s a way to end it myself.”
I tell this story in the book – it’s almost unbelievable, and it’s true – that as I was seriously contemplating my own exit, a little brown bird flew into this house in Somalia. The houses don’t have glass panels on the windows; they’re kind of open to the elements. I was in a dark room, but that particular day the door was open a crack, and this little bird was hopping around in there just in the moment that I was feeling all was lost.
So to answer your question, when you’re open to seeing signs from life – if you’re spiritual or religious, maybe you interpret them differently – I really do believe, and that belief has been reinforced through my own experiences, that there are signs all around you.
When you’re really in the depths of despair, just having the intention to be open, literally looking around at the world around you, I think it can be surprising what you find that can be encouraging.
Jennifer Stewart: That’s a wild story, Amanda, but also pretty amazing. Was there a moment when you realized you were going to survive? And in that moment, what did that realization feel like?
Amanda Lindhout: Well, I wish there was a really great story about that, but it’s kind of strange how it happened.
We were – I say “we” because I was with an Australian photographer – and we were released in the middle of the night in the middle of the desert. But no one told us what was going on, so it was actually very scary.
We were released and turned over to another group of Somali men who our families had hired to facilitate our release. So this transition was terrifying. We didn’t know what was going on.
Then one of these guys handed me a phone, and my mother was on the other end. She told me, “Amanda, you’re free.”
Right away, I thought I was dreaming, because in captivity every night I would have dreams of freedom. I’d dream that I was sitting at a dinner table with my family. I’d dream about my release. So literally, I thought, “I’m dreaming this.”
I started pinching myself. “Do I really feel this pinch? Is this actually happening?”
That disbelief about my freedom did not go away when I was brought to Kenya and reunited with my family and hospitalized for several weeks. No – I kept thinking I was going to wake up from this and be back in that dark room.
In fact, it took a long time – many, many months, maybe six months – for the truth to really sink in. Okay, that is done, and I really am back home now.
Moments of that disbelief would continue to visit me over the years. That is a classic symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. But yeah, it was about six months before I was really able to feel, “Okay, whoa, it’s done.”
Catherine Clark: How did you navigate that journey, Amanda – that journey of trauma and trying to learn to live again without the fear? I have to imagine there was some kind of fear that it might just happen again.
Amanda Lindhout: Absolutely, yeah. There was very much that fear, because your perception of the world changes when you’ve been hurt by others.
Suddenly, a world that I trusted very much – I obviously trusted it enough to travel to, at that point in my life, over 50 countries, right? – no longer felt like a safe place. To emerge from that situation with this interpersonal trauma meant there were activations everywhere: loud noises, being in an elevator with a man standing close to me. All of these things were triggers for me.
It was a long and really difficult journey. Honestly, one of the most difficult parts of it was that, like any sort of mental health condition, trauma is uniquely yours. Finding others who can say, “Yeah, I totally get it,” is one of the challenging things, because you do ultimately feel quite alone in your trauma. Certainly with a story as big as mine, that was true for me.
The truth is, it took many, many years of having a very clear commitment to myself that I was on the path to reconnecting with my well-being. That commitment meant so much to me, and it became the foundation of everything, because in those early years it seemed like wellness was a dream that might never come into being.
Maybe I would never feel healthy again. Maybe it would always be hard for me to connect with others. Maybe I’d never be able to have a close relationship with a man again because of the things that had happened to me.
But through those early difficult years, I strengthened that commitment to myself – this idea that I deserve to be free in my life. I began exploring, almost like it was my job, all the things I could do to try to find my way back to well-being, all the different healing modalities. I’ve really truly tried most of them – maybe all at this point.
The good news for people is that I had a diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder that was off the charts. The psychologist I worked with had actually never seen it so severe, and yet I am speaking to you today, and that is not part of my life anymore.
I think my healing journey and my commitment to myself are hopefully an example to others that whatever mental health crisis you’re dealing with in the moment, better days can be ahead, even if you’re not living them yet.
Just keep that commitment and, as difficult as it is, keep looking for the next step and the next thing that you can try, because you don’t know which one will be the doorway to the next step in your healing.
Jennifer Stewart: How is the Amanda post-kidnapping different than the young journalist who went to Somalia?
Amanda Lindhout: You know, I think that’s a good question. It’s interesting – I’m just thinking about that – and I think the answer to that question would have been different every year after my release.
These days, what I can say is that that experience, and all of the years of recovery afterward, have allowed me to have a lot more gratitude in my life for the things that really matter.
I think sometimes, if you’ve never faced a big challenge in your life, it’s easy to take a lot of things for granted – all of it, really. For me, just seeing the sky, even all these years later, I can still get lost looking at the big blue sky over my head because I had lost it for such a long time.
The connections with my family – like my mom, right? I didn’t get to talk to or see my mom for so long, and even now, all these years later, that’s not lost on me: how important and sacred that relationship is.
So I’m able to appreciate what really matters in life in a way that I’m sure I never would have been able to had all of these things not happened to me.
Catherine Clark: One of the things that I think a lot of people – but especially women – can struggle with is the idea of self-compassion and even patience with oneself as you attempt to handle a situation or go through any form of recovery. Did you have to learn those skills too?
Amanda Lindhout: Oh, absolutely. What I needed to do in the aftermath of that was really look at my self-talk – the way I was speaking to myself.
I had to grow a lot of self-awareness around that, because it can just be happening in the background, and you don’t even realize sometimes how hard and cruel we can be to ourselves.
I definitely had this story for years that I was damaged because of the things that had happened to me in there. I wondered, “Will any man ever want to be with me because of everything that I’ve been through?” And because I had this PTSD, I thought, “My brain is damaged.”
I had a lot of guilt because of what my family had to go through and the consequences of everything that happened.
When I started to really tune in and analyze my self-talk – wow, you know, it was very confronting, but it was good to see what it was.
I remember doing an exercise that a therapist had suggested, which was to write down the things I was saying to myself and actually look at them. Truly, it was shocking. I mean, I’d already been through so much, and then here I was continually beating myself up.
So the awareness for me was the first step. I had to really be honest about what that dialogue with myself looked like, and that was the first step toward becoming softer, kinder, and more compassionate with myself.
Once I had the awareness, then I could catch it. I might be running a train of all these negative thoughts, and then at some point I’d go, “Oh, I’m doing that again.”
Then I began to intentionally reprogram myself. Even at first, if I didn’t totally believe the words that I was substituting in to replace the negative ones, it was still important to do that, because eventually, over time, you’re speaking to yourself that way so much less.
I was opening myself up to the possibility – with intention – of forgiving myself, of finding compassion for myself, of thinking, “If this was someone else, if this was a friend or family member who had gone through all of this, how would I talk to them?”
Then I tried to bring that same kindness back to myself.
It did take many years to really get to a place where I could be gentle with my own dear self, but I’m fully there now. I do not go off to the races with this negative self-talk anymore.
If I’m having a bad day and some self-criticism comes in, because I did the work to really train myself to catch it, I can catch it now and just go, “Stop that. That doesn’t help anything.”
Jennifer Stewart: I’m so happy you’re there, and that’s a remarkable amount of work – and some excellent insight and advice for, frankly, anybody who’s gone through any kind of tough or abusive situation. So thanks for sharing that.
Turning to hope and gratitude, what’s next for you, Amanda?
Amanda Lindhout: Well, for a number of years now I’ve been working on a second book.
My first book, A House in the Sky, as you read, Jen, is the story – it’s a coming-of-age memoir of the years leading up to being kidnapped, and then that 460-day experience, plus a little bit about the aftermath.
Over the last 15 years on my own recovery journey, I’ve learned so much about mindset techniques and how to really orient yourself toward hope. This is what I love to share with audiences when I get the opportunity to speak as a keynote speaker, but I would love for those messages to reach more people.
So yes, I’ve been working on a second book. It’s probably taking longer than I thought because almost two years ago I gave birth to my daughter, Lyra, and that is a miracle on my path.
During my darkest moments, I probably couldn’t have imagined that. I couldn’t have imagined that my body would have the health to support a pregnancy, or what a miracle it would be that I was able to have a child.
So my life is very full with a nearly two-year-old running around, and this is, for me, the best chapter of my life to date.
What reorients me to hope again and again and again is the fact that when I was chained to the floor in a pitch-black room, could I have imagined that my life 15 years later would be what it is now? It was difficult to imagine that, and yet here I am.
So, thank God, I never gave up.
