The first partner of California opened up in a recent profile about how she's dealt with trauma.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom is getting candid about trauma she's faced in her life from an early age.
The documentary filmmaker and first partner of California, wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom, recently opened up for a profile interview in the Los Angeles Times, where she reflected on the hardships she's faced in life, and how she's trying to use that pain to motivate her and make a lasting impact.
One particularly formative and tragically harrowing experience she faced came shortly before she turned 7, while she was on a family vacation in Hawaii. Jennifer and her 8-year-old sister, Stacey, were playing on golf carts, and an unimaginable accident occurred.
Jennifer didn't see that Stacey was hiding behind her cart when it moved backward, and her sister was killed in the accident.
As Jennifer recalled in the interview, the traumatic loss of her older sister while they were playing together spurred her in childhood to work harder and achieve more academically, as if she were trying to make up for a void left by her sister.
"I felt the pressure to be perfect," she told the publication. "To make my parents forget, by being two daughters instead of one."
"I'm sure there was survivor’s guilt," she explained. "I’m sure, in my subconscious, it's like I have to make up for that loss, and I have to do something to improve other people's lives or have an impact, double my own."
Jennifer later explained that she only began to forgive herself for his sister's death when her son Dutch -- the youngest of her and her husband's four children -- turned 6, the age she was at the time of the accident, and she "realized that I’m really hard on myself."
"I realized that you can't blame a 6- [or] 7-year-old," she shared. "You can't ask them to understand things."
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