"Almost cost me my life": Jelena Dokic on childhood trauma
Jelena Dokic has shared more details of her traumatic childhood as she launches her new documentary series, Unbreakable: The Jelena Dokic Story, in hopes of changing the "shame and stigma" that victims of domestic violence and abuse may feel.
At the height of her tennis career, she was ranked number four in the world, but behind the scenes she was battling a traumatic home life with an abusive father.
Now, Dokic has become an advocate for body positivity and mental health awareness, candidly sharing how she has turned her pain into power.
"People know me as a tennis player and I did alright on the tennis court, but I think my story is much bigger than that," she told Today Extra.
"It's about hardship, adversity and child abuse and domestic violence and mental health and being a refugee and what that does and the consequences of it, we need to have more open conversations in order to be able to make change.
"But also we need to change the perception around it and remove the shame and stigma, because I struggled with it and that almost cost me my life and silence is the biggest enemy of all of those things and victims and survivors, having another chance and just putting it on screen is another way to reach more people and to tell the story."
During book tours and advanced screening at film festivals, Dokic admitted that most people who have seen her new documentary mentioned how confronting it was to watch.
"But that's the whole point, because life is not sunshine and rainbows, it's universal and so many people go through a lot of these things that I talk about and that I've been through," she said.
"It really resonates with them - there's been so much silence around it for a very long time and it's really creating change if me speaking up might help someone else realise what they're going through or help them in some way.
"Ultimately, I do want people to look at this as a story of success, I'm a winner at the end of the day and you can come through it and maybe someone out there will say, 'you know what? She did it, I can do it too.'"
Image: Today