Olivia Munn is looking back at difficult time in her life.
The X-Men: Apocalypse actress detailed a toxic past relationship that she called “a bad, bad period” of her life.
“The catalyst [for my healing journey] was getting out of a relationship that had drained me,” Munn told Monica Lewinsky on the Feb. 18 episode of her Reclaiming podcast. “I don’t know if there’s a word to describe what that relationship was like. It was without a doubt the hardest period of my life, being in that.”
The 44-year-old pointed to her “feisty” nature and “standing up to” a group of bullies at the age of 13 as traits that helped her get out of that situation but, at the same time, Munn was surprised by how long she allowed herself to be mistreated.
“It taught me how to stand up and fight for myself, so that was great,” she explained. “But then when you look at my family life, I felt really trapped in this really tumultuous family dynamic, and so I knew that my friends and people in my life saw me as somebody that would fight back.”
“I truly had no idea that I could be manipulated and hurt that way,” Munn added, “that I wouldn’t just get out of something that was dangerous to my psyche.”
The Newsroom alum—who shares son Malcolm Mulaney, 3, and daughter Méi Mulaney, 5 months, with husband John Mulaney—added that she “only had healthy relationships” prior to this one, which she said “made up for all of it.”
And, in fact, people in her life that she’d have expected to support her in the ways she needed at the time didn’t give her the correct guidance.
“In that particular situation, I had a therapist who I really loved and I know that she cared about me—or at least I thought she did,” Munn shared, “and I would constantly, from the very beginning, say, ‘I don’t know about this, I don’t think this is the right, I want to get out,’ and then it got worse and worse and I’d be calling her crying like, ‘I gotta get out.'”
“This is shocking to people, but she encouraged me to stay,” she continued. “She thought that my ‘picker’ was off, and she would look at it as like, this person on paper looked great and when there was couples therapy, they knew how to present the right way. Then the stories I would tell seemd unbelievable.”
In the time since, Munn has taken some learning lessons from that difficult period of her life.
“From that experience, learning that I gotta go with my gut and I gotta be decisive with some things,” she mused. “If it’s coming from a place where I want to survive, and I realize that I’m not happy and that days and weeks and months go by of unhappiness and fear…”
And the Love Wedding Repeat star also took with her some additional wisdom that she wants to teach her friends and, ultimately, her children.
“When they say like, ‘Oh, just go on the date! You never know. You might like him, you might at least learn what you don’t like,'” Munn said, “I think some people who are subconsciously vulnerable—which is what I think I was, because I had no idea I was this vulnerable to anything that had happened to me post that first date—is that if you feel in your gut something’s not right, then don’t do that first date or get out right away, because one date could take years off your life.”
And, as she added, it’s “not just the period that you’re with that person but, if you’re lucky to get out, the years healing yourself afterwards.”
