Beyond the Trauma: Finding Healing and Hope in Your Christian Mental Health Journey
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Amelia Rees shares her powerful story of trauma, faith, and resilience—from losing a close friend to murder at 15, to surviving a rare bone tumour, to building a thriving life rooted in God's faithfulness.
The Catalyst: How One Conversation Started It All
Sometimes the most important conversations happen in the most ordinary moments. For Dave Quak and Amelia Rees, it happened at a baptism—of all places.
After the service, standing by the ocean with salt water still dripping from their clothes, Dave and Amelia found themselves in one of those rare, honest conversations. Dave was wrestling with something. He'd been carrying bipolar disorder for years, and he felt God nudging him to start talking about it publicly. Amelia, his niece (yes, they share the Quak surname—though she's thankfully escaped it through marriage), was navigating her own mental health journey.
In that moment, something clicked.
"I was coming down off some of my medications," Amelia recalls. "We were just talking, and you were asking how I was going. Very quickly, you said, 'Oh, I've got bipolar.' And I was like, 'Oh, okay, that's cool.'"
What started as a casual conversation between family members became the seed for Sunburnt Souls—a podcast dedicated to exploring faith and mental health with radical honesty.
A couple of weeks later, Dave sent Amelia a text: "Thank you so much for the chat. I do think it's time for this to start being made public."
Amelia's response was simple: "Look, this is actually what I do."
She's the founder of Pretty Podcasts, a production company that helps entrepreneurs, lawyers, and thought leaders launch professional podcasts. But Dave hadn't really thought of his niece as a boss in her field—she was just... Amelia. The girl he'd known since childhood.
"It's almost that 'prophet without honour' thing," Dave reflects. "You don't realise the gift people are in your life."
What Dave didn't know at the time was just how deep Amelia's understanding of mental health and faith truly ran. Her story wasn't just about supporting his journey—it was about her own extraordinary journey through trauma, loss, and the kind of faith that only comes from surviving the unsurvivable.
The Murder: When Trauma Enters at 15
Amelia's mental health journey didn't start with a diagnosis or a therapy appointment. It started with a phone call that changed everything.
She was 15 years old, living in Gosford, New South Wales. One of her closest friends from church—a girl named Tania—was walking home from school. She got off the bus. And then, in a moment of unspeakable violence, a 16-year-old boy attacked her.
He stabbed her 48 times. Over two minutes. It was intentional. Premeditated. Planned.
Tania died.
"That absolutely rocked my world," Amelia says, her voice steady but carrying the weight of decades of processing. "I didn't really talk about it much. I definitely hid all of my feelings from my family and people around me. I felt really ashamed, angry at God, but then I felt guilty for being angry at God because I was raised in the church."
This is the cruel irony of growing up in a Christian home: you're taught that faith means always being grateful, always trusting, always praising. But when your friend is brutally murdered, gratitude feels obscene. Trust feels naive. And praise feels like a betrayal of the pain you're drowning in.
So Amelia did what many traumatised teenagers do: she hid it.
"You're told you can't be angry," she explains. "So it spiralled for quite a few years."
The spiral was dark. Really dark.
The Darkness: Suicidal Ideation at 16
A year after Tania's death, Amelia's family moved to Queensland. The change of scenery didn't help. If anything, it made things worse. She was isolated from the place where it happened, but she couldn't escape what happened in her mind.
By 16, the pain had become unbearable.
"I got to this place where I didn't want to live on this earth anymore because the pain was just too much, and I didn't know how I was going to cope," she recalls.
She was so desperate that she told a friend on the bus: "I may not see you on Monday."
When her friend asked why, Amelia said: "I don't know, I'm not sure if I'll be here."
The friend was furious. "What do you think that's going to achieve? Nothing."
It was harsh. But it was also the only intervention Amelia received. Her friend, also 15, didn't have the tools or training to help. She just knew something was very wrong.
Amelia had a plan. There was a massive hill near her house in Gosford. She could catch a bus. She could walk to the top. She could throw herself off and land on the rocks. It would be done.
But something stopped her.
"I think part of it too was that I didn't want to put the people who love me through that," she reflects. "It's one thing for a life to be taken intentionally by someone else, but it felt like a bigger step for me to take my own life. There would be a lot of unanswered questions for my family that they wouldn't understand, and that didn't feel fair."
So she lived. Not because she wanted to. But because the thought of her family's pain was slightly more bearable than her own.
The Spiritual Darkness: A Demon in the Room
But the physical pain of suicidal ideation wasn't the only darkness Amelia faced.
From age 15 to 18, she experienced something she describes as demonic oppression. Every night, she would go to bed, and there would be something—a dark presence—sitting at the end of her bed.
"It would sit at the end of my bed every night," she says. "I got to the point where I would just sleep while it sat there."
It taunted her. It tormented her. It whispered lies about her worth, her future, her God.
"Looking back on it now, the devil really used the death of my friend to torture me. And it worked—for five years—until I realised that God didn't want me to be tortured. I didn't deserve that. He wanted to release me from that."
The breakthrough came when Dave taught her how to pray against spiritual oppression. How to stand firm in her faith. How to recognise that the power wasn't with the demon—it was with her, through Christ.
"You taught me how to pray, how to stand firm, how to have strength in the Spirit," she tells Dave. "And that sounds so silly, growing up in the church, but there was so much focus on God and not much focus on the other side. And the impact that can have—the role it plays in our daily walk—I wasn't fully aware of that power."
The Turning Point: Bible College and the Holy Spirit
For five years, Amelia carried this alone. No therapist. No medication. No one who knew the full extent of her pain.
Then, at 20, she finally saw a psychologist.
But before that, something shifted.
After high school, Amelia decided to attend Bible college. It seemed logical: she loved people, she loved Jesus, so why not study theology?
She chose Christian Heritage College, which had a more Pentecostal flavour than the traditional evangelical church she'd grown up in. It was a different experience—more charismatic, more expressive, more focused on the Holy Spirit's power and presence.
"It really opened my eyes to that spiritual side of God—the Holy Spirit, that feeling," she recalls. "I had never experienced that before. It just wasn't the way we worshipped growing up."
But more importantly, people began praying for her healing. Not just physical healing, but spiritual and emotional healing.
"People were praying for healing for me," she says. "And I realised something: God can heal miraculously, but He wanted me to do the work."
That realisation was the permission she needed. Permission to seek professional help. Permission to acknowledge that her pain was real and deserved to be treated. Permission to stop white-knuckling her way through life.
At 20, she finally saw a psychologist.
The Diagnosis: Anxiety, Depression, and Finding the Right Medication
The psychologist quickly diagnosed Amelia with anxiety and depression. They prescribed Zoloft, an SSRI antidepressant.
"The way I explain it is that it sort of brings my emotions to the middle rather than fluctuating so high and so low," Amelia explains. "So, the really happy times don't feel as happy, but the really sad times don't feel as sad. It gives me the mental energy to deal with whatever's in front of me—just that little bit of extra focus."
For the first time in five years, Amelia could think clearly. The medication didn't erase her pain, but it gave her the mental bandwidth to process it.
Therapy was equally transformative. Her psychologist taught her something simple but profound: the three-step process for emotional regulation.
The Three Steps to Processing Emotion
Step 1: Awareness
First, identify what you're feeling and what's causing it. For example: "I'm sad because I miss my friend who's gone."
Step 2: Acknowledgement
Next, acknowledge how that feeling feels. Give it words. Amelia's psychologist helped her expand her emotional vocabulary beyond "happy" or "sad."
"When I first started therapy, I didn't have much vocabulary to explain my emotions," she admits. "I was either happy or sad. My psychologist helped me find different words. Like, is your sadness anger? Or is your sadness depression?"
Step 3: Choice
Finally, you have two options: take action if action can be taken, or accept it if there's nothing you can do.
"For example, I can't change the fact that my friend is gone," Amelia explains. "There's no action I can take to change that outcome. I can choose to accept it, or I can hold it up in front of me, and it blinds everything else. I can't see anything else. So, I've had to learn how to accept something and then put it down."
This wasn't about forgetting or moving on. It was about carrying grief without letting it consume her entire life.
"That doesn't mean I forget about it or that it doesn't hurt anymore. I'm allowed to pick it back up and be aware of how it makes me feel. But then, I need to put it back down, accept it, and leave it there. Not bring it with me every single day."
The Osteoblastoma: When Life Gets Harder
Just when Amelia was beginning to heal from her childhood trauma, life threw another curveball.
She and her husband Marshall had been dating on and off for years. They'd met at 16, broken up (he was terrified when she talked about marriage), and reconnected five years later. Within six months, they were married.
Two weeks after he proposed, they discovered Amelia had a tumour.
Not just any tumour—an osteoblastoma, a rare bone tumour inside her collarbone.
For a month and a half, they thought it was cancer.
"I had a bazillion tests," Amelia recalls. "I even told Marshall, 'Look, if this is going to be my path—you just proposed—here's your get-out-of-jail-free card if you want to take it.' He was like, 'Nope, I'm here for the long haul.'"
The tumour was extremely rare. Osteoblastomas typically grow in long bones—legs, arms, spine. Hers was inside her collarbone, growing outward, literally pushing her bone from the inside out.
The surgery was unsuccessful. Then another surgery. And another.
The Collapse: When Your Bone Breaks in the Shower
One morning, Amelia was in the shower washing her hair. She put her arms down.
Her collarbone snapped in half.
Just... snapped.
"The tumour had eaten away so much of the inside of my bone that there was nothing left," she explains. "It just snapped because there was nothing supporting it."
After five or six years of in-and-out hospital visits, surgeries, and failed treatments, the doctors made a radical decision: they would remove her entire collarbone.
This surgery had never been done before in Australia. It required three teams of doctors: oncologists, bone specialists, plastic surgeons (to rearrange everything), and a heart specialist—because the tumour had become vascular, connecting to her blood vessels.
Every time her blood pressure rose, blood would flow through the tumour, pushing against her bones, causing excruciating pain.
The Medication Nightmare: Opioids and Survival
For five years, Amelia was on heavy opioids. Lots of them.
OxyContin (fast-acting), Tramadol (slow-acting), codeine, Panadol. At one point, she was taking about 20 pills a day. She was even prescribed the "green whistle"—the nitrous oxide inhaler that ambulances carry—for breakthrough pain.
"I drank a lot of pear juice," she jokes, referring to the constipation that comes with opioid use.
But it wasn't funny. She was essentially sedated for five years.
"I was very flat, and I didn't have much to do either," she recalls. "Marshall was working all day to support us, and I'd just be home alone. I'm a people person, and I struggled being by myself all day. Some days, I was literally at the door waiting for him."
Marshall, an introvert, came home from work completely peopled out, only to find his wife—vibrant, energetic, full of life—waiting at the door, desperate for human connection.
He had to take on a carer role. He'd come home to find her passed out on the floor from pain. He'd catch her going down. He'd manage her medications. He'd be her rock while she was drowning in opioids and despair.
And Amelia still had anxiety and depression on top of it all.
"My mind would just run around in circles otherwise," she says.
Getting off the opioids was brutal.
"Full sweats, it was crazy," she recalls. "I was on that kind of medication for about four or five years, which obviously took its toll on my marriage as well. I was there but not really present."
The Choice: Childfree by Design
As Amelia recovered from the physical trauma of the tumour and the medication nightmare, she and Marshall faced a question many couples face: do you want kids?
Their answer was no.
"I've decided—after a lot of prayer and consideration—we are childfree by choice," Amelia explains.
There were practical reasons. The first ten years of their marriage, she was severely unwell. She might have needed chemotherapy. Parenthood wasn't on the table.
But as she got healthier, neither of them felt a calling to be parents.
"Neither of us felt a real calling to be parents," she says. "But the calling to be really awesome aunts and uncles, yeah, that was really strong."
There's also something deeper. Amelia is acutely aware of her own mental health struggles and their potential impact on a child.
"If I had a kid, I know I could be a good parent, but I'd be happy not to do it," she says. "Maybe it's fear. Maybe it's, 'I don't want to create another little mini-me,' because I feel like the mini-me inside my head would not be helpful."
She's thought about what it would take to be a good parent: emotional stability, capacity, presence.
"To raise a kid who is balanced and emotionally stable takes a balanced and emotionally stable parent. And I don't feel I have the full capacity for that."
But she also recognises her own gifts. She's an incredible aunt. She mentors young people. She creates spaces for people to heal.
"I grew up without a lot of adult Christian mentors," she reflects. "And I feel like that would have helped me at that stage of my life. And I want to be that."
Dave affirms her choice: "I don't want to offend people, but maybe some people should have thought about this before having kids, you know what I mean? Because they are demanding and it is difficult. And if you recognise that your capacity might not be there, I think that's a really commendable thing."
The Businesses: Building a Life of Purpose
Today, Amelia is thriving—not despite her mental health struggles, but partly because of them.
She's the founder of Pretty Podcasts, a production company that helps entrepreneurs, lawyers, and thought leaders launch professional podcasts. She's also a hairstylist.
She co-owns Veil Bella, an airbrush makeup business with her best friend of 17 years. They do hair and makeup for brides and other clients.
And she's a director of Raising Dignity, a charity that works with African refugees to provide education, economic opportunity, and dignity to women and children in war-torn regions.
Each business serves a different part of her soul.
"With the podcast stuff, I love it too, but I don't interact with people directly—I'm listening to them, but I don't have that human connection all the time," she explains. "Whereas if you go to a wedding, you're talking with people, getting to know them, building relationships."
The beauty of having multiple ventures is that she can manage her mental health without sacrificing her contribution to the world.
"When we wrestle with mental illness, sometimes a nine-to-five job just isn't doable," Dave observes. "So for you to be able to create these different spaces means you can work, contribute, and change the world while also taking stock of your mental health and self-care."
Amelia nods. "Yeah, and that takes time and practice."
The Wisdom: Pain Is Inevitable, Suffering Is Optional
After everything—the murder of her friend, the suicidal ideation, the demonic oppression, the rare bone tumour, the opioid addiction, the years of recovery—Amelia has arrived at a profound spiritual truth.
"God's really revealed to me that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional," she says. "There's always a certain choice that we have."
This isn't toxic positivity or spiritual bypassing. It's hard-won wisdom from someone who has genuinely suffered.
"Whether it's pain—it's very easy to get sucked into despair," she explains. "The despair of living life without health. What that looks like. How do you manage that when you're only 20 and you can't get out of bed unless someone helps you?"
The key is where you place your pain.
"If you put your pain on yourself and hold it in your mind, processing and thinking about it all the time, it will consume you," she says. "And you'll suffer for that. You end up feeling like your soul is being ripped apart. And God doesn't want that for us."
So the practice becomes: acknowledge the pain, process it with God, and then—this is the hard part—put it down.
"The physical pain—yes, it's inevitable. I know I'm always going to be in pain; we're living in a world full of pain. But the suffering, the deep hurt that can come along with experiences and turn them into trauma, that's optional."
The Faith: God's Got This
Amelia's faith isn't abstract theology. It's rooted in survival.
She's lived through things that should have killed her. And she didn't die.
"My faith in what God can do with my future is so strong because there were years when I didn't think I was going to live," she reflects. "And then I did. And you become really grateful. And then you go, 'Oh, God's got this. Oh no, I should just trust him,' because, you know, he kept me alive in that first surgery. He said he's got my back."
This faith is tattooed on her back—a paraphrased version of Romans 8:38-39:
"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither present nor future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
It's not a theory. It's her testimony.
"I look back over my last 15 years—with murders, tumours, marriage, psychologists, and all that sort of stuff—and to be sitting in this place, seeing how God is providing for us, it's incredible," she says.
She didn't work through her whole 20s. And yet, she and Marshall own a home. They have a life filled with purpose and meaning. They're making a difference in the world.
"Who am I to say He can't do that in the future?" she asks. "It's almost disrespectful not to have the faith that He will carry us through."
The Discernment: Spiritual vs. Mental Health
One of the most valuable skills Amelia has developed is the ability to discern between spiritual struggles and mental health struggles. They can feel very similar.
"Sometimes it takes a couple of days for me to realise that something's spiritual, but usually, I can see it coming from a mile away," she says. "I run with my gut."
This discernment came from years of experience—from the demonic oppression at 15 to the spiritual warfare she's encountered since.
"Even though that time was really hard, it's actually a blessing now," she reflects. "Having that demonic thing take you around in your formative years trains you in the art of discernment."
The Message: You Can Face Anything
As Amelia reflects on her journey, she lands on a simple but powerful truth:
"Now I know that I can face anything. And that's a blessing. It's a hard lesson to learn. But even in our marriage with Marshall, there's nothing we can go through that we haven't already faced. And that's powerful."
She's not saying life will be easy. She's not saying there won't be pain.
But she's saying: you have a framework to handle it. You have God. You have community. You have the tools to process your emotions. You have the capacity to survive.
And sometimes, survival is the greatest victory of all.
Listen to the Full Episode
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Key Takeaways
•Trauma doesn't define your future. Amelia's friend's murder shaped her, but it didn't determine her destiny. With time, therapy, faith, and community, she transformed her pain into purpose.
•You don't have to hide your pain. For five years, Amelia suffered alone. When she finally spoke up and sought help, everything changed.
•Therapy and faith work together. Amelia didn't have to choose between psychology and spirituality. Both were essential to her healing.
•Mental health struggles don't disqualify you from greatness. Amelia has built multiple businesses, mentored countless people, and made a global impact—all while managing anxiety and depression.
•Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. This isn't toxic positivity. It's a hard-won truth about where you place your attention and your faith.
•Your testimony is your power. Amelia's story isn't just her story—it's a roadmap for others who are suffering.
•God's faithfulness is proven in survival. When you've lived through things that should have killed you, faith becomes real.
Reflection Questions
As you sit with Amelia's story, consider:
1.What pain have you been hiding? What would it take for you to speak up and seek help?
2.How has trauma shaped your worldview? Has it led you closer to God or further away?
3.What does faith look like in your suffering? Is it real and grounded, or more theoretical?
4.How do you discern between spiritual struggles and mental health struggles? What's your gut telling you?
5.Where are you placing your pain? Is it consuming you, or have you found a way to carry it without being crushed by it?
6.What would it look like to build a life of purpose around your mental health limitations? How could your struggles become your strength?
7.Who in your life needs to hear that they can survive this? How can you share Amelia's message of hope?
About Amelia Rees
Amelia Rees is a podcaster, entrepreneur, mental health advocate, and director of Raising Dignity. She's survived trauma, rare illness, and spiritual warfare—and emerged with a faith that's unshakeable and a heart for helping others. She co-owns Veil Bella (an airbrush makeup and hair business), runs Pretty Podcasts (a podcast production company), and is passionate about creating spaces where people can heal and thrive. She's married to Marshall and lives with two sausage dogs.
