Sandra Bullock Details Dark Early 2010s: 'If I Don't Pull It Together, I'm Gonna Die'

Appearing on "Red Table Talk" Wednesday, Sandra Bullock opened up about how she overcame a particularly troubling period in her life in the early 2010s.

After Willow Smith opened up a bit about coping with a recent home invasion, Bullock shared her own experience. Back in 2014, a stalker broke into her home -- but, unlike Smith, the actress was actually home when the terrifying ordeal happened.

"I was literally in the closet going, 'This doesn't end well,'" recalled the Oscar winner, who had been watching too many true crime programs at the time. "It was the one night Louie [who was with a nanny for the evening] wasn't with me. I went, had he been home ... it would have changed our destiny forever."

"The violation of that. I wasn't the same after that. I haven't been alone since the day it happened," she added.

Joshua James Corbett was convicted in 2017 of breaking into Bullock's home, after she hid in a closet and called police. In 2018, LAPD went to his home to serve a search warrant, leading to a standoff in which he killed himself.

"This is what's sad, the system failed him. There was an altercation with SWAT and he killed himself," Bullock said on Red Table Talk, addressing the many "layers" to how the incident affected her.

"I didn't realize what PTSD was. This is the oddest thing, I would look left out of a car, not right, and I would start sobbing," Bullock continued, before revealing why she decided to get help. "I thought to myself, I'm a single parent and this child is going to absorb nothing but fear and trauma and shame from me, in the most pivotal time of his life. I was like, I don't want to drop that load of baggage on my beautiful child."

The break-in was actually just one in a string of difficult moments Bullock experienced in the early 10s. In 2010, her then-husband Jesse James was outed as a cheat and they divorced. She went on to adopt Louis as a single mom, before things started to go off the rails in the years to follow.

"I was looking at my body, it was going to break. It was not responding well to what was happening. The timeline is crazy," she recalled. "Louie had a grand mal seizure, I thought he had died. Two days later I pulled my hair tight, went to the Academy Awards [pictured above, in 2012], pulled it too tight. Day later I was bitten by a poisonous spider. My hair starts falling out. I have alopecia spots everywhere. I've always had hair. The break in happens and I literally had to take inventory, going, 'If I don't pull it together, I'm gonna die. Something is gonna happen to my body that I can't control.'"

She also recalled just feeling extreme anxiety while simply sitting in her New Orleans home reading Architectural Digest. "I have anxiety that I'm sitting in the place I want to be in, doing exactly what I wanted to be doing and I had extreme anxiety," she added. "I went, that stuff needs to stop."

Bullock said she turned to EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which helps alleviate stress connected to traumatic memories.

"I was so scared to do it. I had gone on this entire journey and it was inside my house," she said, at first believing her trauma was simply related to the break-in. "But all of a sudden it went to unsafe relationships, unsafe childhood moments and when I got out of it, I realized I have surrounded myself often with unsafe people in situations and put myself there, I have no one to blame but myself, because that was the most familiar feeling I have. I went, oh my gosh."

"In that EMDR journey, I had to take ownership of everything I brought into my world because it felt comfortable and realize it no longer had a place," she added, saying the whole experience has taught her how to ask for help.

"I'm still not great at it, but I'm getting better," she concluded, "and it was my children who showed me unless I pull it together right now, I'm not gonna be around to have the moments I want to have."