Sandra Bullock has pretended to be in life or death situations on screen but in 2014 she found herself in a terrifying scene in real life. The actress joined Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith, and Adrienne Banfield-Norris for “Red Table Talk” and recounted the night she found a man in her home, leaving her with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Police arrested the man, Joshua James without incident inside her home and the notebook he had in his backpack pointed to a man that was not in the right state of mind. The tragic story only gets worse because James died by suicide in May 2018 after a 5-hour standoff with police. “What’s sad is that the system failed him,” Bullock said.

The home invasion took place in the early morning hours of June 8th in 2014. At the time, Bullock told police she arrive home around 1 am, went to her room, took a shower, and went to sleep. She was later awakened by loud banging she thought was coming from inside her home and called the police. When police arrived they found James and a backpack containing a notebook, cut-out magazine pictures of her, a Utah concealed firearm permit, and a letter addressed to her, dated June 7, per ABC7.

Bullock called the police, locked her bedroom, and got in the closet. “I’m in the closet going, ‘This doesn’t end well,” she said. Police found entries in his notebook, which included a reference to her son Louis, whom she adopted in 2010. “Until then I will forever be thinking of you, and Louie my son, as you are my wife by law, the law of God, and you belong to me and me to you,” he wrote, per ABC7.

She told Jada she was thankful he wasn’t there at the time. “It was the one night that our nanny goes, ‘Let me just take him to my apartment which is up the street because you’re going to be out late,’” she said. “Had he been home, I would’ve run to the closet, which is now my official closet but that was his bedroom, and it would have changed our destiny forever,” she added. “The violation of that. I wasn’t the same after that. I was unraveling.”

The Oscar winner said she has tried different options to help her trauma and said EDMR therapy has been the “most healing.” The form of psychotherapy stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.