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Sandra Bullock Talks Learning Daughter Laila's 'Triggers' Since Leaving Foster Care

Sandra Bullock
Sandra Bullock

George Pimentel/WireImage Sandra Bullock

Sandra Bullock has had a lot to learn since welcoming her daughter.

During Wednesday's episode of Red Table Talk, the 57-year-old actress sat down with Willow Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and opened up about the "triggers" her daughter Laila, now 8, faces since leaving the foster care system.

Prior to adopting her daughter in 2015, Bullock had to take classes on how to raise children with trauma. She said that over the years, she's learned some of the triggers that her daughter has and how to approach parenting in those situations.

"I had my kids in my closet with their little beds because I was so afraid to not have them super close to me. I would walk in and I wouldn't be able to find her. She'd be in the closet with all her clothes on, she'd be on a bookshelf, she'd be hiding, she'd always be ready to leave," Bullock said of Laila, adding that she also made sure she knew that "I'm not going anywhere."

She continued, "My partner said to me, when she's been with us longer than she hasn't been, I have a feeling we're going to see a change. You love by leaning in and hugging and holding and letting them know that they are not going anywhere."

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Bullock — who is also mom to son Louis, 11, whom she welcomed through adoption in 2010 — said that she would find herself taking some of her daughters' daily triggers personally, but would have to remember the training she went through.

"It was really hard to separate yourself and not be hurt because all you wanna do is love, but guess what? Your love is not going to cut it right then and there," The Unforgivable star continued.

"Laila would hide food. It's survival. Absolute survival. Her spirit and just who she is has pushed forward beyond the triggers and the fears," Bullock said before joking that her children know that she'll always be there. "They'll come up for the rest of her life, but she knows that wherever she chooses to go to school, I'm moving there. That's the joke in the house. You guys need to pick the same college if you go, the same city to live in, because I'm gonna be living there."

Sandra Bullock Red Table Talk
Sandra Bullock Red Table Talk

Red Table Talk Sandra Bullock and her daughter Laila

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Bullock said it took years for Laila to find her comfort zone, finally reaching a point where her daughter didn't have to sleep with her only two years ago.

Elsewhere in the interview, Bullock, admits that though the process to adopt a child in the foster care system is difficult, she hopes her "glorious" daughter can "show what exists within that system."

New episodes of Red Table Talk air Wednesday at 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET on Facebook Watch.