Answer Addiction

Tag: celebs & sobriety

  • Charlie Sheen Is One Year Sober

    Charlie Sheen Is One Year Sober

    Charlie Sheen announced his sober milestone on Twitter this week.

    After one of the most well-publicized relapses in history, actor Charlie Sheen revealed this week that he has been sober for one year. 

    Sheen, 53, posted a picture of his one-year AA chip on Twitter, writing, “so, THIS happened yesterday! a fabulous moment, in my renewed journey. #TotallyFocused.”

    It’s an important step for Sheen, who has a long and complicated history with both substance abuse and recovery. In 2016, Sheen spoke with Dr. Mehmet Oz, who asked how many times the actor has tried to stop drinking. 

    “About 2,000,” Sheen said, according to People. “There was a stretch where I didn’t drink for 11 years. No cocaine, no booze for 11 years. So I know that I have that in me.”

    Sheen said he initially relapsed after receiving an HIV diagnosis in 2012. 

    “It was to suffocate the anxiety and what my life was going to become with this condition and getting so numb I didn’t think about it,” Sheen said. “It was the only tool I had at the time, so I believed that would quell a lot of that angst. A lot of that fear. And it only made it worse.”

    Sheen told Oz then that he is committed to helping find a cure for HIV and wants his children to see that he inspired others, despite his demons. 

    “They’re going to see that dad is a true hero. That he helped a lot of people and continues to help people who can’t help themselves,” Sheen said.

    He added that when he was using he was “hammered, fractured, crazy,” but in recovery he is “focused, sober, hopeful.”

    Sheen’s father, Martin Sheen, who is in long-term recovery himself, has spoken about supporting his son through the tough times but also knowing when there is nothing left to do. 

    “What he was going through, we were powerless to do much, except to pray for him and lift him up,” Martin said in 2015.

    However, once Sheen was ready for help, his father was able to draw on his recovery and AA experience to help his son. 

    “The best way to heal is to help healing someone else, and it takes one to know one, so you can appreciate what someone’s going through if you’ve gone there yourself,” Martin said in September of this year. 

    He added that getting sober in the spotlight adds another challenge to an already fraught situation. 

    “The bigger your celebrity, the more difficult it is to lead an honest life, because your past is always present,” Martin said. “I think today makes it that much harder for people because there’s no privacy. I think that the idea of anonymity is very important to the [recovery] program, and it has an energy all its own.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Eliza Dushku Celebrates 10 Years of Sobriety

    Eliza Dushku Celebrates 10 Years of Sobriety

    “Buffy” actress Eliza Dushku shared her sobriety milestone on Instagram.

    Eliza Dushku, best known for her roles in the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the film Bring It On, is celebrating 10 years sober on Instagram.

    Posting an image of a large Roman numeral X, the 37-year-old actress bubbled with positivity and gratefulness in the caption. “#grateful #sober #X yrs today. holy sh*t. #aa #twelvesteps #willingness a #sponsor #fellowship #service & asking for help #odaat saved my life,” Dushku wrote on the post. “If you’re struggling w #alcohol &/or #drug #addiction, I promise, you don’t have to live that way anymore.”

    She topped off the post with a little encouragement and advice for any of her fans who might be facing the same problems. “Reach out, your life is waiting for you: www.aa.org & www.na.org,” she wrote. Possibly making a reference to her Buffy character’s name, she added “Have #FAITH.”

    Dushku hasn’t always been so public about her recovery. For years, she kept her struggles with substance abuse under wraps, only speaking directly about it for the first time in March of last year at the Youth Summit on Opioid Awareness in New Hampshire.

    “Something a lot of people don’t know about me is that I am an alcoholic and I was a drug addict for a lot of years,” Dushku told a crowd of 8,000 middle and high school students. “You hear people say ‘I am that’ because I am that, and I’m always going to be that, but the difference between me and an alcoholic or drug addict that still drinks and does drugs is that I am sober.”

    Dushku said that she began using drugs when she was just 14 years old.

    “I loved the first time I took a drug because I loved how it made me feel. I loved the way it made me not feel, and I didn’t have to feel,” she recounted to the audience. “It was fun and I loved it, until it wasn’t.”

    Her substance abuse problems got worse, spiraling down until one day her brother stopped allowing Dushku to visit her niece while under the influence.

    “I remember my brother telling me he didn’t want me to be around my niece because he didn’t trust me,” Dushku said. “I’m a really good auntie today. But you know what? He was right. I’m a good person, but when I did drugs and I drank, I didn’t make good decisions. … All it takes is one bad decision. You don’t have to live like that.”

    These days, Dushku is doing better, celebrating 10 years sober as well as getting married in August.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Eric Clapton Committed To Sobriety After Son’s Death

    Eric Clapton Committed To Sobriety After Son’s Death

    Rather than returning to drugs and alcohol to cope with his son’s accidental death, Eric Clapton turned to songwriting. 

    Legendary singer and songwriter Eric Clapton was just three years sober when his son Conor fell from a window and died at the age of four. Despite that immense loss, Clapton was more committed to his sobriety than ever following Conor’s death, according to a new biography. 

    “He was trying to beat the alcoholism when his son was just a baby,” biographer Philip Norman recently wrote Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton, told Fox News. “He was fighting against it. But it was really the death of Conor that made him determined that he would never drink again.”

    Conor died in 1991 when he fell from the window of his mother’s 53rd-floor apartment in New York. Conor would regularly look out the window, pressing his face against the glass, but that day a cleaner had left the window open. Conor reportedly darted past the cleaner and fell out.

    At the time of Conor’s death, Clapton was on his way to pick up his son for a day at the zoo. 

    “He was enchanted by Conor,” Norman told Fox News. “He had become a companion. Not quite a baby, but more of a boy. Eric was waiting to take him out that day… Conor would normally run into the room and press his nose against the glass of the window. But it wasn’t there that day. He just went out. It was the most dreadful, horrible, unimaginable tragedy.”

    After Conor’s death, Clapton struggled with his loss, but maintained his focus on his sobriety, Norman said. Rather than returning to drugs and alcohol to cope, Clapton turned to songwriting. His ballad “Tears In Heaven” was written in the aftermath of Conor’s death. 

    “Eric first coped, strangely enough, by playing a song he had written when he was married to Pattie called ‘Wonderful Tonight,’” Norman said. “Which is very soft, almost like a lullaby… That was the initial thing that comforted him. Then he wrote a song about [his grief]. By a really cruel twist of fate, it became the most successful record he has ever released, ‘Tears in Heaven.’ That’s really how he got through it.”

    In 1992, the track won Grammys for “Record of the Year,” “Song of the Year” and “Best Pop Vocal Performance.” Despite its success, Clapton told the Associated Press in 2004 that he could no longer perform the song because it was too emotional for him. 

    Clapton’s daughter Ruth also helped him cope with his son’s death. 

    “Looking back on those years, I realize what a profound effect she had on my well-being,” Clapton wrote in his memoir. “Her presence in my life was absolutely vital to my recovery. In her, I had again found something real to be concerned about, and that was very instrumental in my becoming an active human being again.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Amanda Bynes Talks Being Four Years Sober, Reflects On Past Drug Use

    Amanda Bynes Talks Being Four Years Sober, Reflects On Past Drug Use

    Amanda Bynes credits her parents with helping her “get back on track” after her past issues with problematic drug use.

    Amanda Bynes is moving on from her past. The actress, now 32, was a popular target of the paparazzi during her twenties, racking up DUIs and a reputation for drug abuse and bizarre behavior.

    But she’s now sober and studying at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) in Los Angeles.

    In a new interview with Paper magazine, the former Nickelodeon star relives her hectic past.

    As a child, Bynes landed a place on the Nickelodeon sketch comedy show All That, alongside Kenan Thompson and Nick Cannon, and quickly became a fixture of the network. As a teenager, Bynes appeared in films like Big Fat Liar, What a Girl Wants, and She’s the Man.

    Despite her success, Bynes began having issues with her self-image. She recalled being thrown “into a funk” after seeing herself in She’s the Man. In this 2006 film, Bynes plays a teenage girl who disguises herself as her brother in order to play on the boy’s soccer team. “When the movie came out and I saw it, I went into a deep depression for 4-6 months because I didn’t like how I looked when I was a boy,” she said.

    Still, she continued to churn out hits on the big screen like Hairspray (2007) and Easy A (2010). But she couldn’t shake her self-image issues. While watching herself at a screening of Easy A, Bynes said, “I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie and I didn’t like my performance. I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it.”

    Bynes “never liked the taste of alcohol” and “never really liked going out that much. I [only] started going out around 25 years old,” she said.

    While she couldn’t stomach alcohol, Bynes did start using marijuana when she was 16. “Even though everyone thought I was the ‘good girl,’ I did smoke marijuana from that point on.”

    However, this progressed to molly, ecstasy and Adderall. The combination of drugs that she was abusing did not agree with her.

    Bynes announced that she was retiring from acting, and found herself out of work with not much to do. “I just had no purpose in life. I’d been working my whole life and [now] I was doing nothing. I had a lot of time on my hands and I would ‘wake and bake’ and literally be stoned all day long,” she said.

    This cycle of being “just stuck at home, getting high, watching TV and tweeting,” eventually spiraled out of control. Bynes began “hanging out with a seedier crowd and I isolated a lot… I got really into my drug usage and it became a really dark, sad world for me.”

    She explained that her bizarre behavior was truly “drug-induced, and whenever I got off of [drugs], I was always back to normal.”

    Bynes, with her past behind her, is now looking forward to earning her fashion degree and returning to acting. “I’ve been sober for almost four years now.” She credits her parents with “really helping me get back on track.”

    “Those days of experimenting [with substances] are long over. I’m not sad about it and I don’t miss it because I really feel ashamed of how those substances made me act,” she said.

    With everything she has been through, magnified by the relentless pursuit of the paparazzi, Bynes says she’s now able to live fearlessly.

    “I think that’s kind of how I go about [life] now—like, what’s there to lose? I have no fear of the future. I’ve been through the worst and came out the other end and survived it so I just feel like it’s only up from here.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Michael Douglas Discusses Addiction With Marc Maron

    Michael Douglas Discusses Addiction With Marc Maron

    “I got sober. I was in rehab in 1991. Probably more alcohol but drugs were a part of it.” 

    Academy Award-winning actor Michael Douglas is no stranger to substance use disorder. The Basic Instinct star has been to rehab, his son has battled heroin addiction and he also lost a brother to an overdose.

    Yet in a recent interview on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Douglas admitted that he’s currently “not really” sober.

    “I got sober. I was in rehab in 1991. Probably more alcohol but drugs were a part of it,” he explained, according to Radar Online.

    The 74-year-old actor says that today, “Everything is a question of moderation and all of that but just not the way you wake up in the morning anymore (wanting more). You have to be careful of the fact that… I have had addiction issues in my family. I have lost a brother, Eric.” (In an interview with the Daily Mail, Douglas said, “I drink in moderation, I don’t get drunk, I monitor myself pretty well.”)

    Douglas then spoke about his son Cameron, who was addicted to heroin and served time in prison for selling meth and heroin possession in 2009. While he was incarcerated, four-and-a-half years were added to his sentence when he was caught smuggling in drugs for his “personal use.”

    “He is fine,” Douglas says. “He is doing really well. But I think you learn about genetics amongst other things that you have to be careful.”

    When Douglas went to rehab in the early ’90s, he also reportedly went in for sex addiction.

    In 2015, he told the Daily Mail, “I had an alcohol issue—I’d just lost my stepfather and it was a good rehab session; it certainly helped me find out a couple of things. Basic Instinct had just come out and I don’t remember who the clever editor was in London, but they came up with ‘sex addiction.’ It became a new disease. No one had heard of that up until then, but it’s stuck with me ever since. And it still pops up now and again.”

    With his son Cameron’s incarceration, Douglas realized that he followed the same path as an absentee father, much like when his own father Kirk wasn’t there for him when he was growing up.

    He told Today in 2010, “I’ve taken blame about being a bad father—if being a bad father is working your butt off trying to create a career at one time.” Douglas said that Cameron’s mother, Diandra Luker, had alcoholism in her family as well.

    “Then you finally end up with who you choose to hang out with,” Douglas continued. “In Cameron’s position, he took a lot of lowlifes and he was a very attractive target to hang out with, and I don’t think that helped, either… I’m willing to take the hit.” 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "Sex And The City" Star Kristin Davis Credits Acting For Sobriety

    "Sex And The City" Star Kristin Davis Credits Acting For Sobriety

    “I don’t think I would be alive. I’m an addict. I’m a recovering alcoholic. If I hadn’t found acting…acting is the only thing that made me want to ever get sober.”

    Kristin Davis, best known for her role as Charlotte York on the hit HBO series Sex and the City, revealed in a recent interview that she credits her acting career with helping her beat alcoholism.

    Davis discussed her sober journey on the Origins With James Andrew Miller podcast, Entertainment Weekly reports.

    “I don’t think I would be alive,” without her career. “I’m an addict. I’m a recovering alcoholic. If I hadn’t found acting…acting is the only thing that made me want to ever get sober. I didn’t have anything that was that important to me other than trying to dull my senses.”

    Davis said she started drinking when she was young.

    “I didn’t think I would live to be 30,” she said. “Luckily I quit very young, before any success happened, thank goodness.”

    With her acting career, Davis realized she had “something that was more important to me than just drinking.”

    As a teen growing up in Southern California, Davis drank to help calm her insecurities.

    “I’m kind of shy normally, so I felt like I needed help,” she explained. “One thing led to another, and I was drinking.”

    Davis then turned to acting, but then she started showing up to her classes hung over, and she knew she had to make a choice. She told The Week, “I thought, It’s going to be one or the other. I can’t really have both.”

    After attending rehab, Davis confessed she would miss drinking on occasion. “Every once in a while, I’ll be with friends and they’ll be drinking red wine, and I’ll think, in a really innocent way, ‘Oh wow, that’s such a wonderful glass of red wine. Wouldn’t it be fun to drink it?’ Maybe it would be fine, but it’s really not worth the risk.”

    At the same time, Sex and the City made the Cosmo a very popular drink, and as Davis told Health in 2011, “It’s caused a lot of confusion out in the world. I get sent many a Cosmo! I never drink them. I believe [alcoholism] is a disease. I don’t think you can mess with it. There was a time when people who didn’t know me well would say, ‘Couldn’t you just have one glass of champagne?’ And I would say, ‘No.’ I’m doing well. I still have occasional bad days. Why risk it?”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Gary Busey Reflects On Cocaine Addiction, Becoming Sober

    Gary Busey Reflects On Cocaine Addiction, Becoming Sober

    Busey says he stopped using cocaine on May 3, 1995, and has been sober ever since.

    In addition to his busy and prolific career as an actor, Gary Busey has earned a reputation for philosophical aphorisms that he calls “Buseyisms” – words of wisdom drawn from the letters of a word that he said reveal a new definition in its “deeper, dimensional meaning.”

    The Academy Award nominee has compiled many of these life lessons in a new book, Buseyisms: Gary Busey’s Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth (itself a Buseyism, which stands for “Bible”). In addition to a wealth of Buseyisms, the new book also details the actor’s battle with cocaine addiction, which nearly ended his life before he gained clarity through a spiritual outlook.

    In a conversation with NBC News Digital’s Think page, Busey recalled how he became addicted to cocaine shortly after earning an Oscar nomination for his performance in The Buddy Holly Story.

    “A fellow who looked like a Beverly Hills cowboy showed up at my door,” he recalled. “He told me that he was going to be my manager, and he had a gift for me. It was a blue box from Tiffany’s and, in the box, was a rock of cocaine as big as a 50-cent piece, and thick, with my initials in it.”

    The dealer told Busey that the drug would help him be “more creative,” and as Busey recalled, “I got hooked bad.” His drug use led to an overdose, followed by an unpleasant realization: “What have I been doing? I’ve been dancing with the devil in a circle that’s very tight, and the devil always leads the dance.”

    According to Busey, he stopped using cocaine on May 3, 1995, and has been sober ever since.

    To summarize his 25 years of sobriety, Busey has an aphorism: “F-R-E-E-D-O-M stands for ‘facing real exciting energy, developing out of miracles.” Busey expounded on the notion by adding, “The best freedom you can have is knowing you’re a miracle. So, be yourself, and live in the harmony of what God gave you to be when you were born. Think on that; feel that about yourself. And you won’t need to abuse substances or alcohol or needles or pills.”

    Busey remains sanguine about the challenges of chasing sobriety. He freely admitted that those who follow his advice and give up their substance of choice may actually come to hate him for such a suggestion. “But that’s okay,” he noted. “Hate is an emotion that comes with growth.” But the payoff, he said, is worth the effort. “Everything you’ve done in your life, even though some of it was hard, is good, because you go through it to get better. And that’s why we’re on earth.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • John Mayer Details Giving Up Alcohol After Drake's Birthday Party

    John Mayer Details Giving Up Alcohol After Drake's Birthday Party

    “I was in my sixth day of the hangover… I went, ‘OK, John, what percentage of your potential would you like to have?’”

    Singer-songwriter John Mayer hasn’t had a drink in two years.

    “I just went deep one night, and I remember being like, ‘What happens if I keep going?’” he said in a new interview with Complex.

    The decision was simple. “It was Drake’s 30th birthday party, and I made quite a fool of myself,” he recalled. “And then I had a conversation with myself. I remember where I was. I was in my sixth day of the hangover… I went, ‘OK, John, what percentage of your potential would you like to have?’”

    There was no wrong answer, he told himself. But in the end, he wanted it all—100%.

    “The voice in my head said, ‘OK. Do you know what that means?’ I went, ‘We don’t have to talk anymore. I get it.’”

    The “Your Body Is a Wonderland” singer is hoping to show people that there are alternatives to drinking. “I want people to know that ‘that’s enough for now’ is on the menu, so to speak,” he said on social media October 2017.

    Giving up drinking—a very personal experience, he says—paved the way to new things. “The next year, I did four tours, I was in two bands, I was happy on airplanes.”

    Not drinking “feels like boredom at first,” he explained. But sticking with it will level everything out. “You’re like, ‘Oh, I”m not having these high highs.’ But if you work, you can bring the whole line up.”

    Mayer says because it is different for everyone, it’s hard to explain how he came to quit booze on his own.”It’s the most personal thing to people. If I were to tell other people how they could do it, it just is so particular to your own spirit and your own psychology that it’s almost impossible to develop one way of explaining it to someone else.”

    Mayer also recalled collaborating on a song with late rapper Mac Miller (born Malcolm McCormick). The Pittsburgh native died of a drug overdose on Sept. 7 in his home in Studio City, California.

    “I just wish it wasn’t fatal. I just wish figuring out your life didn’t take your life away from you,” Mayer says. “I don’t have an answer for how to fix that, but once you get old enough to understand how valuable life is, you look at people and go, ‘I just wish you could work this out.’”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How The Situation's Wife Helped During His Journey To Sobriety

    How The Situation's Wife Helped During His Journey To Sobriety

    “She’s definitely my better half and the reason why I strive to be the best version of myself and to fight for our future,” the reality star says.

    With the popularity of Jersey Shore, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino has become a reality TV fixture. He battled a painkiller addiction in the public eye, and now he is a recovery advocate, speaking candidly about his own experience.

    Now Sorrentino’s wife, Lauren Pesce, has been credited with helping Sorrentino stay sober, even as he’s preparing to serve an eight-month jail sentence for tax evasion, which is set to begin on January 15.

    As People reports, Sorrentino and Pesce met in junior college and dated for about four years. The couple took a break from each other during the Jersey Shore heyday, then got back together once the show had ended.

    Pesce has had to endure a lot as Sorrentino’s significant other, including witnessing his fight for sobriety. Having battled an addiction to painkillers, Sorrentino is reportedly nearly three years sober after two visits to rehab—the first in 2012 and the second in 2015.

    As a practicing Catholic, Pesce said she relied on her faith when Sorrentino needed help.  

    “It’s not so much just going to church,” she says. “It’s finding my belief, that God has a reason for everything, and knowing you’re able to overcome anything as long as you have your faith and trust in God. That’s what I did, and Mike really came into that as well and found his own spirituality.”

    Pesce adds, “What I dreamed of, the expectations I had set for him, him getting healthy and sober—I didn’t know that our relationship would survive had those miracles not happened, and they did. He put in the hard work and thanks to the faith in God that we have, we’re in the position we’re in today.”

    Sorrentino called Pesce “my better half and the reason why I strive to be the best version of myself and to fight for our future.” Sorrentino also wants to be “a good example to her, her family and everyone watching—because my life has been under a microscope. I have a lot to prove.”

    Right before Jersey Shore returned to MTV in April, Sorrentino hit a 28-month sober milestone the month before.

    He told Entertainment Tonight, “I’m very proud, it’s one of my finest accomplishments and it was a huge challenge. It’s a ‘one day at a time’ thing and [I’m] just showing people that it’s very possible.”

    Sorrentino also showed off his two-year Narcotics Anonymous medallion in an Instagram post: “28 months clean and sober. We do recover.” 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Demi Moore Honored By Women’s Recovery House

    Demi Moore Honored By Women’s Recovery House

    “Early in my career, I was spiraling down a path of real self-destruction, and no matter what successes I had, I just never felt good enough.”

    On Saturday (Oct. 27), actress Demi Moore was presented with the Woman of the Year Award by Friendly House, a women’s recovery program in Los Angeles.

    Moore was honored at the 29th Annual Awards Luncheon hosted by Friendly House, the first residential program for women recovering from substance and alcohol use disorder, according to its official website.

    “Addiction is in the history of my family and I know truly how destructive it can be, and to be able to give women who don’t have the finances or resources this opportunity is remarkable, where they are human beings and not a number on an insurance form,” Moore said to Extra at the event.

    While accepting the award, the Ghost actress shared her story of crisis and redemption. “Early in my career, I was spiraling down a path of real self-destruction, and no matter what successes I had, I just never felt good enough. I had absolutely no value for myself,” she said.

    “And this self-destructive path, it very quickly brought me to a real crisis point.” It was at this point that she was hit with a divine intervention. “Two people, who I barely knew, stepped up… and they presented me with an opportunity—that was more like an ultimatum—unless I was dead, that I better show up.”

    Moore accepted the help and was forever changed by the chance she was given. “It gave me a chance to redirect the course of my life, before I destroyed everything. Clearly they saw more in me than I saw in myself, and I’m so grateful, because without that opportunity… I wouldn’t be standing here today.”

    Sobriety is a point of pride for all three of Moore’s daughters as well.

    In a 2017 social media post, Rumer Willis, announced that she was six months sober. “It’s not something I planned on but after the long journey of getting here I can honestly say I have never been more proud of myself in my entire life,” the eldest wrote.

    This was followed by a similar announcement from Scout Willis, who a week later celebrated one year of sobriety. “I am meeting the best version of myself every day,” the middle sister wrote.

    And finally, Tallulah Willis shared that she overcame both a drinking problem and eating disorder. “I did not value myself, my life or my body and as such I was constantly punishing for not being enough,” the youngest wrote.

    View the original article at thefix.com