Answer Addiction

Tag: discussing sobriety

  • Pierce Brosnan's Son Talks Sobriety

    Pierce Brosnan's Son Talks Sobriety

    The 35-year-old says his life turned around when he got married and had a child.

    There are many sons and daughters of the rich and famous who have suffered from addiction, and Sean Brosnan, son of Pierce Brosnan, is one of them. Now he’s sober and looking back on the long hard road he traveled to get there.

    As People reports, Sean went through a devastating loss when his mother died at the age of eight. “I remember the day my dad told me she passed, and it was a few days after Christmas,” he explained. “He started to cry, but I didn’t cry. I was comforting him at eight. It wasn’t until maybe six months later where I was in school and realized while I was walking to class, she is never coming back. That is when it transitioned into anger.”

    Sean first started taking drugs in middle school, and when he got into a major car crash at the age of 16, he got hooked on painkillers. Sean’s friend was driving drunk.

    “He had a couple of beers and was over the limit,” he said. “I broke my back and shattered my tailbone, my pelvis in five places, my left femur. I took opioids for the first time in the hospital.”

    Sean recalled after the accident that he became “a drug connoisseur” but his drug of choice was alcohol. He tried to get sober when he was about 25, and survived several suicide attempts. “I wanted help and I was once again in no man’s land.”

    Sean was later dealt another terrible blow, losing his half-sister Charlotte to ovarian cancer, which also killed his mother. “After she died, I drank on the plane on the way there. The insidious part of the disease was that I almost used it as an excuse. Which sounds terrible to say but that is my addict in me saying, ‘Yes, I can drink, and no one can blame me.’”

    Sean says his life turned around when he got married in 2014 and had a child in 2015. He’s since left Hollywood behind and works in the healthcare field, which he finds much more fulfilling.

    Sean is currently a residence advisor at a treatment center, and is working towards becoming a psychologist. “In the last two years, I sort of started not finding as much meaning in what I was doing in the film industry,” he explains. “The only thing I knew besides the film industry was addiction.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Alice In Chains' Jerry Cantrell Reflects On Sobriety

    Alice In Chains' Jerry Cantrell Reflects On Sobriety

    “Getting f–ked up is fun, and that’s why people do it. Especially when you’re young. It’s a part of life…But it comes with a price,” Cantrell said in a new interview.

    When Nirvana’s Nevermind album exploded in the early nineties, Seattle immediately became a hotbed for great music, and bands like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains all became wildly successful. But with that success also came tragedy with the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell and Alice in Chains lead singer Layne Staley, who died at the age of 34 after struggling with heroin addiction for years.

    Now Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell is reflecting on his own sobriety, and the myth that drugs make rock stars more creative.

    As Cantrell told Grammy.com, “Getting f–ked up is fun, and that’s why people do it. Especially when you’re young. It’s a part of life. It’s a part of a lot of people’s experience. But it comes with a price. It generally doesn’t end good.”

    Cantrell continues, “I’ve been super-creative fucked up. I’ve been super-creative not fucked up. It’s been so many years for me that I just don’t really think about that anymore. I think, at some point it becomes an impediment. It works until it doesn’t. Let’s put it that way.”

    Cantrell added that “it worked for a while. And I think that’s the case probably for most people. Maybe [it] takes you and puts you in a different mind space, and kind of maybe opens your perception to some stuff, but the costs are so fucking high. You know what I mean.”

    Cantrell has been sober for years, and he told Blabbermouth, “I don’t miss [drugs] at all. But I’m also not ashamed of it. Nobody’s perfect, and I certainly am not. You just kind of figure it out as you go.”

    Cantrell told Billboard that when he recorded one of his darkest albums, his solo work Degradation Trip, he was “just really fucked up back then, and you can totally hear it on that record. It was done right before I got sober, and it was also done right when I was dealing with the death of my band, and then the unhappy coincidence of Layne passing away right after I released that record. So it was not a good time in my life, and it totally comes across on that record.”

    Cantrell said he got sober a year after Layne died, and he wishes that the legendary singer would have a different epitaph without the focus on his drug problems. As Cantrell said on The Pulse of Radio, “It’s unfortunate that that seems to be the only headline that gets equated with him, because there was so much more to him than that. Not taking away the fact of the reality of what that is, and how it ended, everybody knows that too. But there’s a whole lot more to the story.”

    View the original article at thefix.com