Jessica Simpson has just celebrated four years of being sober - and marked the occasion with an incredibly powerful post on Instagram. The singer, 41, shared an image of herself four years ago, in which she says she looks 'unrecognisable' - and decided that she wanted to give up drinking.
'I knew in this very moment I would allow myself to take back my light, show victory over my internal battle of self respect, and brave this world with piercing clarity,' Jessica writes. 'Personally, to do this I needed to stop drinking alcohol because it kept my mind and heart circling in the same direction and quite honestly I was exhausted.'
Admirably, by sharing her story so candidly, on such a huge platform, Jessica will be helping those with similar stories feel less alone. It might even be the sign somebody needs to get help. Her post also shows that anyone go through addiction problems, even if, on the surface, it looks like they have a seemingly perfect life.
'There is so much stigma around the word alcoholism or the label of an alcoholic. The real work that needed to be done in my life was to actually accept failure, pain, brokenness, and self sabotage,' she continues. 'The drinking wasn’t the issue. I was. I didn’t love myself. I didn’t respect my own power. Today I do. I have made nice with the fears and I have accepted the parts of my life that are just sad. I own my personal power with soulful courage. I am wildly honest and comfortably open. I am free.'
It isn't the first time the mum-of-three has been open with her fans about her health. In her memoir, Open Book, which was released last year, she revealed that she had issues with pills and alcohol, which led her to stop drinking in November 2017. 'I was killing myself with all the drinking and pills,' she wrote in her memoir. 'Giving up the alcohol was easy. I was mad at that bottle. At how it allowed me to stay complacent and numb.' Jessica also had issues with diet pills, due to the pressures of the industry, which was compounded with alcohol and drugs like Tylenol PM and Ambien, a habit Jessica described as her way to deal with past trauma and to fall asleep.
In the book, Jessica also disclosed that she was sexually abused as a child, which she says happened for six years. At a Halloween party in 2017, Jessica sought help from her friends for her addiction, telling them: 'I need to stop. Something’s got to stop. And if it’s the alcohol that’s doing this, and making things worse, then I quit'. Jessica later started to attend therapy twice a week, and has been sober since. But she says the therapy was more difficult than giving up alcohol. 'Therapy was not as easy,' she wrote. 'With work, I allowed myself to feel the traumas I'd been through.'
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