A few months away from the third anniversary of her sobriety, Jessica Simpson is silent no more.
In her 2020 memoir, Open Book, the fashion mogul and performer opened up about her struggles with alcohol and self-medicating and what drove her to become sober. Reflecting on her battles with substance abuse and using it to cope with anxiety and her insecurities, Simpson told SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle that she eventually realized alcohol was having the opposite effect of what she had wanted.
“I didn’t even realize how much I was drinking and how much I was suppressing,” she recalled. “I thought it was making me brave, I thought it was making me confident and it was actually the complete opposite. It was silencing me.”
At a certain point, though, the star could no longer keep everything within her down.
“It just ended up coming to a surface. I knew a lot of it was coming up, coming up and I couldn’t suppress it any more. The alcohol wasn’t numbing anything. It wasn’t numb anymore. I was just numb,” she recalled. “I couldn’t even understand stuff that was coming out of my mouth. It didn’t sound like me.”
As a result, Simpson decided to go right into therapy and “laid it all out there,” as she described to Cagle, for hours on the first day.
“My therapist was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe somebody can cover that much trauma and fear and awareness,'” Simpson said. “It takes people their whole life to discover those things.”