Demi Lovato is getting candid about her battle with addiction, speaking out about getting sober, falling off the wagon and recovering once more.
“I got sober at 19, so I got sober at an age where I wasn’t even legally allowed to drink,” the “Confident” singer, 27, said on a segment of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” airing Thursday.
“I got the help that I needed at the time, and I took the approach of a ‘one size fits all’ solution, which is … sobriety, just sobriety,” she continued. “So my whole team took that approach and we did it and we ran with it and it worked for a long time.”
Eventually though, Lovato’s battle with bulimia was getting increasingly tough to handle and took a toll, she said.
“I asked for help and I didn’t receive the help that I needed,” she said. “And so I was stuck in this unhappy position. Here I am sober and I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m six years sober but I’m miserable, I’m even more miserable than I was when I was drinking. Why am I sober?'”
When Lovato reached out to her team for help, she says, “They responded with like, ‘You’re being very selfish, this would ruin things for not just you but for us as well.’
“My core issues are abandonment from my birth father as a child, like he was an addict, alcoholic,” she explained. “They totally played on that fear and I felt completely abandoned, so I drank. And that night I went to a party and there was other stuff there, and it was only three months before I ended up in the hospital with an O.D.”
In July 2018, Lovato was hospitalized after she suffered an overdose. She then went to an in-patient facility.
“I think it’s important that I sit here on this stage and tell you at home or you in the audience or you right here that if you do go through this, you yourself can get through it,” she said. “You can get to the other side and it may be bumpy but you are a 10 out of 10, like don’t forget it. And as long as you take the responsibility, you can move past it and learn to love yourself the way that you deserve to be loved.”
At this year’s Grammy Awards in January, Lovato received a standing ovation when she returned for first public performance since her overdose, belting out “Anyone,” a song she wrote days before she ended up in the hospital.
