Jada Pinkett -Smith and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Jones are ‘attaining’ true freedom by telling their ‘dirty’ pasts. They are letting it all go while also teaching others how to let it all out, too so as to be able to fly light.
It is not uncommon that people have ghosts from their past, however, many a times, for fear of being called names or outrightly rejected, such people could decide to hide these ‘ghosts’ forever while ‘rotting’ on the inside, or to open up; and speak out about her past and present struggles so that they could find healings, and be relieved of the baggage that has reduced their ‘speed’ mentally, socially, ethically and/or otherwise.
Jada is no stranger to making confessions on her Facebook show. The actress and mom-of-two, in the latest episode of her talk show, Red Table Talk, tackled the topic of addiction along with her mother.
While Jada revealed she was addicted to a number of things such as exercise, alcohol, and sex, Adrian revealed she was addicted to heroin while her daughter was growing up and that that didn’t allow her perform her duties to her daughter as a mother, very well.
After previously revealing her obsession with sex toys, in this week’s episode Jada details how she battled with sex addiction when she was younger, believing it would fix all her problems.
Speaking to her mother about addiction, Jada described herself as a “binger’ and revealed how she had suffered through periods of fixation.
”My sort of addictions jump. They jump around. When I was younger, I definitely think I had a sex addiction of some kind, yes, that everything could be fixed by sex. You know what I’m saying?”
Jada – mom to Jaden, 20, and Willow, 17, and who is married to her actor husband, Will Smith shared that there was another period of time when she was addicted to the gym, then another when she realized she had a drinking problem.
”I remember reaching a rock bottom that time I was in the house by myself and I had those two bottles of wine and was going for the third bottle. And I was like, ‘Now hold up. You’re in this house by yourself going onto your third bottle of wine? You might have a problem.’
Jada has been able to pull herself out of addictive patterns by acknowledging she had a problem and then choosing to put an end to the damaging behaviour.
”So I went cold turkey. That’s the thing about me: I can go cold turkey. I am a binger, and I always have to watch myself and I can just get obsessed with things. It’s not what you’re doing but how you’re with it.
Why you’re doing it. It’s the behavior that’s attached to it because if you want to have a lot of sex, that’s great, but why are you having all that sex? That’s what you’ve got to look at.
“I think I didn’t find out my mother was addicted to heroin until I was in my teens. I could tell when my mother was high. She couldn’t make it on time to pick me up from school.
Or she’s nodding off, falling asleep in the middle of something. You just realise, oh, that’s not being tired, that is like, a drug problem.
Alcoholism and drug addiction run through my family, and I’ve had my own addictions that I’ve had to get over. It just made me realise that really great people just get caught up.”
Looking back, Banfield-Jones finds the topic “difficult to talk about” as she sees the whole ordeal “devastating”.
“It’s difficult to talk about something that is gonna go out to the world. I couldn’t hide the unmanageability of my life, and the emotional damage and the spiritual damage I did to myself and to her. That was devastating. I abused drugs for over 20 years,” she told her daughter.
To begin with, Banfield-Jones began to clean up her addiction when she had a man “come back into her life”, but eventually learned to get sober for her own well-being.
“At that time, I didn’t think I was anything without a man. So I had this man come back into my life. It’s sad to say that I did it for a man. I had to come to the understanding that there was a power.
That God had been looking out for us, you and me both, through all of that. And I just had to let go and surrender so I could receive what he was trying to give to me, through other people.”
