‘It really makes children miserable’

Lily Allen is looking back at the moment she hit rock bottom as she celebrates five years of sobriety.

In a new interview with Timespublished over the weekend, the singer recounted that her drinking caused a tumultuous time following her divorce from her first husband, Sam Cooper. “I drank myself into oblivion,” she told the outlet. “I went to his house and started screaming, waking up the kids, you know, the kids were really upset.”

She added that her daughters Marnie, 11, and Ethel, 13, “remember that”; “they know that [she] was affected at the time and it was important for Mom to avoid falling into those situations.”

Now five years sober, Allen regularly attends 12-step meetings. For her, it’s important that her children “feel safe.” She added, “For me that’s the most important thing. I felt very unsafe as a child and my children feel safe too.”

Although Allen struggled with alcoholism throughout her career, her addiction peaked after the dissolution of her marriage to Cooper.

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“I had almost exhausted all my options in terms of acting. I was getting into some pretty crazy sex, drugs and alcohol,” she admitted. “I often sit in bed and think, ‘Maybe now is the time to take heroin because it doesn’t work anymore.’ Luckily, I didn’t go there because now I wouldn’t be here.”

The moment her ex crossed the line made Allen realize that she needed to change her behavior. Another catalyst, she explains, was her friend’s reaction when she ordered a gin and tonic mid-conversation: “Oh, you really needed that drink,” she recalls her friend saying. .

“I remember being so angry,” she said. “When they were in the bathroom, I was thinking, ‘Why do I feel angry when someone insinuates that I need this drink?’ And that’s because I did. It really took control of me, I just felt like I had no control over my destiny anymore so I went to the meeting the next morning.”

Allen explained that that bias “runs deep” in her family, as she grew up watching her father, actor Keith Allen, use cocaine. “Self-medication applies,” she told the publication. “For me, it’s not really like ‘if’, but ‘when’.”

Originally published in Enstarz.

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