- Drew Barrymore reflected on her time in a drug rehabilitation center as a teenager.
- Barrymore said that some of the exercises in vulnerability at the hospital carry over to her show.
Drew Barrymore opened up about her time in a youth rehabilitation center for drug use as a teenager, connecting the vulnerability that she learned there to "The Drew Barrymore Show" now.
In a Saturday blog post on her website titled "Mother's Day," Barrymore reflected on her treatment at Van Nuys Psychiatric hospital, and becoming emancipated from her mother at age 14.
"I was in for the long haul," Barrymore said of her nearly two-year stint in the institution. "I bonded with a lot of the kids, because like me, they did not know where to put their anger and they did not know how to live life anymore without the need to get high or self-destruct in some form and fashion."
In her blog post, Barrymore described one of the exercises that she would do at hospital, where the patients and their caretakers would sit in a circle on Wednesday night, with one family sitting in the center each week sharing their experiences. Years later, she connected that experience to her own talk show.
"The show is like the room," Barrymore wrote. "All feelings are welcomed, and all behaviors are not."
Barrymore has previously spoken about her time in a rehabilitation center as a teenager, telling The Guardian in 2015 that her mother placed her in the institution when she was 13 years old. At the time, Barrymore said that while the experience was "horrible and dark and very long-lived," she "needed it." Barrymore told The Guardian that it was experts at the institution that recommend she emancipate herself from her mother at age 14.
Barrymore said in her blog post that it was "necessary for me to step away and start to become my own person" after her emancipation. And as she's continued to tell stories of motherhood on her show, and parsing through her own relationship with her mother in public, Barrymore wrote that she thinks of her own daughters.
"This isn't just about my mom," she wrote in the blog post. "It's about my girls. It's about me. It's about how to simply be a mother."