After revealing for the first time that he had been molested as a child, actor Dax Shepard concluded that his issues with drug addiction were likely fueled by the experience, USA Today reports. In a recent interview on Sirius XM’s The Jason Ellis Show, Shepard said he was molested by an 18-year-old “dude in my neighborhood” when he was seven. Although he described the molestation as “minimal,” the actor believes the trauma contributed to his drug problems later in life.
Shepard, who has been sober since 2004, made the connection when his mother, who works as a court-appointed advocate for foster children, told him about a statistic linking abuse to addiction—that if you’ve been molested, you only have a 20% chance of not being an addict. “In my mind, I just liked to fucking have a great time,” he told Jason Ellis. “But when you hear a statistic like that, I’m like, ‘Oh no, I was going to be an addict, period.'”
The 41-year-old actor said it took him 12 years to tell anyone about being molested. Before then, he had convinced himself that it was his fault, “as generic as that is.” He told Ellis, “I’m like, ‘It’s my fault and I’m gay, I must have manifested this because I’m secretly gay.’ I had all these insane thoughts for 11 years or 12 years.”
In a 2012 interview with Playboy, Shepard went into detail about his drug-fueled escapades. “I just loved to get fucked-up—drinking, cocaine, opiates, marijuana, diet pills, pain pills, everything. Mostly my love was Jack Daniel’s and cocaine,” he said at the time. “I lived for going down the rabbit hole of meeting weird people. Of course, come Monday I would be tallying up all the different situations, and each one was progressively more dangerous. I got lucky in that I didn’t go to jail.”
Despite the weight of his past demons, Shepard seems to have moved on with relative ease. He is happily married to actress Kristen Bell and is currently working on a new film, CHiPs, based on the 1970s TV show.
The link between childhood trauma and addictive behaviors is highlighted in this Fix interview with Dr. Gabor Maté, who believes that one must address underlying trauma first, before an addiction can be properly treated.
