Childhood trauma can be a trigger for celebrities. As they get older and understand what happened to them as a child can make them want to forget so they use and drink to make those memories go away and it’s hard for them to stop. They blame their experience for their addiction and not get the help they need to overcome the trauma. Being a celebrity and playing different characters helps them deal because they get to be someone other than themselves. They had a script to hide behind. Become a new person every week.
Child actors are in an adult world where they see and watch their peers partake in things that no child should ever witness. They experience things only other child actors will understand. They are supposed to be protected, but they are taking advantage of because they think that’s what their supposed to do. They want to be professional.
Hollywood isn’t for everyone. It’s a stressful environment. There’s a lot of pressure from your peers and from the outside world. Everyone expects you to be the best. You are being watched and judged on a regular basis and its challenging to figure out who you are and where you belong.
You can get into recovery, but it takes a lot of work to make it last. You have to be able to do the work and make sure that you don’t put yourself into situations where using drugs will help your overcome whatever it is your going through. You are going to have to cut people from your life into order to become sober. You can’t be around people who are going to enable you to use. In some cases, people are the reason you continue to use and abuse drugs. They want to keep you around so they will do anything to make you stay.
There’s also the challenge of accepting your past and trying to figure out why you started and if you are able to live a clean life. You have to address the demons and be able to fight them.
It’s no secret that celebrities have any sort of addiction, but there are some that hide it better than others. Sometimes we don’t know how deep a celerity is into their addiction that we are not only shocked, but surprised that they have made it as far as they’ve had.
Being a celebrity comes with a lot of pressure and because of it, they tend to use their wealth and their connections to hide behind something. They have an easy access to drugs because of who they know. They can use their power and their fame to get what they want when they want it. Celebrities who have famous parents can use drugs and alcohol to cope with how they grew up. They live in a world that not many people can relate to. They use their upbringing as a reason to do what they do, but they are not the only ones to develop such a lifestyle. Anyone can have a traumatic past and it’s how we deal with it that will play a part in our future.
With a high stress job that comes with trying to always be on top will have its downfall. When you are in the public eye and everyone is watching your every move, you have to make sure that you do and say the right thing, but it’s a challenge when you want to be honest and tell the truth. You will get backlash if you don’t use your words carefully.
You want to be able to watch your favorite celebrity and be able to trust them and be a good role model, but we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. We don’t know their struggles or why they are into the things they are. We can’t always believe what we see on screen.
The film and TV industry make it seem like getting over an addiction is easy, but its more to it then. It’s a lot harder than it looks. There’s a lot more to it than waking up on day, deciding to get sober. It takes work. There’s always going to be something that will make you take one step back. It’s going to take trial and error. There are things that are not going to work, and you will have to start from the beginning and one day something will stick.
There are areas in Los Angeles that are more rough because of the economic situation. There are a lot of cities and towns that don’t have the resources people can use to get the help they need. Poverty is also a problem. People will live in an environment where they were raised by single parents, or they didn’t have the money to be able to afford things that we take for granted.
We don’t know how many people struggle with addiction, but in L.A County there were 60,000 as of 2009. The number could have tripled since then.
Alcohol and marijuana are easily supplied in California since you can walk into a store and buy alcohol. With marijuana being legal in a lot of places, people are opening up shops that specialize in different strands, but the drugs that are most commonly abused in Los Angeles are meth, cocaine, alcohol, and marijuana.
Kids who grow up on TV and in movies are mostly pressured by their parents to work because they are the ones that are paying the bills. The more work they get, the bigger the paycheck. Parents would do what to takes to get their child a starring role, to be the next big thing and as the child gets older and realizes that the childhood that they had wasn’t a normal childhood. Parents tend to live out their dreams through their kids and it shows.
They grow up to fast. They are working in a world that isn’t made for kids. They are constantly around adults. It’s a challenge to separate being a kid and being a professional. They don’t have a real sense of the reality because the only thing they know is the film and TV industry. They play with someone else’s emotions and pretend to be someone they are not. They don’t have a sense of who they are when it’s time to grow up.
With the “Quiet on Set” documentary that has recently come out. It really shows how much the adults aren’t aware of what’s being done on set. Some people are so unaware of what’s happening that when the truth comes out, they pretend that its brand new information even after being told for years that it’s been happening and there’s people in the industry that get accused for something and nothing gets done. Those people prey on other people, preferably someone much younger than them because they have that authority figure, and they use that to get what they want.
Kids are being taking advantage of and it really affects how the person grows up. Some may have it easier and live a normal life after Hollywood, but a lot of them are still dealing with the trauma and some of that trauma will get passed down and will repeat.
The success that some kids have early in their careers may not happen to them as an adult. They grow up, lose that look or are not as talented as they once were. Child stars will try and make a comeback or try and re-invent themselves to outgrow the characters they’ve played in the past and it fails because they can’t get away from the past.
It’s a shame that kids are thrown into an adult so early in life and when they do grow up and become adults, they don’t know how because they’ve never taught how to survive in the real world. They got everything handed to them and when those go away and they’re left alone, they struggle. They become lost. Everything they know disappears because they don’t know anything else but to be someone else. They are living different lives through TV and movies. They don’t have the time to be themselves.