Jeff Jarrett says he is approaching nine years of sobriety, and that the milestone has changed how he views his own past. Speaking with Ariel Helwani on YouTube, Jarrett opened up about the dark road that led him there.
Jarrett pinpointed the date: “October 17th, 2000 and 17 was the last drink. So, coming up on nine years,” he said.
He explained that sobriety did not erase what he had been through, but reframed it. “Sobriety has absolutely changed, not changed my past, but definitely changed how I’ve viewed my past. The good and the bad of it. I’m very grateful for everything that I went through.”
Jarrett described how a professional high masked a personal crisis. Even as his business was climbing, his wife was sick and he was raising three kids.
“My personal life with a sick wife and three kids, I put on that mask again that I got this. I got this.”
The Mask And Self-Medication
He said a reflexive response kept people from seeing how much he was carrying. “People would say, Jeff, you okay? And my immediate response, almost like a trained response, much like with Owen was, yeah, I’m good, worry about the girls. Yeah, I’m good, worry about the girls.”
That refusal to deal with his own pain, Jarrett said, eventually pulled him under. “As time went on, it’s the mask that you continue to put on and self-medication is what the easy term to say, but yeah, it led me down a dark road.”
Jarrett said he has done extensive work on himself since getting sober, including therapy. “Oh, yeah. But in 2007, continuous,” he said when asked about counseling. “I’ve done a lot of processing on this over the last nine years.”
He tied his healing directly to how he now looks back on old grievances, saying forgiveness lifted a weight off him. “If I don’t forgive, it’s like me carrying around a 10-pound ball. There’s no need in that. So I long ago forgave.”
