Actress Jemima Kirke turned to rehab to curb her party lifestyle.
The Girls star entered her first rehab facility several years ago when she was 23 after realizing she was hooked on fun times, which included drinking heavily and drug abuse.
Now 31, she admits that although her alcohol and drug consumption was a problem, she never considered herself an addict.
“I didn’t relate to (the) psychic need for the alcohol,” she tells Anna David’s podcast Recover Girl. “I recognized it as a tool and I know how to use it as a tool. I’m not someone who drinks excessively but I will drink for a reason sometimes. It’s a problem more than addiction. I think that’s possible.”
“I just was a problem drinker and user and I liked to party,” she adds. “It didn’t look the way a lot of other people’s (addiction) looks. I didn’t use (it) during the day necessarily. I just went hard when I went. I would do a lot of three-day benders. That was like a party. That was normal.
“It takes a long time to come back from a three-day bender and you’ve lost a week of your life.”
Jemima realized she had a problem after she spent a whole night drinking and partying. She went to her mother while still intoxicated and asked her for help, and when she sobered up and changed her mind, her mum still made her go.
“I came home to my mom’s house and I was like, ‘I can’t do it anymore’,” she says. “I was just so tired and coming down, and she was like, ‘Yes, thank you. Of course, darling, we’ll check you in’.”
The actress entered The Meadows treatment facility in Arizona and subsequently checked into Lifeskills South Florida and another rehab. She didn’t agree with the treatment program at Lifeskills because she claims the therapists were constantly shaming her, but one positive aspect of it was meeting her now estranged husband Michael Mosberg. The couple wed in 2009 and separated earlier this year (17). They have two children.
Jemima is now sober and in therapy and insists she knows how to handle her party triggers.
