Jemima Kirke on Drinking After Rehab: ‘I’m Not Someone Who Drinks Excessively’

Posted on the 12 April 2017 by Sumithardia

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Jemima Kirke, 31, stars on Girls, which premieres its final episode on this last season on Sunday. She was a guest on the Recover Girl podcast with Anna David, where she talked about her three stints in rehab, two of which she was ejected from. Jemima recently admitted that she met her last husband, Michael Mosber, with whom she has two children ages seven and five, in rehab. Jemima and Michael are divorced but they were together for eight years so she considers that a success. She elaborated on how they got together, and on her personal philosophy of recovery, during the podcast. It sounds like she’s saying that it wasn’t that bad for her because she was a binge drinker, not a daily drinker, and it’s like she’s minimizing it. I don’t know her story but I do know that you’re told not to do that in recovery. I’m quoting E! below, which has a summary of her interview. On the page for the podcast they note that Jemima started drinking again a few years ago and their article is title “Drinking After Years of Sobriety With Jemima Kirke.” This is in contrast to E!, which states that she’s sober now. (I couldn’t listen to the podcast as it’s not on iTunes yet.)
Despite needing treatment, Kirke told David that her partying ways didn’t stem from a need to repress feelings but instead recognized it as a “tool.”
“I didn’t relate to [AA's] psychic need for the alcohol. I recognized it as a tool and I know how to use it as a tool,” she explained. “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.”
Even now, Kirke admitted that her problem wasn’t necessarily in line with everyone else’s she met in rehab. “I just was a problem drinker and user and I liked to party. I don’t know I just had, I mean it didn’t look the way a lot of other people’s looks,” she admitted. “I didn’t use 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.”
What “sealed” her “coffin” before finally agreeing to rehab was one final all-nighter.
“I came home to my mom’s house and I was like, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ I was just so tired and coming down,” she recalled. “And she was like, ‘Yes, thank you. Of course, darling, we’ll check you in.”
The next day, however, she tried to back out but her mom forced her to check in. “I learned a lot about myself in rehab,” she said.
Kirke entered her first rehab facility, The Meadows, when she was 23. “It was fun,” she shared. “I have a lot of sober friends who never got to go to rehab. It was fun. It was just nice.”
Afterwards, she went to a facility named Lifeskills and then onto an “awful” place she didn’t name.
The Tiny Furniture actress was ultimately kicked out of Lifeskills and the nameless facility, but she didn’t mind leaving because of the “shaming” that took place. “‘Always the victim, Jemima,’” she recalled her rehab therapist telling her.
Despite not agreeing with the programming at Lifeskills, Kirke did admit that she had some positive experiences because she ended up meeting her now-ex-husband Michael Mosberg.
“You’re sick. I’m sick. I get you,” she said of her mindset upon meeting him. “I’m reacting against my whole life.” Although everyone told her it was a bad idea, she admitted “something worked” because they stayed together for eight years.
[From E! Online]
I’m pretty sure that if I gave interviews at the age of 31, after I started drinking again, I would have sounded very similar to Jemima. I wish I would have learned that lesson earlier. I was 28 when I first quit drinking with AA and was sober for two years. I went back to drinking like Jemima and nothing bad happened immediately but a decade later I was drinking every night and it was affecting my moods and relationships. It was harder to stop drinking the second time and I’m lucky I wasn’t in a worse place. (I go to AA now, but that’s not how I stopped this second time. I stopped drinking with SmartRecovery, which is free and based on rational emotive therapy, I highly recommend it.) I understand what she is saying about AA, it’s very circumscribed, it can be sexist, it can try to pigeonhole you and there are certain ways of thinking and talking about recovery in AA which are discouraged. It’s free though, there are meetings all over, and overall it’s a good group of people trying to live without drugs and alcohol. I try not to tell myself that I’m not as bad as the other people because I was miserable and that gets you nowhere. Plus I can relate to the stories. My life is so much better sober and I want to keep that.

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Source: celebitchy.com

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