In her new documentary, Simply Complicated, Demi Lovato opens up about her struggles with drug abuse, bulimia, and self-harming. She confesses to using hard drugs in 2012 around the same time she was advocating for sobriety.
“I wasn’t working my program, I wasn’t ready to get sober,” Lovato said. “I was sneaking [cocaine] on planes, I was sneaking it in bathrooms, sneaking it throughout the night. I went on a bender of like, two months where I was using daily.”
Demi Lovato, 25, went to a rehab clinic in 2010 for drugs and alcohol dependency, as well as for self-harming and an eating disorder. She relapsed two years later and let many people down, including her manager, who nearly left her side after she almost overdosed.
“There was one night when I used a bunch of coke and I popped a few Xanax bars,” the Confident singer explained. “And I began to choke a little bit. My heart started racing, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, I might be overdosing right now,'”
The path to recovery was not too easy for Demi despite her willingness to get better – drugs took a complete hold of her. She would sneak out to buy drugs and use other people’s urine to pass her drug tests, but an incident in Palm Springs changed everything.
When Lovato swallowed half a bottle of pills in Palm Springs, she got taken to psychiatric hold for a temporary amount of time. After this, she kept doing drugs secretly for a while, but as her sobriety coach, Mike Bayer, says, the thought of losing the people she loves is what ultimately made her stop.
Bayer was at least Lovato’s twentieth sober coach but was the one to finally help her break free of the chains holding her back. “The most important thing to Demi is losing people,” Bayer says, “Losing people that she cares about and that love her.”
Demi Lovato’s manager asked her to get rid of her phone that had drug dealers’ numbers stored. Although she listened and managed to stay off drugs, she still had an eating disorder to deal with, which came back into her life when her Wilmer Valderrama left.
The two announced their break-up over social media in 2016 – six years after they first started dating. Lovato admits that while she was with Valderrama, she went three years without purging food, but was one of the first things she did when they first broke up.
“The less I have to think about food, the easier it is to go about having a normal life and I don’t want to let anybody down so when I do have moments when I slip up, I feel very ashamed,” she explained. “What started the relapse was missing Wilmer. And when I feel lonely my heart feels hungry and I end up binging.”
Although Demi Lovato is clean now, she still struggles every day with the thought of using drugs. She says that although coming out as a poster child for recovery is not an easy task, she wants the world to know that no road to successful recovery is an easy one. And for that, we thank her.
WATCH THE FULL DOCUMENTARY HERE:
This article was inspired by USMagazine//From Drug Addition to Sexuality: 12 Revelations From Demi Lovato’s ‘Simply Complicated’ Documentary