In a recent Mother’s Day blog post, Drew Barrymore explained how entering rehab as a teenager helped her realized she needed to be emancipated from her parents.
“When I got emancipated by the courts at 14 years old, the umbilical cord was severed, and I have not been the same since,” the Never Been Kissed actress wrote. “It was necessary for me to step away and start to become my own person. And at the age of 14, my own parent.”
Barrymore’s mother sent her to Van Nuys Psychiatric in California when she was 13 years old. “It was a drug rehabilitation center, where — like the adults in residence, once you came in you did not leave,” the talk show host wrote. She was there for nearly two years.
“It taught me the foundations of telling your truth. Not in a way that made you an immovable person on some high horse, but your story. Your feelings. Your faults. Your hopes and wishes. Your hurts. What and where you wanted to get to in life,” she continued.
Barrymore added, “And — very important — who was going to help you on your path and who would you have to let go. For me, at the end and when I got out, it was my mother.”