Ashley's Secret Life | Glamour
GLAMOUR: You've gone through a huge life change. What exactly happened when you went to visit Wynonna?
ASHLEY JUDD: Well, one of the things families are asked to do is allow the person in treatment to talk about their perception of their lives without interruption. I found I was having traumatic responses to what I was hearing: I would get light-headed and almost pass out. And what I realized is that I wanted this opportunity for myself.
GLAMOUR: Did you talk to anyone about how you were feeling?
AJ: No, but the counselors must have noticed what I was going through. When they approached me about treatment they said, "No one ever does an intervention on people like you. You look too good; you're too smart and together. But you [and Wynonna] come from the same family —so you come from the same wound." No one had ever validated my pain before. It was so profound.
GLAMOUR: What, exactly, did they say you needed treatment for?
AJ: Codependence in my relationships; depression; blaming, raging, numbing, denying and minimizing my feelings. But because my addictions were behavioral, not chemical, I wouldn't have known to seek treatment. At Shades of Hope, my behaviors were treated like addictions. And those behaviors were killing me spiritually, the same as someone who is sitting on a corner with a bottle in a brown paper bag.
GLAMOUR: So what were the first few weeks like?
AJ: We were asked to do an incredible amount of written work —hundreds of pages of self-evaluation, some of which we shared in group therapy. I remember the night I shared my history of depression, like the way I used to use sleep to cope with uncomfortable feelings. When I finished, the counselors and my peers were looking at me with huge eyes. They said, "We're really glad you're here."
GLAMOUR: What is one of the most surprising things you discovered about yourself in the first few weeks?
AJ: Well, I do this thing on airplanes and in hotels that I never thought was a problem, where I wipe down all the plastic surfaces around me. The first time I looked at that in treatment and thought I might have to refrain from wiping, I cried for 25 minutes —sobbed from my toenails. I said, "How can you tell me that's an addiction? I'm not hurting anybody." But it's not about germs —it's about control.
GLAMOUR: Can you give us a sense of where all this pain comes from? What was your childhood like?
AJ: Complete and total chaos. I lived alternately with my mother, father and grandmother and went to 13 schools in 12 years. Everything was in such a state of disarray and dysfunction that I became a hypervigilant child, doing the best I could to raise myself under extraordinarily unpredictable and unsafe circumstances. Now I can look back and say, "Gee, I wasn't just alone a lot —I was really lonely. I was clinically depressed at the age of eight."
