David Sheff Quotes

But my activities have been pretty much focused in the last almost 30 years on the recovery, of my own recovery, the understanding for my family of my recovery.

All my life, I had this idea that if I could unravel the mystery that was my mother, then I could help save her. But it didn't really work. We were close, but she struggled with mental illness and alcoholism, and it was rough at times.

Trying to overcome addiction is one of the hardest things for a person to do. And the fact that I had to do it under the scrutiny of tabloid press at first made it seem even more difficult. But in fact, it oddly ended up being a plus. Because of the tabloid stuff, it wasn't like I could walk into a bar and order a drink.

I was really proactive in trying to heal my family. I wouldn't give up. My whole life was about trying to get my father healthier, and there were moments when he was healthier. Then someone would give him a drink. I always felt if he had one person in his life who supported his healthy side, he'd be on his way.

I'm realizing that my childhood is not my daughter's, that I can't heal myself by any actions I take with her - and that it's definitely time for me to go back to my own childhood... with my therapist.

It is a lot of work being an addict. There's nothing harder than being an addict.

Seeing is believing to most families who have lived with a drinker.

I have a lot of friends who are trying to clean up their act, or that are still making trouble for themselves, so I'm definitely well-versed on what goes on in the mind and the heart of a person who self-destructs as their coping mechanism, and also what they're like when you take their preferred substance away.

I didn't know my dad for a long time. My dad was on drugs and my dad was at the VA Hospital, my dad was off in his own world selling drugs or using them or there would be crack heads in the house or whatever it would be.

My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.

My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.

I had such a wonderful life before drugs and alcohol abuse. I've got that life back now and plan to keep it. Maybe I had to go through what I did to get to this point, to appreciate this life more.

I have other obligations now - the show, my family, my life... though I know that without my sobriety I wouldn't have any of those things.

But when alcohol comes in, start running. Because there's a demon there, and it goes back to her childhood.

I didn't get at first put into a rehab facility; I got put in a adolescent psychiatric unit for my detox.

I think I have an addiction to pretty much everything. I mean, I have to be very careful with myself as far as that goes, which is why I have a support group around me consistently.

I vowed that I'd never allow any man to control me or to be an alcoholic or anything like that around me, because I don't want my children seeing that.

If I have a problem, stuff's going through my head, I feel like using, I usually go and talk to my dad... I decided to get sober a lot younger than he did. He first tried to get sober when he was like 32, I believe.

There were a couple of things in the intervention that made me know I needed help. One was a letter from my daughter saying that she was ashamed she had the same last name as I did, which will shock you a little bit.

Trees Lounge is based on my own life. Both my parents like the movie. My father, of course, thinks it's a masterpiece.

In recent years, the choice of drugs on these reservations and throughout my district has been methamphetamines. It has destroyed the rule of law among the reservation people. It is killing our tribal youth in this country.

When the addict gets recovery, his family gets recovery, right?

'The Fighter' was about a family struggling to overcome and fighting each other sometimes, and I went back and rewrote this script which I had written for my son initially because my son has mood disorder.

Don't bother me while I'm eating, or when I'm coming out of the crackhouse or something. Just let me get going.

Well, all I can say is, it's a day-by-day program, and so I'm very worried about relapsing, but I don't know. I don't want to use. I don't want to go back to that place because nothing good came of it. It was super dark; it's not nice.