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The Smiths are back in the news, but its got nothing to do with the infamous Oscars slap.
On the most recent episode of Red Table Talk, Jada Pinkett got personal about her mental health and shared that she suffers from anxiety. She made the discovery recently despite having physical symptoms for a while, saying, “even though I used to chew my fingernails down to the cuticles. But they didn’t say that that was anxiety. I was a nail-biter, that’s it.”
The 50-year-old actress didn’t connect those actions to anxiety until her daughter Willow’s adolescence and dealing with her anxiety.
“One thing I would say in having to deal with, and learn about her anxiety, I’ve had to look at some of my own behaviors and the behaviors of my mother, and go, well of course I probably have some anxiety in regards to how I grew up,” she said. “It was very difficult, even to this day, in just being there for her in the way that she needs.”
Willow went on to explain that she’d be on the floor crying and shaking, which would trigger her mother into saying that she just couldn’t watch her daughter act like that. As Willow talked about her anxiety, Jada realized that it was generational since her mother and the family’s matriarch Adrienne Banfield-Norris, admitted anxiety had affected her as well.
“I think in our world, I almost saw it as a weakness. We just couldn’t afford to be anxious,” Banfield-Norris said. “I escaped through my drug abuse. Which I think numbed me to whatever was going on with you. I just didn’t want to face it, deal with anything in my life.”
You can watch the latest episode, which features Kim Basinger and daughter Ireland Baldwin below.
