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Your support makes all the difference.Hailey Bieber has revealed that helping her husband, Justin Bieber, navigate his sobriety has been “extremely difficult” because it brought back memories of watching her father struggle with alcohol and drug addiction.
The 24-year-old model spoke on the Victoria’s Secret Voices podcast about how she was able to help Justin on his journey with sobriety, but that it meant having to go to “some dark spaces”.
Justin, 27, spoke openly about his past drug use and mental health problems last year. Hailey’s father, Stephen Baldwin, previously struggled with cocaine addiction.
Hailey told the podcast: “There’s a lot of addiction that runs in my family, not even just my dad, but a lot of other people on that side of my family struggle with a lot of different things.
“My dad was always really open about it and I always appreciated that. I was always really, really close to my dad.
“He was just always extremely open about why being sober was what worked for him and why we needed to be sober and what alcoholic behaviour looks like, and where that comes out.”
Hailey said her father had problems specifically with cocaine, adding: “Looking back on times of drug use and being in some dark spaces and having to kind of go back there and talk about it was extremely difficult.
“I was never somebody who struggled with any substances, but that’s because I was so aware of it because of my dad… I was like, I’m never trying [cocaine] because I’m just so scared that if I try it one time, it might lead into something else.”
After the couple wed in 2018, Vogue described Hailey as being “convinced of her genetic vulnerability to addiction”.
Her uncle, Alec Baldwin, has also previously spoken out about battling alcoholism and drug addiction in the past. He wrote candidly about substance abuse in his 2017 memoir, Nevertheless.
In the Victoria’s Secret podcast, Hailey said she had to have an “open dialogue” with Justin in order to support his sobriety.
“Being like, ‘Hey, where are you with this?’ I’ve had times where I would get nervous, [asking Justin], ‘Are you OK to do this? Because you did have a time in your life where it was not OK for you and it was a very dark time for you’,” she said.
“But he has very good self-awareness when it comes to that and is very open about it and that’s all I can really ask for.”
In an interview with GQ Magazine earlier this year, Justin described creating memories in his marriage to Hailey as something “beautiful that we have”.
“Before, I didn’t have that to look forward to in my life,” he said. “My home life was unstable. Like, my home life was not existing. I didn’t have a significant other. I didn’t have someone to love. I didn’t have someone to pour into. But now I have that.”
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