Jada Pinkett Smith's daughter Willow reveals her struggle with self-harm: 'I was cutting myself'
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Willow Smith shocks her mother on the Monday episode of "Red Table Talk" after revealing that she used to cut herself when she was much younger. (Facebook)
Jada Pinkett Smith's daughter, Willow, opened up about her past struggles with self-harm and cutting herself in a recent episode of Smith's new Facebook series, "Red Table Talk."
On Monday's episode titled "Surviving Loss," Smith sat down with her "Table Talk" co-hosts, her mother, Adrienne Banfield Jones, and her daughter, Willow, to talk about coping with the pain of loss.
Willow opened up to her mother and her grandmother and explained that after hitting stardom at the age of nine with the single, "Whip My Hair," the now 17-year-old said she experienced a great loss of self which led her to a dark place.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“I would have to say I honestly feel like I lost my sanity at one point,” she said. “It was after that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing and I had just stopped doing singing lessons and I was kind of just in this gray area of, ‘Who am I? Do I have a purpose? Is there anything I can do besides this?’”
She then went on to reveal that in the midst of feeling conflicted about who she was, she began cutting herself.
“After the tour and the promotion and all of that, they wanted me to finish my album. And I was like, I’m not gonna do that,” she said. “After all of that kind of settled down, I was listening to a lot of dark music and it was just so crazy and I was just plunged into this black hole and I was, like, cutting myself and doing crazy things.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Shocked by the revelation, Smith asked, “What? Really? When were you cutting yourself? I didn’t see that part? Cutting yourself where?”
The young star then showed her mother the scars on her writsts and forearms and said, “You can't even see it. There’s still a little something there. Totally lost my sanity for a moment there."
Jada Pinkett Smith is joined by her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Jones and daughter, Willow Smith, on her talk show to talk about the greatest loss in their lives. (Facebook)
She then admitted that she told no one in her family about phase and only one friend knew. "I never talk about it because it was such a short, weird point in my life but you have to pull yourself out of it.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}But the daughter of Will Smith reassured her mother that the phase was short-lived and she has not revisited the idea of self harm in almost five years. “I honestly felt like I was experiencing so much emotional pain but my physical circumstances weren’t reflecting that," Willow said.
Following her daughter's talk, Smith, 46, opened up about what it was like to survive the loss of her close friend, Tupac Shakur.
"That was a huge loss in my life. Because he was one of those people that I expected to be here," Smith admitted. "My upset is more anger because I feel like he left me - I really did believe that he was going to be here for the long run. So when I think about, I still get really mad. I get mad at God, I get mad at him, I get mad at everybody."