Demi Lovato pulled no punches when speaking candidly about the sequence of events that led to her breaking a six year stint of sobriety and almost dying from a drug overdose in 2018.
Appearing on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Lovato said she "didn't get the help she needed" when she sought assistance for an eating disorder and felt "abandoned" by her "team".
"I was stuck in this unhappy position. Here I am sober and I'm thinking to myself, 'I'm six years sober, but I'm miserable. I'm even more miserable than I was when I was drinking. Why am I sober?'"
Having taken a "one size fits all approach" to sobriety after getting clean from drugs and alcohol at age 19, Lovato said she sent a message to some associates confessing she was struggling to stay on the wagon.
"I reached out to the people that were on my team, and they responded with like, 'You're being very selfish. This would ruin things for not just you but for us as well'," she said.
The 'Cool For The Summer' singer said that response triggered trauma she has around her biological father, who also struggled with substance abuse and was estranged from her as a child.
"I have vivid memories of him leaving so when they left, they totally played on that fear, and I felt completely abandoned so I drank," she explained.
"That night I went to a party and there was other stuff there and it was only three months before I ended up in the hospital with an OD."
Lovato is promoting her new single 'I Love Me', which champions a message of self-empowerment. In a leaked clip of the music video obtained by TMZ, Lovato appears to reference her overdose by walking past a person on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.
