Jessica Simpson’s 8-Year Sobriety Confession: ‘Alcohol Blocked My Dreams’

Jessica Simpson is celebrating a major milestone and reflecting on the hard lessons that came with it.

The singer, 45, marked eight years of sobriety over the weekend, sharing a glowing selfie on Instagram as she opened up about the role alcohol once played in her life and how choosing faith over fear changed everything.

‘8 years ago today I made the choice to confront, to confess and to let go of the self-sabotaging parts of my life that I was choosing,’ Simpson wrote on Saturday.

‘Making that decision allowed me to fully live in the pursuit of God’s purpose for my life. Alcohol silenced my intuition, blocked my dreams and chased my circulating fears of complacency,’ she continued, adding, ‘Today I am clear. Today I am driven by faith.’

‘Both fear and faith are something that we feel and may not see, I’m so happy I chose faith over fear. It was not in the fight that I found my strength, it was in the surrender,’ she concluded.

Simpson, who announced her separation from husband Eric Johnson in January, has been open about how sobriety has been key to unlocking her creativity again. 

‘The moment I started drinking too much was when I started writing music in 2016 and it was making me go to places and feel sorry for myself,’ she previously told People. ‘I don’t know why I wanted to feel sorry for myself other than the alcohol was lying to me and saying, ‘You’re braver because you can say this with me on your side.’

‘That sentiment is not true,’ she added. ‘I actually am so much more honest without alcohol, and I actually believe myself so much more without alcohol.’

Reflecting on the emotional clarity she’s gained, Simpson shared, ‘I personally feel like it made my emotions quiet. Instead of addressing them, dealing with them and getting through it, I was just letting them be.’

Simpson previously detailed hitting rock bottom on Halloween 2017, when she was too inebriated to help dress her children in their costumes.

Jessica shared in her memoir Open Book that on Halloween morning, she and husband Eric Johnson were on their way to a school assembly for daughter Maxwell with Jessica in the passenger seat. 

The star, who also runs a billion dollar clothing/lifestyle brand, recalled that ‘it was 7:30 in the morning and I’d already had a drink.’ 

Afterwards, they headed and prepped for a Halloween party they were hosting.

While she was getting ready for the party with her team gluing on her fake beard and helping her with her wig to look like Willie Nelson, she recalled just zoning ‘out.’

‘I was terrified of letting them see me in that shape,’ she wrote. ‘I am ashamed to say that I don’t know who got them into their costumes that night.’

Jessica said that after the Halloween party wrapped up, she took an Ambien pill to help her sleep.

Her close friends came over the day after Halloween and she told them: ‘I need to stop. Something’s got to stop. And if it’s alcohol that’s doing this and making things worse, then I quit.’

In her memoir, the star also revealed she was sexually abused as a child and that the emotional trauma was among the factors that later led to her self-medicating with alcohol and pills.

She wrote in her memoir of the day after: ‘I slept in, afraid to see them, afraid I had failed them. I hid until they left, then drank.’

Ultimately, she said she realized that she was ‘killing’ herself ‘with all the drinking and pills.’ 

‘Giving up the alcohol was easy. I was mad at that bottle. At how it allowed me to stay complacent and numb. Therapy was not as easy. With work, I allowed myself to feel the traumas I’d been through,’ she wrote.

Simpson and Johnson separated last year. The couple share three children: daughter Maxwell, 13, son Ace, 12, and daughter Birdie, 6.