Trinny Woodall Thanks Rehab for Life After Losing Six Friends in Recovery

Trinny Woodall has reflected on her time in rehab for drug addiction, revealing that she lost six of her friends within the first year of her recovery.

The fashion and beauty expert, 61, began drinking and taking drugs at 16 after moving from boarding school to a day school in London, and struggled with a lack of self-confidence and chronic acne.

After multiple failed rehab stints in her early 20s, she then entered a program at 26 years old, that helped her build a foundation for recovery and has now been sober for over 30 years.

However, Trinny has revealed that her treatment and early recovery was soured by tragedy, with many of her friends tragically passing away during the first year.

Appearing on the cover of Women’s Health UK, she opened up on the difficult time, explaining her feelings of gratitude to have survived.

She admitted: ‘I felt relieved to be alive. I had six friends die in my first year of recovery. There wasn’t an “I’m on the back foot” moment – it was simply “I have another chance.”‘

Trinny, best known for her series with Susannah Constantine – What Not To Wear, added that she didn’t care about judgement for her past, insisting that it was through these hardships that she’d become the woman she is today. 

The TV star said: ‘It’s difficult looking back. I don’t know if I was judged, but do I care? No. If I hadn’t gone through it, I might not be where I am today. We only learn when we’re challenged. When life is going well, we don’t learn much.’

The entrepreneur previously explained how the tragic deaths of her friends became one of her biggest motivations to stay sober at the beginning of her recovery.

She told The Times: ‘Four of my closest friends died of overdoses within a year and a half of my stopping drugs. Many things would make me not go back to drugs, but that was a very strong thing for me early on.

While Trinny detailed how each of her friends passed suddenly after they had made a pact to go to rehab together, during an appearance on Steven Bartlett’s Diary Of A CEO podcast in 2023. 

She recalled: ‘I had three really good friends, and we were all using one night, and I said let’s make a pact and go to rehab tomorrow. Two of them had been, and one of them had never been.

‘The next morning I woke up and I still had that feeling, which is rare, so I called a therapist that I knew and I said I need to go but I have a window of opportunity that is so small, I need to go literally in the next two hours because I’m scared that I’ll change my mind.

‘So he got me in somewhere, and I stayed for five months, and I sold what I had to pay for it.’

She added: ‘Some very tragic things happened in that time, and one of the people died, and then I went to a halfway house in Weston-super-Mare for seven months, where you kind of live off £8 to £10 a week, it pays for your fags, and I worked in an old people’s home.

‘I came back to London a very different person, then in that following year another friend died, then in another two years they’d all died.’

While outwardly she projected an image of success during her twenties, Trinny explained how her personal life was blighted by an addiction that was fuelled by a lack of self-confidence. 

She said: ‘Things happen in your life that begin to fine tune and define who you’re going to be. I went through phases in my late teens and early twenties of turning to drugs because of not being happy with who I was, not knowing who I was.

‘Sometimes people turn to drugs because they don’t know who they are. They have an inner lack of confidence, and I definitely had an inner lack of confidence.’

After a series of spells in rehab she got clean as she approached her late twenties, a period she admitted was a catalyst for significant change – both personally and professionally.

‘When I got clean at 26, 27, that was a huge beginning of the change in my life,’ she said. ‘I was so relieved that my twenties were over, so relieved. That was a big moment for me to begin to work out who I was – that was the first moment, probably.’

The TV stylist also revealed how her first spell in rehab ended prematurely after she was caught watching a pornographic video with other residents.

But she claimed the residential treatment programme was a bruising introduction to in-patient therapy due to its confrontational approach, branding it a ‘very shaming place’.

She told Steven: ‘That was a funny one, but not funny in the end. It was a terrible rehab. Rehabs now are very different but it was a very, very shaming place. It would be closed down now. It didn’t have a very good way of dealing with things.

‘In that whole scenario there’s definitely a feeling of you’re thrown in with people you don’t know and you reveal your life. It was a time when you would write down your life story.

‘They did this stuff where they would get 20 people to critique how bad your life had been, in a room, and judge you for it. Looking back now that was the only way rehabs worked in the UK.

‘So when you bring up that porno film it was that sense of “let’s do something funny because we’re having such a s****y time here”, and it backfired and I was chucked out.’

The full Trinny Woodall interview can be read in the December issue of Women’s Health UK, on sale now