Demi Lovato says recovery is a 'learning experience'

Demi Lovato says recovery is a “learning experience”.

The ‘Sorry Not Sorry’ hitmaker called getting back on track after nearly dying from a 2018 overdose of an almost lethal combination of opioids, heroin and fentanyl “a lot” after she needed to regain people’s trust.

The 29-year-old pop star told Apple Mu 1’s Zane Lowe on Wednesday (17.08.22): “Recovery is a lot. And with time, comes trust. I never have come out of treatment, I mean, maybe the first time, expecting people to trust me right away. It was a learning experience of, okay, people are going to have to learn to trust you again. The only way they can do that is by you proving yourself and not just talking, but taking actions that are towards your recovery. My family is incredible. And I’ve had members of my family struggle with addiction, so they are very understanding of it, and they know what it’s like. Do they worry to this day? Absolutely. That’s never probably going to go away with what I put them through. As a consequence of that, they ended up suffering.”

Demi “wouldn’t be here today” if she hadn’t been discovered in the nick of time.

She said: “I mean, when they found me, I was turning blue, and the doctor said, I had five to 10 more minutes left. If no one had come in when they did, I wouldn’t be here today.”

In May 2021, the ‘Dancing With the Devil’ singer shared the impact of seeing people – such as the rapper DMX – die from overdoses she gets a sort of “survivor’s guilt”.

Demi said: “Anytime that I see somebody OD or even pass away that’s in the public eye, I immediately think, ‘That could have been you, had you not been putting all this work into the last couple years of your life’. There’s times where I’ve even talked about feeling survivor’s guilt because you do ask yourself why am I still here? Why are others not?”