By .
Sharna Burgess is recalling her experience of substance abuse.
On the latest episode of her podcast “Old-ish”, the “Dancing with the Stars” pro opened up about smoking meth as a teenager.
READ MORE:
Brian Austin Green & Sharna Burgess Announce Engagement: ‘Our Latest Chapter’
As she told her co-hosts, fiancé Brian Austin Greem and Randy Spelling, she first started dabbling in drugs at just 15-years-old.
“We were sitting at the backyard of someone’s house, and a crack pipe was being passed around with meth in it, and we were all taking hits of it,” she said of trying meth at 17.
Burgess explained that because the drug was “new” to her at the time, she wasn’t using it “every day” and didn’t think of herself as “hooked.”
Looking around the backyard at the time, she recalled feeling a moment of “clarity” and envisioning what her future would look like.
“Here I was, 17 years old, high awake for three days, watching 20-somethings and maybe even young 30-somethings passing around this crack pipe just waiting to get a little bit more out of it,” she said. “I realized that I had come from being an Australian champion ballroom dancer, I represented my country at the World Championships, I was an athlete, the best in the country at the time. And because of a knee injury, I fell off.”
Burgess continued, recalling how she realized how far she’d fallen, and that she “needed to get back to that person,” thinking to herself, “This was not what I was meant for.”
READ MORE:
Brian Austin Green & Sharna Burgess Share Their Kids’ Emotional Reaction To Their Engagement
Talking about her years of substance abuse issues, Burgess shared that she experienced “scary moments,” including one night at a club when she became dehydrated after she “had taken too many things” and “started frothing and foaming at the mouth.”
She added, “You sober up very quickly when you’re in fear of your life like that.”
That experience still wasn’t enough for her to stop, and issues at home and her complicated relationship with her father were also “triggers that sent [her] back into it.”
“I was very, very uncomfortable in my reality, so I would escape to this place of euphoria,” Burgess said. “And eventually, the things I would take to get to that place of euphoria weren’t strong enough or enough, and I do more and have more and more often. And that was the slippery slope for me.”
Burgess now credits dance with helping give her the “strength” to stop using drugs.
