For the Love of Therapy: Jada Pinkett-Smith on Trauma, Grief, and the Power of Embracing Your Journey
For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast
Jen Hatmaker
4.6 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 25 October 2023
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re in the thick of our “For the Love of Therapy” series, and this week we’re getting a full helping of candor and insight from the multifaceted actress and author, Jada Pinkett Smith. Jada candidly reveals another side to her journey that many might not know from her highly public persona, a story where she takes charge of her narrative in the face of what people have decided for themselves who they think she is. Jada recounts the formative and often traumatic events of her past, and talks in stark terms about her present day pain points. Without sparing the hard parts, Jada leans into what it’s like for her, as it is for so many of us to be a woman today, what it’s like to reckon with our trauma, and marriage is really like behind the curtain, in hopes that what she’s learned will resonate with other women, no matter what their story is.
Jen and Jada compare notes from their own lives about:
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Jada’s encounters with complex trauma, PTSD, panic attacks, and suicidal ideation
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How mental health issues can visit anyone at any time, regardless of privilege or upbringing
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The slow acceptance to admitting they’ve faced trauma, thinking “others have had it worse” - and the continued work toward reckoning with that truth
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The reality that all of us, especially those in the public sector, will be judged by others, and a new understanding that judgment is most often about people’s own pain and how they’ve been hurt by others’ judgment, rather than it is about the person being judged
Through sharing her life journey, which she covers in much greater detail in her newly released book “Worthy,” it’s Jada’s hope to encourage others navigating similar struggles towards wellness and understanding.
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Thought-Provoking Quotes:
“I just wanted to offer other women breadcrumbs that are on this journey called life. Our journeys aren't going to look exactly the same, but there are just some universal challenges that we have just being human and specifically being women. I just wanted to go, ‘Listen, I don't care what's going on. Instagram and Facebook, life is messy. Life is difficult. It's challenging. We're all trying to figure this out, and I'm just going to show you little things along the way that I figured out.’” - Jada Pinkett Smith
“When you really start to understand the human condition, and when you really start to see people's fears, you really start to see people's pain. That's why people want to strike at you. That's why people want to spew whatever they can your way because of how they've been hurt, how they've hurt themselves, how they've been hurt from others' judgment.” - Jada Pinkett Smith
“I am so lucky--yes, my mother was deep in her addiction, but I'm going to tell you--she showed up [for me] at some of the most pivotal times.” - Jada Pinkett Smith
“It would take me years to really detach myself from chaos because chaos became normal for me.” - Jada Pinkett Smith
“It's not other people's judgment that's the problem. It's how you judge yourself. When you know who you are and you are in the process of healing your self-judgment, you realize that any judgment that anybody's got on you is really a reflection of where they are sitting within themselves.” - Jada Pinkett Smith
“I know what kind of oxygen that would've given me if I had been able to hear someone talk about [mental health] in an honest way. I wouldn't think that I was crazy or I wouldn't have to feel so ashamed. I felt so much shame for feeling the way that I did, having the things that I had, because it's like, "well, what are you upset about?" And mental health doesn't have anything to do with that.” - Jada Pinkett Smith
“I wanted to share that here is a person who seemingly had it all, who was looking for cliffs to drive off of, and it was a serious dire situation that nothing material could help me with.” - Jada Pinkett Smith
“Even today is difficult for me to look at my life and say that I've suffered trauma. I didn't realize how much trauma I had. I know it theoretically, but I'm still in the process of believing it.” - Jada Pinkett Smith
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2021.
Girls Hold Up This World by Jada Pinkett Smith and Donyelle Kennedy
Guest’s Links:
Connect with Jen!
Jen’s website
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | episode mentions suicide and may be triggering for some listeners. |
| 0:08.9 | Hey everybody, she and Hatmaker here, your host of the |
| 0:12.1 | or the love podcast. Welcome to the show. We got a big one today, guys. |
| 0:16.7 | We've got a big one. We really do. Right now, we are in a series called for the love of therapy, |
| 0:23.6 | which needs no explanation. This is just important. The end. This is important. And so what's |
| 0:29.6 | important to the community is important to the podcast. And so we knew that we wanted to build |
| 0:36.4 | a powerful series around mental wellness and therapy and all the ways we get there. So you guys |
| 0:44.3 | today, oh gosh. I don't even know I need to introduce her. I don't. But today we have on |
| 0:54.5 | after an actual host, Jada Pinkett Smith. She was actually named one of times 100 most |
| 1:02.9 | influential people in 2021. Wow, that's huge. Obviously a co-host of rentable talk, |
| 1:09.2 | which won a daytime Emmy. And if you don't know her just by her name alone, |
| 1:14.8 | I can never list all her movies. I'm not even a professor and bad moms and mad at my |
| 1:20.4 | XXL and girl's trip and the Matrix Resurrection. They can spell on forever. She has really done it |
| 1:26.0 | all. She really has. She was a lead singer and songwriter for a metal band, seriously. She |
| 1:31.9 | published a children's book that went to number two on the New York Times bestseller list. |
| 1:37.5 | She's, you know, married to, you know, a pretty famous dude. But she's her own person. |
| 1:48.0 | And she was her own person way before will. And that's really what we're talking about today. Like |
| 1:55.1 | she's an outrageous talent in her own right, obviously. But she also had a whole life. A |
| 2:00.9 | childhood and then adolescence that deeply informed who she is and where she's at. And we talk |
| 2:05.4 | about all that. But I'm just throwing average part of the series because as you'll hear, |
| 2:11.4 | therapy and like therapeutic interventions was a huge part of her story. Like in fact, in her book, |
| 2:19.4 | which I'd like to read early, it's where we start. She starts out with sort of her therapeutic |
... |
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