Actress Maia Campbell is going strong on her sobriety journey and sharing the progress she’s made. During an hour-plus sit-down recently with Corey Love on episode one of his Wake !t Up podcast, Campbell shared vulnerable moments from her journey, which has been far from easy.
When Love asked whether the actress struggles to live in the moment, she shared that her addiction may have prevented her from being present.
“When I was in my addiction, I was really suffering behind the loss of my mother,” Campbell, 49, began. Campbell’s mother, an ESSENCE contributor and beloved author, Elizabeth Bebe Moore Campbell Gordon, died from brain cancer in 2006.
A video of the South Central actress went viral in 2017 after she was recorded by an Atlanta-based rapper begging for drugs at a gas station.
“The drug that I chose was not a gift. In my pain and in my delusion, I said ‘oh yeah this is great this makes me feel good, this makes me forget the pain,’ but it makes me turn my back on so many healthy blessings that are truer towards my progress, truer towards my faith and my God,” she said.
Although the actress is currently six years sober and in a peaceful place, she still has somber moments where she reflects on her past addiction.
“I still have severe emotional distress about the losses of my parents, and about the embarrassment I caused myself when I wasn’t focused,” she told Love. Her father, Tiko Campbell, passed away in 2012.
“It was heartwrenching,” Campbell says of those videos and images of herself during that period. “I used to wake up every day in pain from the image of me at the gas station dancing around.”
In addition to staying sober, she has been working on her relationship with her daughter, Elisha, who was impacted by her past substance abuse. She had her only child in 2000 with ex-husband Elias Gutierrez, whom she married in 1998.
Campbell, best known for her role as Tiffany on the ’90s sitcom In the House, lost custody of Elisha a year after she was born because she refused to take psychiatric medication for bipolar disorder. Consequently, Elisha was primarily raised by her father.
In 2017, the actress appeared on OWN’s Iyanla: Fix My Life with her daughter and stepfather to seek help improving their relationship. Almost a decade later, the ladies are two peas in a pod, and Campbell attributes much of that to getting professional help.
“We’re in therapy, so it’s a lot better than it ever was, really,” she said during the sit-down. “There was a time when I would come home from treatment, and I would barely know her.”
Campbell also touched on how those hurdles and points in her career deprived her of sacred moments with her daughter that she’s now working to have.
“They make you rich, but they take something away from you so important,” she remarked.
Praying for many more years of sobriety, much joy, and continued healing for the actress.