DAVE GROHL Says He’s Been To Over 430 Therapy Sessions Since His Infidelity Scandal

I’m not a mental health professional, but it seems slightly unhealthy that someone needs to attend over 430 therapy sessions to deal with the fact that they cheated on their wife and fathered a child out of wedlock, but Foo Fighters‘ vocalist Dave Grohl said that is indeed the case when chatting to The Guardian, and that situation wasn’t the only reason he started seeing a professional.

Grohl arguably had one of the biggest falls from grace after being regarded as a rock legend and father figure throughout the scene. His charitability and altruistic gestures of consistently feeding those without homes, communities at risk, and areas that have been devastated by natural disasters seemingly went out the window when rock stars do what rock stars do – sleep with a pretty woman. However, the court of public opinion is a hell of a strong one, and Grohl got the royal boot.

When the news last year broke that Grohl had fathered a child outside of his marriage, he stated that: “I’ve recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside of my marriage. I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her. I love my wife and my children, and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness. We’re grateful for your consideration toward all the children involved, as we move forward together,” with no real follow-up or further comment.

Now, Grohl has opened up to journalist Ben-Beaumont Thomas that he has “been in therapy six days a week for 70 weeks. I did the math the other day: over 430 sessions,” since his newest child was born, and his life was kind of blown to pieces.

So, it’s really no surprise that Grohl originally tells Thomas that “there were so many things that led me to this therapy,” but he does cut off the journalist when probed a little further, only offering, “I have to be perfectly honest. Writing songs and writing lyrics about these things is sometimes enough. As far as having a deeper, longer conversation about them, I still do reserve a lot of this for my own personal life, as impersonal and public as it may seem. But I think that for many reasons, I wound up in a place that I needed to stop and sit with myself and re-evaluate myself. It’s an ongoing process.”

One of the things that Grohl discovered during his therapeutic efforts that he was “pulled in different directions emotionally without having this anchor, this centred feeling” due to his commitments and aspirations.

“There were years where I was so overly ambitious with things, like a documentary series on HBO, writing a book, whatever. I think having grown up in suburban Virginia with a public-school teacher as a mother, any opportunity you got, you would take. But over time, you spread yourself so thin. And so I look back and I’m like, God, what was I trying to prove? There is such a thing as addiction to achievement, and it’s dangerous. You’ll set a goal for yourself and you put everything you have into it; the world disappears. Then you achieve that finish line, and it feels good for 24 fucking hours, and that feeling immediately goes away. And there’s that hole again, there’s that emptiness, and you’re like, shit, I need to fill it up with something else.”

Finally, when as point blankly by Thomas if that was what led Grohl to be unfaithful, Grohl addressed the question he had previously dodged, saying, “No. I think that’s how I ended up overextending myself and getting lost. I wasn’t sitting with myself and really letting [feelings] go from my head into my heart. Getting to the point where I was just like, I need to stop, turn everything off and find my heart.”

Grohl elaborated by saying “had to turn everything off, one of those things being my concern for what other people think,” in regards to social media and the aforementioned court of public opinion, “Being able to shut off that part of yourself can be sometimes a very healthy exercise in considering life within your immediate radius. Not giving all of that so much currency within yourself that it can completely destroy yourself.”