Demi Lovato's complicated relationship with her 'abusive' father caused her life to spiral out of control: Reports
Demi Lovato has always been quite forthcoming and honest about her personal struggles with drug abuse, talking often about the strained and complicated relationship that she shared with her father, who himself was a victim of alcohol and drug addiction. Demi has also, many times, shared about how her father's addictions may have led to her own. At one point, Demi revealed that it was her father who influenced her first foray into drugs when she was merely a teenager of 17. "I loved it," she said about her very first encounter with drugs as a teen, during her Disney Channel days.
Now, after reports that the singer was rushed to hospital after a suspected heroin overdose has become headlines, we take a look into how her strained relationship with her late father and her insecurities fueled her drug abuse habit in a major way.
In her documentary 'Simply Complicated' which she released on YouTube last year, Demi shared her story and revealed to the world last October what sparked her long battle. "I felt out of control the first time I did it. My dad was an addict and an alcoholic," she said.
She also spoke about her father Patrick Lovato, who died of cancer in 2013, and the kind of complicated and abusive relationship that she shared with him. In her documentary, apart from calling him "abusive" in nature, Demi also revealed that her father's addictions and mental illness made him incapable of looking after his family.
"I was very conflicted when he passed because he was abusive," Demi said. "He was mean, but he wanted to be a good person. And he wanted to have his family, and when my mom married my stepdad, he still had this huge heart where he said, ‘I’m so glad that [he's] taking care of you and doing the job that I wish I could do.'"
During the course of the documentary, Demi also recalled the time when she had punched her backup dancer back in 2010. "I remember thinking 'I'm gonna beat this b*** up," she said. After that incident, things got so messed up that Demi went on a month-long bender and revealed that during the time, she started "using daily." Demi was hooked on to Adderall by the time she was 18, and in 2011, she had to get an inpatient treatment related to her drug use for the first time. “I just came to a breaking point; the next 12 months were extremely difficult,” she revealed about entering treatment at 18.
That same year, Demi wrote a song 'For The Love Of A Daughter' for her album Unbroken, which was inherently about the addictions of her father Patrick. In the song, Demi detailed her father's battles and also gave an insight into the massive amount of strain his addiction put on their relationship. She confessed at the time, "I guess I always searched for what he found in drugs and alcohol because it fulfilled him and he chose that over family."
In her song, Demi talks about her "family at war" and how it had been five long years since the two had spoken to each other. She also called her father "hopeless", saying that he had "selfish hands". However, some of the most compelling lyrics from the song are: 'Oh father, please father / I'd love to leave you alone but I can't let you go / Oh father, please father / Put the bottle down for the love of a daughter.'
And the chorus went something like this: 'You have a hollowed out heart but it's heavy in your chest. I tried so hard to fight it but it's hopeless. Hopeless. You're hopeless.' In her song 'For The Love Of A Daughter', Demi also sang about some very hard-hitting life experiences where she felt that her father had let her down, along with their entire family. The lyrics go like: 'Don't you remember I'm your baby girl? How could you push me our of your world? Lied to your flesh and your blood / Put your hands on the ones that you swore you loved. Don't you remember I'm your baby girl? How could you throw me right out of your world? So young when the pain had begun / Now forever afraid of being loved.'
“I was using while I had a sober companion and I went through like 20 sober companions. I was either craving drugs or on drugs. I was not easy to work with,” she recalls of life post-treatment. “It’s embarrassing to look back at the person that I was.” She said that she eventually got clean after her management team threatened to drop her. “It wasn’t a matter of if they’re going to leave, it was they’re leaving,” she said. “‘There’s nothing more we can do for you.’”
However, after her dad passed away in 2013, Demi wrote another song about him, in which it appeared that the Disney star had finally forgiven her father for all the messed up things he had done during his lifetime. The song, which is called 'Father', was included on her 2015 album 'Confident'.
Demi had been clean for about six years before her recent overdose, but previously, the singer had revealed that she had relapsed in one of her emotional songs called 'Sober,' in which she apologized for not being sober anymore. Speaking about overdosing before her most recent hospital visit, the singer revealed that the key to happiness is "to tell your truth and be OK without all the answers."