Chris Rock has been having “lots of therapy” during lockdown.
Chris Rock
The 56-year-old comic sees a counsellor for seven hours a week, which stemmed from being diagnosed with non-verbal learning disorder – which is described as having “strengths in verbal abilities contrasted with deficits in visual-spatial abilities” – and admitted he had a lot of childhood “trauma” to work through.
Asked if his experiences of childhood racism still have an impact, he said: “Yeah, it’s weird. I’ve been doing therapy. That’s what I did during Covid: lots of therapy..
“Success does not erase trauma. It just doesn’t. So I definitely had to go back through therapy and really go through my childhood...”
The ‘Fargo’ actor has “forgiven” anyone who has done wrong in the past and doesn’t see the benefit of calling people out now for things they did decades ago.
He told Telegraph magazine: “The key thing is, I forgive everybody that was involved.
"I don’t want to criticise the culture of whatever, but what happened to me happened 30 years ago. I could out everybody that called me a n***** and everybody that hit me, and put their faces on Instagram, and say their names and all that stuff, right? And they would never work again. Their lives would be absolutely destroyed.
‘So I’m gonna pray that they learnt their lesson… I got kids going to college – wouldn’t that suck if some kid couldn’t go to college because their dad called me a n***** in 1979? So I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna take the very high road.”
Chris – who has two daughters, Lola, 19, and Zahra, 16, with ex-wife Malaak Compton-Rock – rarely drinks these days and has stopped taking “sleep aids” after finding the medication had begun to have a debilitating effect on his daily life.
He said: “I was on an Ambien/Melatonin-every-night thing. And I had really bad brain fog. I was a functional Ambien addict, which affected everything – it affected my ability to concentrate, honestly.”
Tagged in Chris Rock