Former “Bachelor” star Ben Higgins spoke candidly Wednesday about his past struggle with painkillers — revealing he once took pills from his grandfather to feed his addiction.
“I remember doing it and walking out and I just remember this feeling of like, ‘Who are you?'” Higgins said on the Facebook Live series, “Addiction Talk Live.”
“‘Like, what is this about? Why are you still doing this?'” he added. “‘And you’re taking something from someone that you love.’ I think that was the start of me starting to say, ‘I need to start at least confronting it.'”
Higgins, 32, said his troubles began when he suffered a football injury in high school and was given pain medication following surgery.
“When I took the medication, I remember it being a numbing moment for me,” he said, adding that the drugs “just made me feel numb or more maybe, even I can say, like, at peace, and so I just took them.”
The “Alone in Plain Sight” author said his decent into drug abuse was “more of a slow fade.”
“I was recognizing that I was always hiding something from somebody, I think that was the first sign to me,” Higgins said. “I was always strategically prepping in my mind on how I could hide whatever it was.”
Over time, however, Higgins added how he began to feel “a ton of depression, a ton of anxiousness around where was I going to find the next pill, when was I going to find the next bottle.”
For Higgins, his moment of self-reflection came after, literally, taking a look in the mirror.
“I was laying in bed for probably 24 hours straight and I went into the bathroom,” Higgins explained. “I looked at myself in the eyes and just this like, calming but also fire inside of me said, ‘Ben, you’re not the man you ever dreamed you could be,’ and at that moment is when I officially decided that I needed to get help.”
Today, Higgins has been sober for nine years from painkillers. And while he is focused on his future — which includes fiancée Jessica Clarke — Higgins has not forgotten his past, noting “it is still something that is on my mind.”
“Somebody asked me the other day on an interview I was doing, how it feels to be recovered. And I said, ‘It feels good,’ but like, I know I could easily slip back into it, and so I have to stay healthy,” Higgins said.