Patrick TrautfieldTake four cups childhood in the television spotlight, two tablespoons of genetic drug and alcohol addictions, a teaspoon of negative peer influence and you get the life of Jodie Sweetin, who spent her younger years playing Stephanie Tanner on the 1990s series “Full House.”
Sweetin spoke about her drug and alcohol addiction, her struggle to sober up and her motivation to stay clean Tuesday night in a packed Chumash Auditorium.
She began with her golden years on “Full House,” which she started at the age of 5. She worked on the cast for eight years, going to school in the morning and then going to work in the afternoon. When she was 13, the show came to an end, Stephanie Tanner was done and Sweetin was off to the real world of high school.
“Ending the show was like losing family. They were people I was with for eight years,” she said.
After becoming a childhood star, and then being thrown into the dramatic realm of high school at the age of 13, things were not easy for her.
“Freshmen year of high school sucks,” Sweetin said. And this is where the story of addiction began.
“From the first time I drank, it was obvious that I wasn’t doing it just to have fun,” Sweetin said. “I was trying to drown out everything else.”
She was adopted at a young age, and her biological family had a history of addiction. Mix that with influence from older teenagers and a big drug and alcohol scene, and Sweetin was on the path to addiction.
“When I was 17, I started experimenting with drugs. I was spiraling out of control fairly quickly. I scared a lot of people,” Sweetin said.
In her presentation, Sweetin talked about drinking, smoking marijuana and doing speed, all of which came full force when she began living in the dorms her freshman year of college. Her parents were against her living in the dorms, but she managed to get her way on the condition that she would come home for the weekends, a way for her parents to keep her under control.
“That just meant that I would party Monday through Thursday and go home on the weekends to rest and do homework,” Sweetin said. “Party, alcohol and drugs had taken over my life. I only cared about getting my next fix.”
Sweetin finished off her first semester with a 0.9 grade point average.
“You have to work really hard to get a 0.9 GPA. I lost my scholarship, was on academic probation and on probation in the dorms. I was a wreck,” she said.
With this huge addictive peak in her life, Sweetin knew that she had nowhere to go but down. This realization came one night when she was 18.
“It was 6 a.m., and I was sitting outside my door by myself. The sun was coming up and I knew that if I didn’t go home, I wasn’t going to make it,” Sweetin said.
She had dug herself so deep that she knew she had to clean up and spend some time at home. Her boyfriend picked her up, brought her to her house, where she stayed for a week and a half, not going to classes and trying to put the pieces of her life together.
And from there, things started looking brighter. She ended up marrying her boyfriend at the time, police officer Shaun Holguin, in July 2002.
“I was married with a house and a white picket fence and two dogs. I had a happy life for two and a half years,” Sweetin said.
But common sense suggests that a cop for a husband and a history of drug and alcohol addiction don’t mix so well. So when she started falling back into her addiction, she had to hide it all.
“I started not caring again. I was in the mode of ‘all I want is that fix.’ I was doing speed and living this total double life,” Sweetin said. “My husband knew nothing. And I did drugs all day, every day.”
She would stay out all night, coming home at 5 or 6 a.m., and when he would get off his night shift, she would be home asleep in bed, like nothing was happening.
“I was good at shuffling everything around. That’s how an addict is. You work it so you get what you want. It’s a very selfish way to live,” she said.
It got to the point where drugs were the only way to make her feel normal, Sweetin said. “My life completely revolved around getting high. If I didn’t do it, I felt horrible.”
She didn’t have any friends that didn’t use and had dropped to 100 pounds.
“I was so wrapped up that I didn’t see what I’d become: a selfish, miserable, sick person and I didn’t know how to get well,” she said.
And this is where Sweetin’s second realization came in. “Two weeks before everything came crashing down, I had a feeling that my life was going to crumble . . . but I didn’t stop,” she said.
So nature took its course, and everything collapsed.
“I went to the emergency room with acute alcohol poisoning. I had an irregular heartbeat from all the drugs. My body temperature was 95 degrees; I was hypothermic,” Sweetin said. “I was in the emergency room all night and even before I went in, I was begging my friends not to call the ambulance. And they were like ‘Are you kidding?'”
When her husband came the next morning to pick her up, she was so “horrified and ashamed that I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I had managed to take down everyone around me and they didn’t even know they were going down.”
This was the moment that her husband realized the degree of her problems and the extent of the lies that she had been make for the previous two and a half years. And it was just too much to try to repair.
“It was a hard relationship for me to lose. It was the ultimate loss but I needed to lose something important to me to realize what I had done.”
She checked into rehab in March 2005 and stayed there for over a month where she began the attempt to repair her life and to think, “What was it that made me happy?”
After rehab, she later stayed in a sober living house for six months and has to figure out where she wanted to go with her life.
She was then approached to do a public speaking tour to tell about her addiction and recovery.
“I was really embarrassed and they wanted me to try and make people aware of what had gone on,” Sweetin said. She proceeded to talk on “Good Morning America” and “The View,” becoming more comfortable talking about her past.
She is now on her public speaking tour, with 13 locations to go in the next two months. Her inspiring message came with large amounts of motivation and support for those who may be going through the same thing.
“If there is one thing I would say at the end of each of my speeches is: I had to go through this a couple of times, but it was never too late to make a different decision,” Sweetin said.
After her official speech, Sweetin continued with a question and answer session where she answered more serious questions, along with inquiries having to do with rumors and gossip flying around.
“No, I am not dating Jason from ‘Laguna Beach,'” she said, laughing. “I’ve seen him a couple times at parties and he was like, ‘Hey, let’s take a picture.’ And after a couple pictures everyone is like, ‘Oh Jodie and Jason.'”
“And no, I’ve never gotten high with Bob Saget,” Sweetin said with a grin on her face. “But I do talk to Bob all the time. He is so incredibly supportive, and so is the whole ‘Full House’ cast. We go out to dinner all the time.”
An audience member wearing a T-shirt printed with “Jodie, I want to be Sweetin’d” then requested that she recite her most famous “Full House” line.
“I was waiting for that question . . . How rude!” she squeaked, backtracking to the Stephanie Tanner days. “And that’s copyrighted, I’m going to have to charge you $50 for every time I say it.”
With a down-to-earth personality, sarcastic humor and an inspirational moral, Sweetin was certainly a treat to the ASI True Life series. She joked around with audience members, graciously took pictures and signed autographs after the show. Many of those who attended seemed pleased with the event, obvious by the huge swarms of people surrounding the desk where she signed autographs, and the long arms attempting to snap a picture of the “Full House” star.
“I always knew that she did drugs but I never thought she’d be at our school. I’m really glad she came,” nutrition sophomore Neesha Sridhar said. “As she talked, I realized she was like anyone. She was really down-to-earth, really fun, normal.”