Jada Pinkett Smith opened up about her anxiety disorder on her Red Table Talk show, stating that her nail-biting and cuticle-chewing habits since she was a child were not related to her diagnosis, but that all changed when she tried to understand her daughter Willow since that gave her a clue about her own life.
“I’ve had to look at some of my own behaviors and my mom’s behaviors and say, well, of course, I probably have some anxiety about how I grew up,” she explained to her mom and Willow herself, according to New York Post.
Some chapters of the new season of his Facebook podcast were recorded prior to Will Smith’s incident with Chris Rock at the last Oscars. Although the subject has not been openly discussed, at its premiere they affirmed through a message on the screen that at the time they would share their learnings from this moment of healing.
What did Jada Pinkett Smith say about anxiety?
“I feel like as a child, she (her mother) didn’t understand my anxiety. Because she, growing up, had seen her friends die, had been through so much that my problems, to her, felt smaller,” Pinkett Smith added. “ I had to forgive her a little bit for saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, but it’s really not that bad.’
Given this, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, 68, confided that she never identified Jada’s attitudes as anxiety. The Matrix actress acknowledged that many families go through a generational cycle of this feeling, but they haven’t realized it. She did it together with Willow.
“It took me a long time to understand Willow. I mean, just her anxiety. She had a hard time relating to me, because of two things: her lifestyle and how she was raised very differently from me. And then not really knowing how to comfort her, not knowing what help she needed, not understanding her behavior, it was very difficult, even to this day, just to be there for her in the way that she needs to be there,” he noted.
“We recently had a conversation and she said, ‘I never knew I actually experienced anxiety.’ She was pushing him down for so many years like she had no idea, ”Willow added about Jada.