Metal Anarchy

During a recent interview with The Guardian, Foo Fighters guitarist/vocalist Dave Grohl revealed that he has been going to therapy. The musician decided to seek help to address trauma associated with his infidelity scandal, the loss of Taylor Hawkins, etc.

Grohl said the following:

“I’ve been in therapy six days a week for 70 weeks. I did the math the other day: over 430 sessions.”

He continued:

“I have to be perfectly honest. Writing songs and writing lyrics about these things is sometimes enough. As far as having a deeper, longer conversation about them, I still do reserve a lot of this for my own personal life, as impersonal and public as it may seem. But I think that for many reasons, I wound up in a place that I needed to stop and sit with myself and re-evaluate myself. It’s an ongoing process.”

He also discussed how he approached things after he admitted to fathering a child outside his marriage:

“I had to turn everything off, one of those things being my concern for what other people think. Being able to shut off that part of yourself can be sometimes a very healthy exercise in considering life within your immediate radius. Not giving all of that so much currency within yourself that it can completely destroy yourself.”

He also shared what he learned in therapy:

“There were years where I was so overly ambitious with things, like a documentary series on HBO, writing a book, whatever. I think having grown up in suburban Virginia with a public-school teacher as a mother, any opportunity you got, you would take. But over time, you spread yourself so thin. And so I look back and I’m like, God, what was I trying to prove? There is such a thing as addiction to achievement, and it’s dangerous. You’ll set a goal for yourself and you put everything you have into it; the world disappears.

Then you achieve that finish line, and it feels good for 24 fucking hours, and that feeling immediately goes away. And there’s that hole again, there’s that emptiness, and you’re like, shit, I need to fill it up with something else.”

However, he says this outlook didn’t lead to infidelity:

“No. I think that’s how I ended up overextending myself and getting lost. I wasn’t sitting with myself and really letting [feelings] go from my head into my heart. Getting to the point where I was just like, I need to stop, turn everything off and find my heart.”

In the same chat, bassist Nate Mendel also offered his take on Grohl’s infidelity scandal:

“We just all wanted to run and give him a big hug and let him know — both of them — that we are here.”

Guitarist/vocalist Chris Shiflett added:

“When Dave called me that morning. I just thought: take all the time you need. And then my house burned down a few months after that [in the California wildfires.] So having an extensive break wound up being necessary for me.”