Ben Affleck calls divorce from Jennifer Garner the ‘biggest regret of my life’
Ben Affleck has opened up about his alcoholism and his painful divorce from Jennifer Garner after 13 years of marriage.
Ben Affleck has revealed in a new interview that he considers his divorce from ex-wife Jennifer Garner to be the biggest regret of his life.
Affleck, 47, opened up to The New York Times about how his crumbling marriage prompted his relapse into alcohol abuse and the rehab stint that followed.
“I drank relatively normally for a long time,” Affleck shared. “What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.”
In 2018, Affleck and Garner divorced after 13 years of marriage. They share children Violet, 14, Seraphina, 11 and Sam, 7.
“The biggest regret of my life is this divorce,” he continued. “Shame is really toxic. There is no positive by-product of shame. It’s just stewing in a toxic, hideous feeling of low self-worth and self-loathing.”
While Affleck acknowledges the role he played in the deterioration of their union — and his own life — he’s trying not to “obsess” over it.
“It’s not particularly healthy for me to obsess over the failures — the relapses — and beat myself up,” he said. “I have certainly made mistakes. I have certainly done things that I regret. But you’ve got to pick yourself up, learn from it, learn some more, try to move forward.
“People with compulsive behaviour, and I am one, have this kind of basic discomfort all the time that they’re trying to make go away,” he explained. “You’re trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can’t break. That’s at least what happened to me.”
This article originally appeared on The New York Post and was reproduced with permission
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