Willow Smith Reveals She Used to Cut Herself

Willow Smith shared her story of self-harm in an episode of Jada Pinkett Smith‘s Red Table Talk, sparking conversations about mental health and coping mechanisms.

The Smith family has put some important topics into the public conversation in the last year on Red Table Talk, the generation-spanning talk show on Facebook Watch. They revisited some of their biggest moments on Thursday at an event in Los Angeles, celebrating the talk show’s upcoming second season. According to TooFab, Jada Pinkett Smith said that her daughter has done a lot of good by opening up about her history of self-harm.

“I’ve had a lot of young people come up to me about Willow as well,” she said. “In that particular episode when she kind of revealed about self-harm, we had people in our family that we didn’t even know that felt like now they could reveal what had been going on with them because Willow did.”

Pinkett Smith said that her daughter’s revelation opened up important conversations throughout their whole family, and now the world is having those discussions as well.

“That particular episode was a deeply healing episode within our internal family because there had been a few people who had been going through stuff that none of us knew about,” she continued. “Because of Willow’s strength and courage, we were able to connect on a different level. That was a really powerful episode for us personally as a family.”

Willow Smith told her story in one of the show’s first episodes, back in May of 2018. She recalled feeling like she has lost her “sanity” in 2010, after the explosive release of her song “Whip My Hair.”

“I had just stopped doing singing lessons and I was kind of just in this gray area of, ‘Who am I? Do I have a purpose? Is there anything I can do besides this?’” she explained. “After the tour, the promotion and all that, they wanted me to finish my album and I was like, I’m not going to do that,” she recalled.

“After all of that kinda settled down and it was like a kind of lull, I was just listening to a lot of dark music. It was just so crazy and I was plunged into this black hole, and I was cutting myself,” she went on.

That caught Pinkett Smith off guard, as she apparently heard it for the first time on air. Willow said that she had kept her self-harm a secret from everyone except for one friend.

“I never talk about it because it was such a short, weird point in my life,” she said. “I honestly felt like I was experiencing so much emotional pain, but my physical circumstances weren’t reflecting that. One night I was like, this is actually psychotic and after that I just stopped.”

Red Table Talk will be back for another season on Facebook Watch.