Lily Allen Shares the Moment She Hit 'Rock Bottom' With Alcoholism: 'It Really Distressed the Children'

Lily Allen is looking back at the moment she hit "rock bottom" as she celebrated her fifth anniversary of sobriety.

In a new interview with The Times, published over the weekend, the singer recalled that her drinking caused a turbulent moment following her divorce from her first husband, Sam Cooper. "I drank myself into oblivion," she told the outlet. "I went over to his house and started screaming at him, woke the kids up, you know, really distressed the children."

She added that her daughters Marnie, 11, and Ethel, 13, "remember that"; "they know that [she] was under the influence then and that it's important that Mummy avoids getting into those situations."

Now that she's been five years sober, Allen attends 12-step meetings on a regular basis. For her, it's important that her children "feel safe." She added, "That's the main thing for me. I felt very unsafe in my childhood, and my kids feel safe."

Though Allen had struggled with alcoholism throughout her career, her addiction reached its peak following the dissolution of her marriage with Cooper.

"I'd sort of exhausted all of my options in terms of my outlets for acting out. I was engaging in pretty crazy sex stuff, drug stuff, alcohol," she admitted. "I would sit there in my bed and think, 'Maybe now's the time for heroin because nothing's working anymore.' Luckily, I didn't get there because I wouldn't be here right now."

That moment of overstepping her ex's boundaries made Allen realize she needed to clean up her act. Another catalyst, she explained, was her friend's reaction to her ordering a gin and tonic while catching up: "Oh, you really need that drink," she recalled her friend saying.

"I remember feeling so incensed," she said. "When they were in the bathroom, I was like, 'Why do I feel so angry at somebody insinuating that I need this drink?' And it was because I did. It really had control over me. I just felt like I was no longer in control of my own destiny. I went to a meeting the next morning."

Allen explained that addition "runs deep" in her family, as she grew up seeing her father, the actor Keith Allen, doing cocaine. "Self-medicating was going to be on the cards," she told the publication. "For me, it didn't really feel like an 'if', it was a 'when.'"

Originally published in Enstarz.

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