This Is Us star Chrissy Metz is opening up about the “devastating” way her stepfather treated her over her weight while she was growing up. During a new podcast appearance, Chrissy said that she was subjected to “mental, physical, [and] emotional” abuse during her adolescence that has now continued to affect her well into adulthood.
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Chrissy opened up about how her weight impacted her as a child.
While appearing on The Jamie Kern Lima Show podcast last week, Chrissy said that her stepfather would “weigh me in the kitchen or threaten to lock the cupboards,” admitting that the way he treated her still affects her today. She added, “the emotional stuff … they’re like little nicks, little cuts, and eventually you bleed out. It is painful.”
She said the way he treated her was ‘definitely mental, physical, emotional abuse for sure.’
“Why does my weight equate my worthiness? And as a 12-year-old kid, it’s like, how do you reconcile that in your mind?” she said.
Ultimately, she said the root of her feelings led her to believe that she was “unworthy.”
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During that time, she was also grappling with the fact that she was different from her friends because of the way she looked.
As a preteen, she was struggling with her weight setting her apart from her friends, especially because she wasn’t able to “fit into any of the cute Wet Seal clothes that they can fit into.”
“Also all the boys liked my friends — and I always felt like I was setting my friends up with cute boys,” she shared on the podcast.
This isn’t the first time Chrissy has talked about her difficult relationship with her stepfather.
As USA Today pointed out, Chrissy wrote about her stepfather, whose name was Trigger, in her 2018 book, This Is Me: Loving the Person You Are Today. Her mom married him after her parents’ divorce when Chrissy was 8 years old, and she wrote that her body “seemed to offend” him.
“He never punched my face. Just my body, the thing that offended him so much,” she wrote. “He shoved me, slapped me, punched my arm, and yanked my wrist. He would hit me if he thought I looked at him wrong.”
Trigger recently died.
On the podcast, Chrissy said she wrote him a letter while he was in hospice, which her sister read to him over FaceTime. She wrote, “I was very hurt, but I also love you very much, and I hope that you can forgive me for anything that you might be upset about, and I forgive you.”
She was able to find more closure after his death. “When we were cleaning out my childhood home where he lived, he actually had my book with a book marker in it,” she said. “And I was like, ‘OK, so he was trying.’ He really did try.”