Ben Affleck is still in regret after divorcing Jennifer Garner.
The actor is making his come back on the screen from his new movie The Way Back. In the movie, he is playing a high school basketball coach struggling with his life while battling alcohol addiction and coping with a failed marriage. The movie has echoes of his own experience, as Affleck is honest about his road to sobriety and his public divorce from Garner.
In a new interview with The New York Times, published Tuesday, Affleck talks about his own mistakes while discussing the film. He admitted, “The biggest regret of my life is this divorce.”
“Shame is toxic,” he continued. “There is no positive byproduct of shame. It’s just stewing in a toxic, hideous feeling of low self-worth and self-loathing.”
“I drank relatively normally for a long time,” he told the outlet. “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.”
Affleck and Garner, both 47, separated in June 2015 and got their divorce in October 2018. They started dating in 2004 and married the next year. They have three kids — daughters Violet, 14, and Seraphina, 11, and son Samuel, 7.
“It’s not particularly healthy for me to obsess over the failures — the relapses — and beat myself up,” he told the Times. “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.”
Affleck, lived in rehab multiple times, entered rehab again in August 2018.
In October 2018, he openly talked about his treatment in an emotional statement on Instagram.
“This week I completed a forty-day stay at a treatment center for alcohol addiction and remain in outpatient care,” Affleck revealed in a post. “Battling any addiction is a lifelong and difficult struggle. Because of that, one is never really in or out of treatment. It is a full-time commitment. I am fighting for myself and my family.”
The actor faced another controversy a year later in October 2019 after appearing to be publicly drunk outside a Halloween party.
The Way Back opens March 6.
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