Hailey Bieber had to undergo therapy to cope with negative attention
Model Hailey Bieber has shared that she has had to undergo therapy to cope with the negative attention and trolling she receives online.
“The way that I’ve dealt with a lot of the negative attention is… I’ve talked it a lot through with a therapist, and I do therapy consistently… I’m also married to someone that’s been dealing with this a lot longer than I have, to an extremely, like the highest level it could possibly be,” Hailey said on the Women’s Health Going for Goal podcast, femalefirst.co.uk reported.
Hailey, who is married to pop star Justin Bieber, added that she thinks “being able to share that world with somebody that understands it even better than I do has been so helpful”.
Bieber has trained her to remember that she does not “owe” anything to anyone and doesn’t need to “explain” herself to strangers. Using this coping mechanism has made her feel “a lot more freedom”.
“The biggest thing for me with social media was the battle of… for a while strangers made me feel like I had to explain myself, when the reality is, I don’t owe them anything. It took me a while to get there and understand that, because I’m kind of a perfectionist and I don’t want people to hate me or be mad at me,” she said.
Hailey added: “I want to be like, ‘Hey I’m actually not this person that you think I am.’ I just realised that there’s people on the internet that, no matter what you say and do, they want to just hate you because they are not happy with themselves.”
“The more I’ve been able to break that down with a therapist (and) the more I realise it has nothing to do with me, or my personal character, I felt a lot more freedom,” she said.
Hailey said praying to God is also a form of “meditation” for her and is “extremely important and helpful” for her mental well-being.
“I think for me, meditation a lot of the time, means praying. My beliefs are a very big part of my life, and my faith is a very big part of my life,” she pointed out.
“I think being able to take all of the burdens I feel and being able to release that and pray about it, and to have my own conversation with God, and being able to let it go that way, is extremely important to me and extremely helpful,” Hailey added.
