"That's been there since I was six or seven" - Carly Pearce opens up on struggling with 'crippling' mental health condition

Carly Pearce is opening up about her struggles with mental health.

During her recent appearance on the Dumb Blonde podcast with Bunnie Xo, the country singer got candid about dealing with anxiety and OCD from an early age. Now 35 years old, she said on the Monday, August 25 episode:

“I would have told you, like, three years ago, my anxiety started during my divorce in COVID." She was referring to her split from Michael Ray, which lasted from 2019 to 2020. “But I've had crippling OCD since I was a child. So like checking my backpack over and over and over, checking my alarm over and over and over.”

In the years since then, however, therapy has helped the country singer realize that the two mental illnesses go back decades for her, and didn't originate in 2020, like she initially thought:

“That's been there since I was six or seven,” she said.

Carly Pearce expressed struggling with OCD as a child: Read more

During the episode, Carly Pearce also outlined needing to ensure that “everything” was packed in her bag. During storms, Pearce recalled how her mom would do her best to make her feel better:

"And my mom would just try to calm me down, or I would freak out over storms. I remember her taking me to the local library to meet a meteorologist to try to calm that. I’ve had anxiety my whole life.”

She said that she still has her struggles with OCD, but in 2020, when the pandemic hit, she realized it was time she worked on it.

“I think it just really came to a head of me wanting to do something about it in Covid,” Pearce recalled. “Being taken off the road, going through a public divorce, it was like, I think my body just had a visceral reaction of like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I can’t tell you how many interviews I sat through trying so hard to keep myself together. It’s been a journey for me. … I felt like I was trapped in my own body.”

The “Every Little Thing” Grammy-winning artist said that it was only recently that she learned she needed to take a step back from work to deal with her personal life:

“I got really conditioned over the last 10 years to just zip it up and deal with it, and it just kind of got to a place where a couple years ago I just had to really start back into therapy, start really, like, trying to figure out all of these different things,” Pearce said. “Like, recognizing OCD was something — no, that didn’t come in 2020, that’s been there since I was 6 or 7.”

When the host, Burnie, asked if there were triggers in her childhood that could have contributed to her mental illness, Carly Pearce referenced her mother's perfectionism. She asserted that her mother never put that pressure on her, before adding.

“I had a mom, and she's still like this to this day. She's the best, but she's a perfectionist,” she said. “I watched and led by example, so then I wanted to have everything perfect." She added, “So I learned. She never left the house without her makeup on. She was always just so put together that I think that perfectionism just became not not intent. She didn't mean to do that to me,” Carly Pearce said. “Wasn't like she was like, you have to be this way. But I watched and led by example. Yeah. So then I wanted to have everything perfect,” she continued.

Carly Pearce dropped her last album, Hummingbird, in June 2024.

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