Jada Pinkett Smith shared that she just recently realized she suffers from anxiety, though it pre-dates the slap drama stemming from the 2022 Oscars.
The actress, 50, said she used to bite her fingernails and chew her cuticles, but didn’t connect her bad habits to anxiety until raising her daughter.
“I never identified it as anxiety,” her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, 68, noted during the most recent episode of “Red Table Talk,” which was presumably taped before Will Smith smacked Chris Rock during the ceremony.
Pinkett Smith explained that dealing with and learning about her daughter’s anxiety helped her realize she also has anxiety.
She said reevaluating her own behavior, the behavior of her mother and her life experiences made her realize, “Oh, well of course I probably have some anxiety.”
“Recently, we had a talk, and she was like, ‘I never knew that I actually experienced anxiety,'” Willow Smith, 21, said during the episode. “She was pushing it down for so many years, like she had no idea.”
The star shared that her conversations with her mother also allowed her to “forgive” her mother for downplaying her anxiety throughout her childhood.
“I had to forgive her a little bit for being like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah … I get it, but it’s really not that bad.'”
“It was rough,” Smith told guest Ireland Baldwin, 26. “I feel like when I was growing up, she didn’t understand my anxiety. Because she, growing up, had seen her friends die … she had been through so much stuff that my issues, to her, kind of felt like … [smaller].”
Smith said her anxiety would have her screaming, crying and shaking on the floor, which would “trigger” her mother.
Pinkett Smith said that she eventually came to evaluate her family and their behaviors and recognize a “cycle of generational anxiety.”