Inside Out

People can only be as good as they are, no matter how much they love you.

We all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how we hold both.

What if everything hadn’t happened to me but had happened for me? What I learned is that how we hold our experiences is everything.

Things happen in life to get our attention, to make us wake up. What does it say that I had to lose so much before I had to break down enough to rebuild? I think it says that the thing that got me here—this incredible toughness—was almost the thing that did me in. I got to a place where I could no longer just muscle through; I could either bend, or break. I got here because I needed all of this to become who I am now. I had been holding on to so many misconceptions about myself all my life: that I wasn't valuable, that I didn't deserve to be anywhere good, whether that meant in a loving relationship on my own terms, or in a great film with actors I respected who knew what they were doing. The narrative I believed was that I was unworthy and contaminated. And it wasn't true. There are two reasons I wanted to tell this story, the story of how I learned to surrender. First, because it's mine. It doesn't belong to the tabloids, or my mom, or the men I've married, or the people who've loved or hated my movies, or even my children. My story is mine alone. I'm the only one who was there for all of it, and I decided to claim the power to tell it on my own terms. The second reason is that even though it's mine, maybe some part of this story is yours too. I've had extraordinary luck in this life, both bad and good. Putting it all down in writing makes me realize how crazy a lot of it has been, how improbable. But we all suffer and we all triumph and we all get to choose how we hold both.

I have since come to understand that there is no such thing as someone “loving you enough” to be better. People can only be as good as they are, no matter how much they love you.

I think we treat the people we love the way we believe, in our deepest hearts, that we deserve to be treated ourselves.

I belong. Here. In myself. In this house. On this planet. I'm in my mid-50s now, I've outlived both of my parents, I know that what I walked through was a lot, especially coming from where I came from. The truth is, the only way out is in.

think we treat the people we love the way we believe, in our deepest hearts, that we deserve to be treated ourselves.

Taking responsibility for your own reaction is the gateway to freedom

They divorce and years later the dad mellow as men tend to when they get older. You know the kind. They're assholes when their young then they get sweet when they age. It's the mother who seems bitter and unpleasant by comparison but, he's the one who made her

Unfortunately, even as we try to submerge our pain deep down inside, it finds a way to bubble up: Through addiction. Through anxiety. Through eating disorders. Through insomnia. Through all the different PTSD symptoms and self-destructive behaviors that assault survivors experience for years on end. These incidents may last minutes or hours, but their impact lasts a lifetime.

I know that sounds like the perfect life. But as I would soon find out, if you carry a well of shame and unresolved trauma inside of you, no amount of money, no measure of success or celebrity, can fill it.

I got here because I chose men with the same qualities as my dad and my granddad, and I turned myself inside out trying to please them.

Your mother and father are supposed to act as a kind of touchstone along the path to the future - offering insight on what to reach for, what to look forward to. For me, that picture was dismal.

From them, I learned that love was something you had to scramble to keep. It could be revoked at any minute, for reasons that you couldn’t understand, that you couldn’t control. The kind of love I grew up with was scary to need, and painful to feel. If I didn’t have that uneasy ache, that prickly anxiety around someone, how would I know it was love?

When you are afflicted with a disease, you can’t just decide not to have it, no matter how miserable it’s making you.

In Hollywood at that time - and, unfortunately, still - for some reason a man is worth almost double what a woman is.

I wish I’d been taught - by someone, somewhere - about my body, what was possible in a sexual relationship, how to consider my own desires instead of seeing sex as degrading or something I owed someone.

How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” It feels like you are an orphan.

When I hear about people who’ve had the same friends since kindergarten, I can’t imagine what that must be like.

But looking back, I see that what I was doing was patrolling for chaos

I yelled “No!” because I knew what would come next: the ambulance, then the paparazzi, then TMZ announcing, “Demi Moore, rushed to the hospital on drugs!” And all of that happened, just like I knew it would. But something else happened that I didn’t expect. I decided to sit still—after a life of running—and face myself. I’d done a lot in fifty years, but I don’t know that I’d really experienced a lot, because I spent most of that time not quite there, afraid to be in myself, convinced I didn’t deserve the good and frantically trying to fix the bad

Then I drove back to Carolyn’s house, where Ginny had stopped breathing in her hospital bed, and I took a few minutes alone with her, holding her hand. I didn’t cry then, and I didn’t cry when I went into the little bathroom off her room and closed the door. I had a rush of clarity as I stood absolutely still. All of the emotions that I felt toward Ginny—my anger, my pain, my hurt—were mine. The vessel for them was gone now. Whatever her issues were, and God knows there were plenty, she’d taken them with her. It was a liberating moment. I was flooded with compassion for the pain she had held all her life and had no way to work through or overcome. I felt sad for this wounded child who had never developed beyond the emotional level of a teenager. That understanding freed me to start to be more forgiving toward myself, and to quit working so hard not to be my mother.

I still remember the first time I saw steam billowing up from a manhole in Manhattan—it was like there was an underworld of fire just below the city’s surface, burning night and day.

What I admired most about A Few Good Men was the originality Aaron Sorkin and Rob Reiner showed by not having my character and Tom’s get involved in anything romantic, or even unprofessional. There was an expectation at that time on the part of studios and audiences that if an attractive woman showed up on film, it was only a matter of time before you saw her in bed with the leading man, or at least half naked. But Rob and Aaron had the nerve to buck that convention: they thought this story was about something else, and they were right. Years later Aaron told a film school class: “The whole idea of the movie was that these young lawyers were in way over their heads and two Marines were on trial for their lives, so if Tom Cruise and Demi Moore take time out to roll in the hay, I just didn’t think we would like them as much for doing that.” Sorkin said he wrote to an exec who had been lobbying hard for a sex scene. “I’ll never forget what the executive wrote back, which was, ‘Well if Tom and Demi aren’t going to sleep together why is Demi a woman?’ and that completely stumped me.” I loved that my character didn’t rely on her sex appeal, which was certainly something I hadn’t encountered very often in my roles. They presented a woman who was valuable to her colleagues—and to the story itself—because of her competence.

know that sounds like the perfect life. But as I would soon find out, if you carry a well of shame and unresolved trauma inside of you, no amount of money, no measure of success or celebrity, can fill it.

UNLIKE WHAT PEOPLE imagine about addicts—that you have one drink and everything comes crashing down—in my case it was a gradual downward spiral.