Pooja Bhatt has never shied away from speaking honestly about addiction, emotional pain and her journey towards healing. Having grown up witnessing her father Mahesh Bhatt’s battle with alcoholism, the actor-filmmaker once believed she understood the damage alcohol could cause. However, years later, during a difficult phase in her own life, she found herself struggling with the same problem.Pooja opened up about the period when her marriage to Manish Makhija was falling apart and how alcohol slowly became an emotional escape for her. “I used alcohol as a crutch at that point,” she admitted in an interview with Vickey Lalwani, adding that she “drank very heavily at that time.”Reflecting on that emotionally turbulent phase, Pooja said, “I was at a low ebb of life because when marriages fall apart, and a relationship of 11 years falls apart, it’s like a death. I didn’t give myself the time to mourn it. I just said I am okay and people were happy with me saying I am okay.” Before her marriage troubles, Pooja described herself as someone who drank socially. But between 2014, when she realised her relationship was unravelling, and the eventual separation, her dependence on alcohol intensified.“I used to be a social drinker before that, but that phase between 2014, when I knew my marriage was unravelling, to me ending it, those two years, I drank a lot because I was trying to put out the fire with gasoline. Alcohol makes you more aggressive; it doesn’t calm you down. It is not a painkiller,” she shared. The turning point came in December 2016 after a deeply personal message from her father. Around Christmas, while exchanging messages filled with affection, Mahesh Bhatt told her, “If you love me, then learn to love yourself because I live in you.”Pooja revealed that those words transformed her life completely. “It’s been 10 years, I haven’t had a drop of alcohol. I started loving myself 10 years ago, and that love story still continues and it’s going very well. I am very content,” she said.While Mahesh Bhatt fully supported her decision to quit alcohol, Pooja admitted that many people around her in the industry reacted differently. “When I gave up alcohol, some of my friends, my own inner circle… They said, ‘She won’t be able to do it.’ When they saw me continue, they said, ‘Yaar, have one drink for me. It’s my birthday, have one drink, it’s my anniversary, have one drink. You have become boring after you quit alcohol’,” she recalled.She also shared an incident that stayed with her years into sobriety. When she once called a local liquor shop to order wine for someone else, the man on the other end sounded nervous. “There was fear in that guy’s voice saying that I heard you have quit. I said yes, I have quit. He said I thought you have called so…”That interaction made her realise how empathy sometimes came from strangers rather than people close to her. “A stranger, whose business is selling alcohol, had more empathy than certain people in my own circle. The industry was very judgmental. The world was not,” she said.Long before confronting her own addiction, Pooja had also experienced the damaging impact of alcoholism through a past relationship. Speaking to Rohit Roy on his show Inside Bollywood, she had earlier revealed that she endured domestic abuse because of a partner’s addiction issues.“I was involved in a disastrous relationship with an alcoholic. Pooja Bhatt, who looks like a strong woman, was a victim of domestic abuse because of alcohol,” she had shared.Pooja has remained vocal about her sobriety ever since choosing to quit drinking on Christmas Eve in 2016. In an earlier interview with Mumbai Mirror in 2017, she reflected on inheriting an intense personality from her father. “I was born to a man who has never done anything in half measures and I inherited that. So when I drank, I drank copiously. Your appetite increases even as the alcohol does terrible things to your body, clutters your mind and colours your judgement of the people you’re hanging out with,” she had said.Over the years, Pooja Bhatt has continued to celebrate every milestone in her sobriety journey, often speaking openly about self-love, healing and choosing peace over self-destruction.
