Jamie Lee Curtis Says There Is 'Always Hope' When It Comes to Overcoming Addiction

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Jamie Lee Curtis has been open about her own struggles with opioid addiction and complicated family legacy of addictive behaviors. Now she's provided the foreword to a new book about how to achieve not only sobriety, but a deeper connection to one's self and soul.

"Many of us need guides to help clear away the noise and shrapnel of our ancestral imprints and access that beautiful centerpoint that is our central self," says Jamie Lee Curtis in her foreword to Soulbriety, a new book published December 6 by Elisa Hallerman. In the book, Hallerman, a former agent in the entertainment industry, describes realizing on the fifth anniversary of getting sober that her work wasn't done.

"I was sober for five or six years at that point," she says. "I was successful and had all of these external things that I believed would make me happy. [But] I was feeling a lack of purpose and I was not happy. And I was forced to really look at that and go deeper."

That meant leaving her career to attend graduate school, where she studied depth psychology as a way to help others deal with addiction.

"No one wakes up and wants to be a drug addict or an alcoholic," says Hallerman. "No one strives for that, yet some people manifest the disease and others don't."

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Addiction, she adds, is a symptom. "Something isn't right. We feel a lack of meaning and purpose. We feel suffering, we feel pain, we feel anxious or depressed," she says. "And if we don't look at what lies underneath, if we don't really take time to look at that, I believe that is what goes on to cause chronic relapsing because we haven't really gotten to the root."

Listen to a clip from the audiobook below.

Powered by what Curtis describes as Hallerman's "unflinching and raw storytelling" and "deep seeking and learning," the book seeks to take an integrative approach to addiction and healing from the underlying trauma that often leads to it.

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In her foreword, Curtis describes hearing the title of Hallerman's book and immediately starting to cry. Hallerman, too, recalled the moment: "Jamie has been a dear dear friend of mine for many years, and when I told her that I was writing a book, she asked me the title. And when I told her the title was Soulbriety, she had a really visceral emotional reaction and said right away before she had ever read a word, 'I want to be involved, I want to help.' And then after she read the book, she offered to write the foreword because she's one of the most amazing people I know."

Says Curtis, "In the end, it's all about our soul. The overall message is that we are enough."