RHOBH Taylor Armstrong gets an intervention from Kim and Kyle Richards about her drinking
On The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills last week Kim and Kyle Richards received a troubling call from a drunk Taylor Armstrong who was unaware that her daughter Kennedy was with Kyle. They assumed that Taylor didn’t remember that the nanny had dropped off Kennedy because she had been drinking too much, but Taylor revealed in a blog that it was because the nanny didn’t tell her about a change of plans.
Even so, Kim and Kyle were concerned about Taylor’s drinking habits, with recovering alcoholic Kim noting that she recognized some of Taylor’s behavior as her own former behaviors. The sisters had a moving moment where Kyle expressed doubts about actually confronting Taylor about it because she felt all the times she had confronted Kim in the past had done no good. Kim explained that she had heard what Kyle had been trying to tell her, even though she didn’t always acknowledge it or work to change her habits. “When you’ve come to me, I have listened,” Kim explained. Kyle replied, “But you didn’t admit it,” to which Kim countered “It didn’t mean I didn’t hear you.”
Taking that into consideration, the sisters decided to have an intervention of sorts for Taylor, and Taylor actually took it very well. She didn’t get defensive, and seemed grateful that the two of them cared enough about her to let her know when they were concerned.
She explained in interview that she doesn’t drink often, but when she does she “can forget a little bit about all the stress I’m under, and all the pain I’m feeling.” She opens up to Kim about how rough her year has been (including, among other things, losing her husband Russell to suicide, and settling a major lawsuit he was entangled in before he died,) “If two drinks help you forget, then four you start to feel a helluva lot better for a little while. And then the next day I wake up and I’m in the darkest place I could be in.” Kim then lovingly tells her “I know,” as she rushes to huge Taylor.
“When you respond to alcohol the way I did, and the way she does, one day’s too many. So, she just can’t do that,” Kim explains. She also tells Taylor “Alcohol just seems so easy. It’s just so easy, and makes things so much better for the immediate moment. It started to affect me to the point where I was embarrassing myself and my children, and I see that in you.”
Later, during their trip to Paris (read more about that here,) Kim appears to be struggling with her sobriety once again. When the girls greeted her in Paris, Lisa Vanderpump noted that she didn’t appear completely lucid.
Kim had recently been given some pain medication to take home after her nose job (click here to see,) but she insisted to her sister Kyle that she had not been taking it. On camera some of the ladies speculated that it was perhaps too early in Kim’s sobriety to undergo an unnecessary surgical procedure because the pain management medications can be triggering. Even if she did fall off the wagon, what matters most is jumping back into sobriety after a mishap.
This episode was extremely powerful, and it’s great for a Real Housewives cast to openly confront issues with alcohol, which affects so many people. By being open about these struggles, hopefully they’ll help some viewers at hom.
Watch what went down here:
