Jon Moxley knew he needed to attend rehab to get his alcohol addiction under control.
All Elite Wrestling‘s Jon Moxley recently sat down with Marc Raimondi of ESPN to talk about his issues with alcohol addiction and to get himself clean. Moxley revealed he knew something had to give after his wife Renee Paquette got pregnant with their first child.
Moxley did his best to try and describe what it feels like to be addicted to alcohol, calling it crushing physical anxiety.
“When it’s bad, it’s bad — you can’t do anything,” Jon Moxley said. “The best way I can describe it is crushing physical anxiety. It’s not like you have anything to be nervous about, but your hands are shaky and twitchy. It’s hard to put into words. But it’s f—ing horrible.”
At the time, Moxley felt that if he didn’t have to travel for work, he might have been able to get clean on his own, but having to travel and work prevented that all from happening.
“I started to resent having to go to work,” Jon Moxley said. “I was like, if I could just stay home and f—ing figure this out on my own — if I could lock myself in a room, I could figure this out. But I have to keep going back on the road, back on a f—ing plane. I couldn’t get out of it.”
Moxley didn’t want to tell anyone about what he was going through because he felt everyone was depending on him, and he just did his best to try and deal with it all on his own.
“I don’t want to tell anybody I’m going through this, because it’s kind of embarrassing,” Moxley said. “I got all these people counting on me for shows and pay-per-views and stuff. So I’m trying to deal with this just myself. Not put anybody else out or anything.”
Eventually, Moxley knew he had to get help because he was fighting a losing battle, knowing he couldn’t do it for another day. He compared it to fighting a professional boxer and just getting beat up every day, knowing that you’d get back in the ring and repeat the ordeal.
It was a long process for him at rehab, and he still had issues he needed to work through once the former AEW World Champion got back home, but Mox says he’ll take that over the way he was feeling prior to going to rehab.
“I’ll take this way over what I was going through before, especially the last several months [before rehab],” Moxley said. “I don’t know. It all blurs together. I was in a living hell — absolute hell. Some days I wake up and I feel good and I almost feel like I’m cheating. I don’t have to chug water or sit in a sauna or take a bunch of aspirin? I feel like I’ve got a cheat code. That’s still kind of like a novelty for me.”
All Elite Wrestling owner Tony Khan who significantly altered creative plans for Moxley to get the help he needed, expressed to ESPN how grateful he was to have him back and how important he is to him and his company.
You can read more from Mox, his wife Renee Paquette, and Eddie Kingston in the excellent piece from ESPN linked above.
READ MORE: Randy Couture Recalls Training With Jon Moxley: He’s Got A Real Deep Passion For What He’s Doing
What do you make of Jon Moxley’s comments? Are you thrilled to see the progress that he’s made in his life over the past several months? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
