Ever since she entered Transitions drug and alcohol rehab center in Miami on October 15, Renee Graziano has been on the up and up. And now the Mob Wives star is opening up exclusively to RumorFix about her stint in rehab and what she is doing to stay clean.
The daughter of imprisoned mafia man Anthony “TG” Graziano tells RumorFix she sought treatment mainly for her addiction to Xanax which she had been taking to treat pain from her plastic surgery last year, but the prescription drug mostly served as a memory blocker for Renee, who reveals she’s had a very hard and painful past.
The reality star has been clean since leaving rehab early November and tells us, “I’ve been doing absolutely wonderful since my release from treatment. I’m very big with prayer. So I stay as close to God as possible. And I’m not going to say that it’s not a daily struggle because my addiction is more depression than it is drugs or alcohol. It’s never been alcohol at all. It was just medication from doctors. I did take it too far, I’m not going to lie, but what I do is I have a sponsor who is a dear friend of 15 years and [it helps] to talk about it out loud.”
“It was a very trying time for me, it was a great learning experience,” Graziano tells RumorFix, “It opened up my eyes much more and made me understand a little bit more of myself. I learned a lot, I truly learned a lot about me. [During treatment] I was able to speak a lot about what happened to me [about things] people do not know about.”
Renee not only enterted rehab to better herself, but also to better the lives of others, by allowing the Mob Wives cameras to document her time in treatment. The 43-year-old tells us she did this to help other people who are suffering, letting them know they’re not alone and to show that she herself is only human. “I’m really who I say I am. I’m really me, I’m not hiding. This is not something that I can hide, this is not something I want to hide. I want kids to know that they’re parents suffer. I want to help people. God is using me in any which way and every way to pay it forward.”
What was the most shocking thing the brave mother-of-one learned about herself while in rehab? She says, “That I’m actually not that bad, and I am pretty. I have very very low self esteem–which people would have never known that. And I happen to be loyal.”
