Millie Mackintosh has spoken about anxiety, binge drinking, shame and rebuilding self-worth in a personal conversation with Roxie Nafousi on her podcast Rise with Roxie.
The Made in Chelsea star joins Roxie to reflect on years of numbing, people-pleasing and using alcohol to cope, explaining how her relationship with drink was shaped by early trauma, bullying and a lack of safety in her own body.
During the episode, Millie describes her time at school, recalling how insecurity and persistent bullying left lasting scars that fed into her need for validation and escape.
“I felt so insecure and got really picked on for how I looked,” she says, describing humiliating pranks that made her feel exposed and powerless at a formative age.
She also recalls being scouted as a teenage model, only for the experience to be weaponised by those bullying her, an incident she describes as devastating and deeply invalidating at the time.
The conversation includes a trigger warning, as Millie speaks openly about her experience of sexual assault and how it influenced her drinking.
“So, the first time I got like out of control drunk, like lost control I was sexually assaulted at a party,” she explains, sharing how she carried shame for years, believing the incident was her fault because she had been drinking.
Millie says she buried the experience, returned to boarding school without telling anyone, and slowly began using alcohol as a way of masking pain, insecurity and self-loathing that she did not yet understand.
She also discusses her use of prescription medication alongside alcohol, describing how mixing substances became increasingly dangerous over time.
“I’d be like really depressed and the anxiety would be out of control,” she says, explaining how using Xanax or Valium to manage hangovers allowed her to keep drinking, rather than stopping and addressing the problem.
Millie reflects on how easily addictions can transfer from one coping mechanism to another, and how shame made it harder to ask for help or speak honestly about what was happening.
That fear of judgement nearly stopped her from including this period of her life in her recent book Bad Drunk.
“I was so scared to talk about it. I nearly didn’t put it in the book because I was so scared of the judgment around it,” she says, adding that silence around these issues only makes them more dangerous.
She also opens up about hiding her substance use from her husband Hugo, admitting that while he was aware of her drinking, he did not know the extent of her prescription drug use.
When she stopped drinking, Millie says it forced difficult but necessary work on their relationship, acknowledging how alcohol had created repeated conflict, regret and emotional distance.
Throughout the episode, Millie is clear that sobriety did not fix everything, but learning to feel safe in her body and mind, and addressing the root causes of her behaviour, has been key to her healing.
