Soap Alum Jacob Young Reveals Secret 7-Year Opioid Addiction: ‘Even My Wife Didn’t Know’

Daytime Emmy-winner Jacob Young, who is well known to soap fans for his work as Rick Forrester on The Bold and the Beautiful, Lucky Spencer on General Hospital and JR Chandler on All My Children, appeared as a guest on the Imperfectly Perfect podcast and opened up about the childhood trauma and substance abuse that ultimately led to a secret, seven-year battle with opioid addiction.

Slippery Slope

A teenage Young burst onto the soap scene in 1997, when he was cast on B&B, but had already endured a turbulent upbringing marked by instability and hardship. Raised in a divorced family and splitting his time between households in different states, Young grew up in poverty, recalling times when his family was “literally starving.”

His father remarried, and his stepmother “quickly became like a second mom.” But when Young was 16 years old, his stepmother died by suicide. The loss, he said, led Young to “a whole new understanding of who I was, why life exists, how things can seconds suddenly change in a second … I was going through stuff that I didn’t realize that I was ever going to go through.”

Within two years, Young had landed his plum contract role on B&B, earning his first Daytime Emmy nomination six months later. At the time, his experience with substances was limited to recreational marijuana use. “I started smoking weed when I was like 14 years old,” the actor explained. “And I think that was one of the ways I was coping, right? You know, I’d hang out with my friends, we’d go camp, chill by a river, fish… we’d smoke our weed and hang out.”

After he left B&B, Young joined the GH ranks as Lucky, the role that netted him his 2002 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Younger Actor. Then, in 2003, he made the move to AMC, which required him to relocate to the East Coast — and that’s when his dependency on alcohol began to bloom. “I wasn’t even interested in alcohol until I got into my later mid-20s,” Young shared. “But as I got older and I was living in New York City … I was working on All My Children at the time and you know, you have everything within three square blocks for the most part, right? And it became very easy because I wasn’t driving, right? I was always taking a taxi or public transportation, and so [I] started getting into really drinking a lot more excessively.”

Young acknowledged that drinking became a coping mechanism for him. “I don’t think I realized the trauma that I had been through,” he mused, recalling, “I was drinking a beer or two, or three, four  [and] that started becoming a habit to help ease the anxiety, all untreated from earlier years of my life. So I started leaning heavily on alcohol.”

Harder drugs soon entered the picture. In his mid-20s, he started experimenting with cocaine and Molly. “I was a single guy, I was making a ton of money in New York, but I wanted to find those people [to party with], but I didn’t know why, you know? Because I was going basically undiagnosed. I was dealing with resentment, depression, old wounds that were still bleeding inside of me. And those [the drugs] seemed to just knock all that out.”

Young was still in party mode when he met his future wife, Christen Steward, but gave up marijuana and cocaine when their relationship got serious and they moved out of New York City and into a house together, ultimately marrying and welcoming three children (son Luke, born in 2008, daughter Molly, born in 2013, and daughter Grace, born in 2016). “And then I had some dental surgery done,” Young shared. “And I ended up getting a prescription for Vicodin.”

The Fight of His Life

“This is something I’ve never been completely open about,” acknowledged Young as he detailed how he became addicted to the prescription pills. “I started getting hooked on opioids and I went through seven years of my life wasted on opioids.” He described “just needing to numb, and to just sit and just feel normal, I don’t know. It’s the one thing that made me feel normal.”

During that period, Young continued to work. “I always showed up, I always did my lines,” he said. “I was always well-studied. It never affected my work.” However, he admitted, “I was living a lie. I was living an absolute lie; there was no two ways about it. And I would show up, you know, you know, pretending that I’m completely normal, that everything is fine in my life, and then go home [and] realize that I just completely lied to everyone that entire day.”

Young hid his dependency until he reached a breaking point. “Nobody knew. Even my wife didn’t know.” Then, Young continued, “I finally broke down and told her the truth. I was like, ‘Look, I’m addicted. And I can’t get off this because I don’t want to get sick, but I need help.”

From there, the actor said, he went into counseling (“I wanted to get to the root of ‘Why? Why am I needing to do this?'”) and with the help of doctors, went about “working my way out of it…. That was a journey, to get off of that. That was really tough.”

These days, Young is committed not only to his sobriety but to sharing his story openly. “I’m not afraid to talk about it,” he declared. “We are all going though something in our lives, you know? Whether it’s raising children, trying to navigate that, whether it’s just trying to raise yourself and figure out, you know, ‘Where am I in my headspace today?'”