Tish Cyrus spoke about two events that leveled her. One was her mom’s death. The other was divorcing Billy Ray Cyrus.

Sometimes one crisis can nearly level you. Maybe you never saw it coming. But having to weather two emotionally grueling situations close together was what happened to Tish Cyrus. She is the former wife of Billy Ray Cyrus and the mom of Miley Cyrus. When she appeared on The Squeeze podcast recently, she frankly discussed those ordeals and how deeply they affected her. “Two of the most probably tragic things in my life that happened, I did not, like, process or even stop to really think,” Cyrus shared with host Tay Lautner on January 14.

Cyrus’ Mom Died in 2020

Her mother, Loretta Finley, was 85 when she passed away five years ago. Cyrus said it was “during COVID” without specifying the cause of Finley’s death further. “I was very close to my mom, and my kids were really close to my mom.” Finley even lived with the Cyrus family while Miley Cyrus was making Hannah Montana for five years in the mid-2000s. “Once that was all over, we had got her a little house right beside ours. She was just a massive part of our lives,” Tish Cyrus explained.

Finley was an incredibly important part of their lives. She was especially dear to Miley. In fact, as Tish Cyrus noted, she and “Miley were very close. She’d go to the set with Miley and my kids just worshiped her … when she passed, not long after that, my marriage started falling apart.”

Then Came Her Split With Billy Ray Cyrus After Almost 30 Years Together

Tish and Billy Ray Cyrus were married for 28 years. Then she filed for divorce nearly four years ago. Coming on the heels of her mother’s death, it was almost too much for her to bear. To Lautner on the podcast, Cyrus said it was “freaking rough … it was the roughest thing I’ve ever gone through.”

She Tried “Self-Medicating” To Ease Her Anguish

Cyrus says she used weed to help her get through the challenges she faced. “I’ve been very open that I was a major weed smoker …I’ve always had a little bit of anxiety. I do think at that time, that was almost like medicine for me — because I’m a huge believer in plant medicine — and I think that I probably during the time I lost my mom and my marriage fell apart, that was like self-medicating in some ways, and I didn’t even realize that I was doing it for that reason.”

In the end, however, therapy was a really big help to her. Therapy gave Cyrus a chance to explore the dark places in her life. It almost sounds like she had a spiritual breakthrough or epiphany. “When I started therapy, and I really started talking about my life and moving out here and my kids in the business and what my life had been, they were like, ‘Wow.’”

She Moved on and Remarried

Tish Cyrus is in a particularly good place now. She got married to Dominic Purcell three years ago. But she has never forgotten the torment she endured from extreme, relentless anxiety. Cyrus observed, “I’m sure anyone that has experienced anxiety at that level, it is horrible. Absolutely horrible, and it lasted a long time. And I just now am really learning how to deal with it, and I’m so much better. Like, I was not functioning for that year — I was just trying to survive.”

She did survive and is now thriving. There is much for us to learn from her story.