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EXCLUSIVE! Alison Canavan admits clients cancelled her work after revealing battle with alcoholism

The model revealed all in an interview on The Late Late Show

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Alison Canavan has admitted that the majority of her clients cancelled her work after she revealed her battle with alcoholism.

Speaking to Goss.ie about the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and how important it is for people to speak out, Alison revealed how she suffered after she spoke out about her mental health and addiction to alcohol last year.

“The problem is that the problem is so huge that when you speak up, you get shut down so quickly so it was like speaking up was never worth it. It’s kind of like mental health and me speaking out about alcoholism. You know, on the surface people are saying how much they support you.

“But last year when I spoke out about alcohol, every single client of mine, bar one, cancelled my work from September until Christmas,” she explained.

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“So I’ve experienced what it’s like in this country to speak up, you know, if you speak up, you’re going to pay the price. End of, that’s the way it is.

“And that’s why 24 years down the road, I will always stand up for what I believe in, because I’ve already suffered. I’ve been a single mother who’s been like ‘s**t, how am I going to afford Christmas?’ – and then you get up and you put on a brave face and you keep going.”

“For me, it’s all about personal experience. And for me, this opens up a massive, massive web of connection for me.

“You know what happened to me last year, big companies in Ireland saying ‘oh, we’ve just decided not to continue with the campaign’ or ‘we’re only going to have two speakers and not three for this event, but we’ll definitely keep you in mind for next year because we think what you do is great’, and I’m like… no you don’t.”

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“The same thing happened when I spoke out about my post-natal depression and that was before everybody and there mother was speaking out about depression.

“The same thing happened where people were saying to me ‘you’re making a big mistake, you’re damaging you’re career’. And did I damage my career? Yeah I think I did, yeah, but I knew that my direction was going in a different direction,” she told Goss.ie.

“When I spoke out last year, I received thousands of emails from people in Ireland whose drink was destroying their life everyday – and there not the people that we think of, they’re young mums at home with kids, who every time they try to say to their husband or their family that they had a problem they’d say ‘don’t be so ridiculous, Josie down the road is ten times worse than you’.

“Because it doesn’t seem like a problem until you’re on the ground, and losing your house, relationship, and everything else. I’ve kind of gone past the stage of the victim mentality.”

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Alison also revealed that former clients are starting to come back to her now, over a year after she revealed her battle with alcoholism.

“I do what I do because I want to help people change their own lives and know that you can change your own life and yes you’ll have to go through a painful period.

“People are coming back to me that were clients wanting to book me and we’re what, over a year down the road. Everybody stood back and said ‘let’s see who will touch her first’.

“The world is made up of leaders and followers, whatever way you want to look at it. And people don’t want to be attached to something that might make them look bad, so people didn’t want to really be attached to me when I spoke out about depression and addiction, because it might reflect on them.

“This is the same narrative that’s happening, whether it’s Harvey Weinstein, the modelling industry, the entertainment industry, any industry – if I speak up, will I be damaged?

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“It’s a bigger, bigger issue. We’re not just talking about Harvey Weinstein, we’re talking about a bigger problem. People are talking about men and women, but we’re really talking about humanity here on a larger scale.

“This comes down to our own personal responsibility, if you want to change the world – be kind to yourself and others. That’s something that none of us are very good at, you know, we’re all very good at pointing the fingers, talking about people, blaming people, shaming people… take a look at yourself.

“Nobody is perfect. That’s the only way things are going to change, is when everybody takes personal responsibility for how they act, and how they live in this world.

“When you see how people react to you, and funnily enough when I started speaking out about depression I felt such deep shame, and then when I spoke out last year, and I was a couple of years sober at that stage, and the shame again that I felt the week after the Late Late.”

“We’re living in a country where shame is so engrained in us, maybe it’s a hangover from the Catholic Church, who knows. The thing about it is that we keep saying that we’re getting on top of things in Ireland, but I’m not sure we really are.

“We’ve got to be careful about patting ourselves on the back for talking about stuff. Talking about stuff means jack s***, and unless we can embrace people and see them for who they are and accept them for who they are and talk about really uncomfortable things, that’s where we need to get to.

“I’m one of hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland who have had addiction issues, who have tried to hide their emotions by just trying to get out of themselves to avoid the world,” she added.

Watch #TheDailyGoss below:

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