Actress Ashley Judd credits a treatment facility near Abilene with helping her overcome depression caused by “unresolved childhood grief” in 2006. Speaking to an annual fundraising luncheon for the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center, which assists abused children, Judd said she found herself at the Shades of Hope Treatment Center in Buffalo Gap, Texas, to visit her sister Wynonna, who’d checked in for a compulsive overeating disorder, during the facility’s “family week.”
Wynonna teamed with Naomi Judd, Ashley’s and Wynonna’s mother, to form the hit country-music duo The Judds in the 1980s. Ashley’s starred in movies including Double Jeopardy and Ruby in Paradise.
Wynonna “would say,’I think I need to go to cooking school,’ ” Ashley, 44, told 1,100 people at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel today, spurring laughter. “Isn’t that just like an addict?!” The actress said she had been the victim of child abuse–in her case, the abuse included abandonment and neglect—as well as rape. So when it came time for her to leave Shades of Hope, she recalled, “they did an intervention on me.” The facility’s founding owner told her, “No one ever thinks to do an intervention on the lost child.” After having been “so choked on my own pain and ashamed of my own shame …” Ashley said, the Texas treatment center “gave me a safe place to fall apart.”
