Aaron Rodgers’ estrangement from his family has been the stuff of media chatter for years now. Members of his family have given their side of the story through the years, like when his brother Jordan opened up about the rift on The Bachelorette, calling Rodgers’ estrangement “just how he’s chosen to do life.”
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However, we’ve never heard Rodgers himself tell his side of things. Until now. This year has been a year of revelations from the QB, first from Ian O’Connor’s book ‘Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers’ and then his Netflix documentary series Enigma. In his documentary, the quarterback hinted that his relationship with his family deteriorated when he rose to fame.
“When I became real famous, family members said, ‘Your life is too big. We need you to be smaller. Be smaller, like, don’t talk about your life.’”
“Fame can change things,” Rodgers’ dad Ed had once said in relation to the Packers star QB at the time. Rodgers admitted that he felt hurt by his family’s rejection of his fame, and made him feel like he wasn’t “seen”:
“It always hurt me because I just feel like, you don’t see me. And so as I found my voice to kind of question things, I also found doing things that, compared to what I grew up in, would be considered an alternative lifestyle.”
Ed and Darla, Aaron Rodgers’ parents, are devout Christians and presumably what he means by “what I grew up in” is surrounded by religion. And everyone is well aware of his “alternative lifestyle,” i.e. his love affair with Ayahuasca and “plant-based medicine.”
He detailed having to “reparent” himself so he could “learn how to love myself better.” While talking about his efforts to “reparent” himself as an adult, Rodgers says he “felt like the love that I was modeled growing up, it’s kind of a merit-based spirituality.”
Rodgers opened up about the dysfunction in his family life, revealing that it began during his high school years when he began to feel a detachment due to his parents’ strict Christian beliefs.
The Jets QB has previously spoken publicly about religion, which didn’t sit well with his family. In 2020, Aaron told then-girlfriend Danica Patrick on her “Pretty Intense” podcast,
“I don’t know how you can believe in a God who wants to condemn most of the planet to a fiery hell. What type of loving, sensitive, omnipresent, omnipotent being wants to condemn his beautiful creation to a fiery hell at the end of all this?”
His parents were reportedly “dismayed” by these comments.
Rodgers claims to have worked a lot on himself to have reached a point of self-love and self-acceptance. He is now in a new relationship and is enjoying that “good feeling” of being in love.
