Maria Shriver Reveals She Sought Help at a Convent Amid Her Split From Arnold Schwarzenegger: I Was ‘Sobbing’
usmagazine.comFinding her voice. Maria Shriver recalled going to a convent to find the “freedom” to be herself following her split from Arnold Schwarzenegger.The I’ve Been Thinking author, 67, revealed on Monday, February 6, that growing up in the limelight as a Kennedy meant that a lot of feelings were buried.
That tendency to stay quiet, however, shifted once she left Schwarzenegger, 75, in 2011.“I think I started feeling like I had the freedom or the permission [to speak my truth] when my marriage ended,” Shriver told Hoda Kotb during her “Making Space” podcast. “At first, felt like, ‘Oh, I better go and figure out what is the truth.’ One of the things I did is [I] went to a convent, a cloistered convent.”The journalist explained that she visited the convent to “be in silence and look for advice” after her 25-year marriage came tumbling down.“The reverent mother there said to me at the very end, she said, ‘I think you came here looking for permission,’” Shriver recalled. “I felt like I was in a scene out of the Sound of Music.
She goes, ‘You can’t come live here … but you do have permission to go out and become Maria.’ I was sobbing. I was like, ‘Who is that?’”The former Dateline correspondent — who is the daughter of Eunice Kennedy and niece of John F.
Kennedy — confessed: “I had never given myself permission to feel, to be vulnerable, to be weak, to be brought to my knees.”Shriver noted that the “world did it to me” and caused her to change course. “Then I was like, ‘OK, God, let’s go.’ I’m gonna take this and learn everything I can about my role and what I need to learn,” she added. “So I gave myself permission to start learning.”In order to view the video, please allow Manage CookiesThe Just Who Will You Be?
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