It is no secret Aaron Rodgers and his family aren’t on good terms … but now the Jets signal caller is delving deeper into some of those issues, saying the rift between his folks was so bad, he had to “re-parent” himself.
The 41-year-old 4x NFL MVP QB opened up on the subject in his new three-part Netflix docuseries “Aaron Rodgers: Enigma,” one of the only times he’s publicly addressed the topic.
“At times when you have some dysfunction or some separation in your family life, you have to kind of re-parent yourself and give yourself what you didn’t get or wanted to hear more of when you were a kid, and I think for me, I just wanted to hear, ‘I’m proud of you,’” Rodgers said during the second episode of the series.
Aaron continued … “I had to find a way to be my own parent in those moments and say, ‘Hey, f*** being perfect. I’m proud of who you are and what you’ve accomplished on and off the field.’ And forgiveness for all the mistakes, because I was just trying to do the best I could and a lot of times it wasn’t good enough.”
While most fans learned about the family drama years later, AR says it started for him much earlier … he just chose not to publicly air their dirty laundry.
“It wasn’t like I was super-duper close with everybody in the family,” he says. “In actuality, it goes back to stuff from high school that made me feel distant. Stuff from college, stuff post-college. And I was quiet about it. Because I thought the best way to do it, was just, don’t talk about it publicly. And what do they do?”
Of course, Aaron’s referencing his younger brother Jordan‘s appearance on “The Bachelorette” in 2016 … where during hometown visits, there was a place setting for Aaron at the dinner table, highlighting the broken down relationship between the signal caller and his fam.
“They go on a bull**** show and leave two empty chairs,” AR says.
“They all agree that this was a good thing to do, to leave two empty chairs on a stupid dating show that my brother just went on to get famous?”
Rodgers also gets into the religious beliefs of his family, saying “he grew up in a very white, dogmatic church, and that just didn’t really serve me. It was very rigid in structure.”
Fast forwarding to today … Aaron credits “plant medicine” for helping him heal.
The Rogers family, including his mom and dad, has not yet commented on the Netflix doc.