Jennie Garth is opening up about her 2013 divorce from Peter Facinelli, and the pain she felt after her marriage fell apart.
In her new memoir I Choose Me: Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose, and Embracing Reinvention, the actress, 54, writes about the actor telling her he wanted to leave after 17 years and three children together, and the humiliation she felt when a therapist asked her, “Why do you want to stay married to someone who doesn’t love you anymore?”
“I spent a good amount of years being angry, hurt, sad, just tormented by it, and it eked out into all aspects of my life,” Garth tells PEOPLE, in this week’s cover story.
“And I noticed my light really dimming. I noticed I wasn’t putting off good vibes. And I could see it in the mirror. I could look at the negative impact that that kind of grief and anger was having on me.”
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She says she eventually realized the only way out of the pain was to forgive and move forward.
“I don’t know, there was a weird switch where one day I just said, ‘I don’t want to carry this anymore. I have done this for long enough. It’s impacting my relationships with other people. It’s impacting how I feel about myself. I’ve got to let it go. I’ve got to forgive him.'”
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“And then I did. And it was the most freeing thing in the world,” she continues. “I’m sure it’s hard to hear as a woman going through [divorce], or really in the belly of the beast to hear me say it’s like a switch that you have to flip, but it is.”
She says forgiveness is all about self-preservation and choosing happiness over resentment, no matter how much you feel you’ve been wronged.
“It has nothing to do with the other person. It has everything to do with you preserving yourself, your life and wanting to move forward and wanting to be happy. Because you can never be happy when you’re holding onto that fear, that attachment to the anger and the resentment. It’s just self-sabotage.”
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Garth and Facinelli have since become close friends who co-parent harmoniously. She’s been married to actor Dave Abrams for 10 years, and is living a happily sober lifestyle, while leaning in to her “I Choose Me” movement, which includes a podcast of the same name.
“I didn’t see the happy ending coming, honestly,” she says of where she’s at now, compared to 15 years ago.
“It’s weird. My whole life has been things just coming at me: fame, responsibilities, children, marriage, divorce, marriage, divorce. I’ve just been swimming and trying to keep up and really doing the best I could do without any training,” she muses. “We don’t get an instruction for life. We don’t know how to do it. We’re making it up as we go.”
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As for any advice she’d give her younger self?
“I would tell the younger Jennie to buckle up, hold on. It’s going to be a wild ride you never saw coming. It’s going to be tricky. And I would tell her to be kinder to herself. I’ve been really hard on myself. I would tell her that it’s okay to trust people, and to truly let herself love herself.”
Jennie Garth’s new memoir I Choose Me: Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose, and Embracing Reinvention, will hit shelves on April 14 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.