Katy Perry took emotionally vulnerability to another level this weekend with a live therapy session where she held nothing back.
Perry opened up about her personal experience with suicidal thoughts and depression live with Siri Sat Nam Singh, a licensed therapist featured in Viceland’s “The Therapist,” E! News reported.
The segment was aired as part of Perry’s Witness World Wide livestream as promotion for her latest album, “Witness.” The pop star has been living in a house full of cameras since Friday. Along with the therapy session, it’s featured celebrity guests, dance parties, yoga sessions, meetings, and more.
Perry, who has been in therapy for five years, told Singh about the suicidal thoughts that inspired her to write the song “By The Grace of God” from her 2013 album “Prism.”
She added that she didn’t feel like she could talk about her struggles.
"I feel ashamed that I would have those thoughts, feel that low and that depressed," Perry said in the video.
She also told Today that she’s struggled with these thoughts more than once.
"It's not just been a one time that I've felt really low,” she said.
During the livestream, the singer also talked about how her "rigid" childhood within her highly religious family didn’t allow her to question things or explore the world in the way that she would’ve liked, but becoming a performer allowed her to grow beyond that.
She also talked about her relationship with her family and how they learned to understand each other despite their disagreements and different viewpoints and see each other with compassion and honesty through therapy.
"You can be right or you can be loved," she added. "I just want to be loved."
"You can be right or you can be loved. I just want to be loved."
Often breaking down into tears, Perry also worked through her complicated relationship with herself and the dichotomy that exists between her public persona Katy Perry and her private, authentic self Katheryn Hudson.
"I'm a bit more nerdy than everybody thinks I am," Perry admitted. "I'm a big goofball. The fantasy of Katheryn went into Katy and made this bigger-than-life personality."
She also told Today that putting on a persona helped her feel like a more important person.
"For a long time I didn't feel like old Katheryn Hudson from Santa Barbara was anything special," she told Today. "You know, I didn't feel like I was enough, so I had to kind of create this character of myself."
She talked to Singh about how she’d been trying to separate herself a little from the Katy Perry personality and let more of herself out, even though her new hair and other experimental moves often drew criticism on social media.
“People talk about my hair, right, and they don't like it, or they wish that it was longer," Perry said. "I so badly want to be Katheryn Hudson that I don't even want to look like Katy Perry anymore sometimes, and that is a little bit of why I cut my hair."
Singh helped the 32-year-old singer reconcile the two personas, and embrace the fact that they could coexist within her.
In 2013, Perry had drawn an angel card (a Tarot-like deck that "guides the recipient toward their best life") with the word "authenticity" written on it.
She culminated this session by drawing another, "freedom," and broke down a final time as Singh encouraged her to let it all out, and give herself the freedom to be whoever she wanted to be.
Perry has also been opening herself up in other ways. She recently extended an olive branch to Taylor Swift to end their well-documented feud, and sat down with activist DeRay McKesson to talk about cultural appropriation and how she was continuously evolving and learning from her mistakes.
Witness World Wide wraps up today with a concert for 1,000 of Perry’s fans.
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