Return to Amish’s Sabrina Burkholder Reveals Past Sexual Abuse Led to Addiction: ‘Drugs Made Me Feel Safe’

Healing old wounds. Return to Amish star Sabrina Burkholder opened up about dealing with past sexual abuse and how it helped her drug addiction.

“Many of you have asked me for advice on how to get clean and sober,” Sabrina, 36, shared via Instagram on Wednesday, April 19. “The number one thing I would recommend is to heal your childhood trauma.”

She went on to say that she was sexually abused as a child, adding that she “never healed or learned how to cope with being an adult.”

“Drugs made me feel safe and it was a coping mechanism in order to deal with all the unresolved trauma and pain inside of me. It was absolutely not okay to deal with it in the way that I did, and I ended up hurting so many people and I regret that so much,” she continued. “It is so important to be honest with yourself and recognize that you are the only one who can change your life, no one else can do it for you.”

The Breaking Amish alum – who entered rehab after a near-fatal heroin overdose in 2018 – said, “You can either let the past define you for the rest of your life or you can look towards the future and focus on that instead.”

Sabrina previously revealed that surviving that overdose was a “miracle,” saying that it “forced [her] to look at the s–ty person [she’d] allowed [herself] to become.”

“I was almost a year clean from heroin. For whatever reason that day, I was in a mood. We all were,” the reality star shared in a lengthy Facebook post in August 2018, two months after the scary incident. “I remember feeling very weird and that was my last [conscious] thought. Half an hour later I woke up surrounded by paramedics. … I was suddenly hit with memories of what happened when I was dead. Yes, dead.”

The Pennsylvania native turned her life around and shocked fans when she announced the birth of her sixth child in February. 

“Baby boy Aro Reno, born 2/23/23,” the TLC personality shared via her Instagram on February 26. 

In addition to Aro, whom she shares with boyfriend Scottie, Sabrina is also mother to son Zekiah and daughters Skylar and Kalani, whom she shares with ex-boyfriend Jethro Nolt, as well as daughters Oakley and Arianna, who are in the custody of a family member.