Kristen Bell is celebrating Dax Shepard’s 21-year sobriety journey by sharing some sweet photos of the actor with their kids.
Bell, 45, posted a touching message to her husband of nearly 12 years via Instagram on Thursday, September 4, thanking him for “getting sober.”
“This is what 21 years of sobriety looks like,” she captioned a carousel of photos of Shepard embracing their daughters, Lincoln, 12, and Delta, 10. “Lots of hugging. Hugging everyone and everything. Hugging life. Thank you for getting sober, @daxshepard. I am eternally grateful to have you. We all are 
.”
In the photos, Shepard, 50, can be seen hugging his kids and kissing Bell, who he has been in a relationship with since 2007.
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Shepard reacted to the post with a cheeky message in the comments section: “Well this is a low blow. Even for you. Makin’ a guy cry when he can’t turn to booze?!?!”
Friends and fellow celebrities alike also shared love for the actor by posting congratulatory notes and messages of support.
“That’s the stuff… the good stuff, the best stuff,” Walton Goggins shared, with Cheyenne Jackson adding, “Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”
Shepard has been candid about his journey to sobriety after struggling with alcohol and drug addiction for years. Although he’s been sober since September 2004, Shepard did reveal on the September 25, 2020, episode of his podcast, “Armchair Expert,” that he had relapsed by taking painkillers while recovering from an accident. He shared that he was seven days sober at the time of recording.
“The last thing I wanted to do was go in public, seven days after the collapse of everything, and share that with people. But it would have felt so dishonest,” Shepard told Jesse Tyler Ferguson of his decision to share his relapse on the “Dinner’s On Me” podcast in 2024. “The bond and the agreement you have with the audience would have just felt like a huge violation of all these people who had been listening for years and maybe looking to me as a role model.”
Shepard also shared that he was worried about how the reveal would affect Bell.
“I don’t want her to have to f—ing spend half of every interview, ‘What’s it like being married to an addict?’ Like, it just doesn’t feel fair to her,” Shepard said.
Ultimately, however, he decided to be honest about his experience after Bradley Cooper, a friend of Shepard’s who is also sober, encouraged him to do so.
“He said, ‘Well, let me tell you this. There’s nothing helpful about a guy that’s 16 years sober, and married to Kristen Bell, and is rich. What’s helpful to somebody is someone who just ate s— and gets back up,’” Shepard said of Cooper, 50.
“And I was like, ‘Wow.’ So, if I’m sincere about what I like about it, [which] is that I’m being helpful, then I really have only a single option,” added Shepard, joking to Ferguson, 49, “So, f— it, I’ll give him credit. He earned it. And he’s so sexy, too. It’d be easier if he wasn’t so sexy.”
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Cooper has shared his support of Shepard over the years, and has appeared on “Armchair Expert” to discuss his own sobriety.
“When I started to do this work of reevaluating the foundation of my life and trying to look at it with a more critical eye on honesty and reflecting on true memory, I found that the benefit is I’m much more present in my life,” Cooper told Shepard in 2024. “I don’t need the things I thought I needed to fill up whatever hole I had. And all of a sudden, I’m willing to be more expressive, creative, present, giving, boundaried.”
