NEWSAaron Rodgers Reveals How Fame and Religion Ruined Athlete's Relationship With His Estranged Family: 'It Always Hurt Me'
Aaron Rodgers' Netflix docuseries released on Tuesday, December 17.
Aaron Rodgers can attest — fame will either make you or break you.
The famed NFL star opened up about his estranged family dynamic and reflected on how he became the man he is today during his new Netflix docuseries, Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, which hit the streaming service on Tuesday, December 17.
Aaron Rodgers has been estranged from his family for the past decade.
Going back to the beginning, Aaron, who grew up "in a really conservative, small-town environment" in Chico, Calif., with his mom, Darla, dad, Ed, and brothers Luke and Jordan, explained: "I was very fortunate when I was a kid to have parents who believed I had a very low pain tolerance."
"There's some lessons that were hard to learn as a child, and you react or you adapt to whatever it is. I felt like there was many times where my parents felt like I was a little soft. And because of that, I made sure I was the toughest motherf----- that I knew," he continued.
Aaron Rodgers said fame and religious differences distanced himself from the rest of his family.
As he got older, the former Green Bay Packers star learned the "white, dogmatic church" he was raised in "didn’t really serve me."
"It was very rigid in structure. I'm not a rigid person. Shame, guilt, judgment — it was like, 'We have the truth, our way or the highway, our way is heaven, your way is h---.' Even talking to my parents, it was very black and white. Somebody has to be wrong, somebody has to be right. I just slowly uncoupled from that in high school," he admitted.
Aaron Rodgers won the Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers in 2011.
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His perspective changed ever further after transferring from Butte College to University of California, Berkeley, for football, as Aaron noted the new school "challenged my beliefs" and "definitely helped me to begin to question more things."
After entering the NFL in 2005 and later winning the Super Bowl in 2011, Aaron only grew further detached from his relatives.
"When I became real famous, family members said, 'Your life is too big. We need you to be smaller. Be smaller, like, don’t talk about your life,'" he confessed. "It always hurt me because I just feel like, you don’t see me."
The New York Jets quarterback mentioned: "This is not something I ever desired or wanted, other than playing on Sundays. It can definitely change the people around your circle, because it can be intoxicating, the fame and notoriety. So, definitely relationships changed after that. Friendships, family."
Aaron Rodgers is open to reconciling with his family members.
"And so as I found my voice to kind of question things, I also found doing things that, compared to what I grew up in, would be considered an alternative lifestyle," he added.
While Aaron has been completely estranged from his entire family for roughly the past decade, he isn't completely closed off from one day mending their relationships.
"People ask me, 'Is there hope for a reconciliation?'" he shared. "I say, 'Yeah, of course. Of course.'"
Plus, there are no hard feelings on his behalf, as Aaron concluded: "I don’t want them to fail, to struggle, to have any strife or issues. I don't wish any ill will on them at all. It's more like this: We're just different steps on the timeline of our own journeys."
