Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters discusses personal struggles amid infidelity scandal

In a recent interview, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters talked candidly about his previous adultery controversy, as per theprp. The band took a long break after he revealed his affair in September 2024 and acknowledged fathering a child outside of his marriage. Grohl stated that he sought medical attention following the event in an interview with The Guardian.

I’ve been in therapy six days a week for 70 weeks. I did the math the other day: over 430 sessions.

Grohl’s treatment endeavors addressed various issues in addition to the infidelity. In addition to certain mentally harmful practices, he also needs to deal with the different traumas he has just encountered. Among these were the deaths of Grohl’s mother Virginia in August 2022 and drummer/vocalist Taylor Hawkins in March of the same year.

I have to be perfectly honest. Writing songs and writing lyrics about these things is sometimes enough. As far as having a deeper, longer conversation about them, I still do reserve a lot of this for my own personal life, as impersonal and public as it may seem. But I think that for many reasons, I wound up in a place that I needed to stop and sit with myself and re-evaluate myself. It’s an ongoing process.

He presented this as an explanation of his outlook on life following his public admission of infidelity.

I had to turn everything off, one of those things being my concern for what other people think. Being able to shut off that part of yourself can be sometimes a very healthy exercise in considering life within your immediate radius. Not giving all of that so much currency within yourself that it can completely destroy yourself.

What did he discover about himself?

There were years where I was so overly ambitious with things, like a documentary series on HBO, writing a book, whatever. I think having grown up in suburban Virginia with a public-school teacher as a mother, any opportunity you got, you would take. But over time, you spread yourself so thin. And so I look back and I’m like, God, what was I trying to prove? There is such a thing as addiction to achievement, and it’s dangerous. You’ll set a goal for yourself and you put everything you have into it; the world disappears.

Then you achieve that finish line, and it feels good for 24 fucking hours, and that feeling immediately goes away. And there’s that hole again, there’s that emptiness, and you’re like, shit, I need to fill it up with something else.

He gave this response when asked if his perspective caused him to cheat on his wife.

No. I think that’s how I ended up overextending myself and getting lost. I wasn’t sitting with myself and really letting [feelings] go from my head into my heart. Getting to the point where I was just like, I need to stop, turn everything off and find my heart.

Bassist Nate Mendel, Grohl’s bandmate, stated in this interview that the band’s response to the adultery scandal was to help Grohl and his wife get through it.

We just all wanted to run and give him a big hug and let him know — both of them — that we are here.

Chris Shiflett also said:

When Dave called me that morning. I just thought: take all the time you need. And then my house burned down a few months after that [in the California wildfires.] So having an extensive break wound up being necessary for me.