Miley Cyrus is speaking up about the emotional labor it needed to repair her relationship with her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, after a lengthy period of family conflict.
On the June 10 edition of Monica Lewinsky’s Reclaiming podcast, the Grammy winner discussed a particularly difficult period in her family’s history, referring to it as their own “dark decade.”
“So, what did you call your decade? “Dark decade?” Miley asked Monica. “Yeah, we had one of those.”
The 32-year-old claimed that tensions amongst Cyrus family members had reached a stage where communication had entirely broken off.
“Half of us weren’t speaking to each other at one point,” she told me. “And we cleaned all that up.”
Miley, the sister of Brandi, Trace, Christopher, Braison, and Noah Cyrus, admitted that the tension had been building for years before it was made public.
She revealed how her mother, Tish Cyrus, divorced Billy Ray in 2022, highlighting how much remained unresolved in the family.
“In that situation, I watched what happens when you don’t clean things up as they’re happening,” Miley told me.
“They really stack, and then all of a sudden you think, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s been 10 years, and this is a disaster that I don’t even know where to begin. “This is emotional hoarding.”
Miley explained how she chose to take the first step in reconnecting with her father.
“And when we start bringing happiness and joy into each other’s lives, we’ll be in a better position to have these talks. Because I’d rather have things balanced first.
That endeavor includes personally rebuilding such communication channels early this year.
“We’re so messy, we didn’t even do any of that,” she quipped when asked about therapy. “Getting each other into a room to even go to counseling would have been a battle. So it was easy to just say, ‘White Flag.'”
“I always wanted my family to feel like I was the safe place that I always had the white flag when they came to talk to me,” according to her.
