The actress said the feeling stems from going through 'a lot of stressful adult things at a young age.'
Jada Pinkett Smith says behind some seemingly strong women hides a "terrified little girl," and that's her.
The 50-year-old actress revealed as much in the latest episode of Red Table Talk with her co-hosts, Willow Smith and Adrienne "Gammy" Banfield-Norris. In the episode -- titled "How Destructive Mothers Damage Their Daughters: Could This Be You?" -- the three panelists are joined by Mother Hunger author Kelly McDaniel as they sort out mother-daughter issues, and it's during this conversation when Jada grows emotional after revealing that growing up fast and dealing with adversity so young is what has led her to feel like a "terrified little girl" is hiding underneath.
"So, I had to, like, deal with a lot of stressful adult things at a young age," Jada explained. "I didn't have the ability to deal with the emotions that were coming with it. I just had to buck up. And so, those women that you see and you think are so strong, there's this terrified little girl underneath. And that's me."
Jada appeared to choke back tears while Willow exclaimed, "Aww, Mommy. I mean, this is why we do the work," to which Jada replied, "It's part of the journey."
Jada didn't share details about the "stressful adult things" she encountered at a young age. But in a 2017 interview while on SiriusXM's "Sway in the Morning" show, Jada revealed she was a drug dealer when she met late rapper Tupac Shakur on the first day of high school at the Baltimore School for the Arts.
"One of the things that's very interesting that I've never really said before is that when I first met Pac, when we first met, I was a drug dealer," Jada said at the time. She later added that she left that life after "something very bad" happened, and she was hoping Tupac would follow suit.
"As I was coming out of the life, he was coming more into the life," she explained. "I was coming out, he was going in, there was a point at which we met and then we were kind of going our separate ways." Tupac was fatally gunned down in 1996 in Las Vegas.
In the same Red Table Talk episode, Jada revealed that the "biggest wound" that comes out most in her personal relationships is a lack of protection.
"My thing was, just, not having protection. That's my biggest wound that comes out in all my relationships," Jada said. "And I've looked for [the] craziest kind of protection, and I don't have a really good sense of what's safe and what's not."
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