TikToker Chris Olsen Details Intense, Yearlong Rehab Stay That Changed His Life

Chris Olsen will stick with the coffee.

For five years, the TikToker has been sober from alcohol. But his experience getting to that milestone was far from easy.

“Yes I went to rehab for an entire year in 2017,” Chris said in a Dec. 27 TikTok video. “This was a hard rehab. This was a mean rehab. This wasn’t like a, ‘We’re going to love you until you love yourself’ rehab. This was a, ‘You f–ked up everything and it’s your job to fix it now’ rehab.”

Case in point? “If you threatened to leave at any point you were forced to carry around your packed bags with you everywhere you went for at least two weeks,” he explained. “And if you didn’t clean your apartment well enough, like if your floorboards weren’t spotless, you were locked out of your apartment for the rest of the day. It doesn’t matter if your food is in there. You have to figure out somewhere else to get food. Not that we had any money. You just had to, like, beg other people who weren’t locked out of their apartments to give you food.”

Chris Olsen – 2022 People’s Choice Awards E! Glambot

And when it came to sharing with other patients Chris said everyone had to be honest.

“Your first exercise when you arrive at that rehab is to tell the group you’re in the 10 most shameful secrets that you have,” the 25-year-old continued. “And if you weren’t sobbing on the floor by no. 10 you had to do the exercise again until you were because you weren’t taking the exercise seriously enough.”

Indeed, as he said, the facility took matters seriously. “One time someone smuggled a phone in and texted someone on the outside that they were going to leave,” Chris recalled, “and the next day we walked into group and her texts were printed and put up all around the walls. So she had to look at what she had done for the next, like, two weeks.”

It was for his benefit, though. “It was all about accountability,” he shared, “and maybe unsurprisingly had, like, the highest sobriety success rate in the country. One of, I don’t know if that’s real. That’s just what we heard.”

Story continues

This isn’t the first time the TikToker has detailed his sobriety journey as he celebrated five years sober in September.

In a video, set to AJR’s song “World’s Smallest Violin,” Chris shared a list of personal and professional accomplishments, including graduating college with honors, getting certified as a personal trainer and building a following of 9.4 million on TikTok.

“None of this would have happened if I didn’t have an intervention 5 years ago today,” he captioned the TikTok. “So if you’re looking for a sign to make a change if I could do it, so can you!!! I love you.”

For the latest breaking news updates, click here to download the E! News App