Tasha Smith “Masculine Energy is what I thought I needed to Thrive”

Actress and director Tasha Smith recently visited the Tamron Hall Show to discuss her current projects. Some conversations were about tackling feminine and masculine energies as a child.

“I am learning to fall back and allow myself to be cared for,” the 54-year-old told Hall. Raised by a single mom. Her mother, Monique Smith, was 14 years old when she became pregnant with Smith and her identical twin, Sidra.

The Survival of the Thickest star spoke about gravitating toward masculine projects in her career with drama, crime, and thriller, somehow believing that masculine energy is what she thought she needed to thrive, but now she says she has changed.

“I grew up in Camden, New Jersey. I used to walk around with lighter fluid, a hammer, and matches in my bag because I felt like I needed to protect myself because we didn’t have a father. I dealt with some abuse and things like that, but I just felt like I had to always protect myself and take care of myself. I didn’t have a man to lean on. I didn’t grow up with this idea of what a man’s role is in a woman’s life, so I felt like I had to be the man, the woman, the uncle, the brother, the cousin. I had to be all of that in my life. I do feel that it was issues in my dating life because I just felt like I had to always take care of everything and do everything instead of allowing myself to be vulnerable and to be taken care of. It was really something I did have to learn how to do.”

Smith mentioned during her interview with Hall that therapy helped her. “Going through therapy and me talking about some of the things that I felt like were obstacles… would get in the way of me having healthy relationships. I remember my therapist even saying, “Are you okay with allowing yourself to be taken care of?” Smith went on to say, “Even as a young girl, her mother had dealt with addiction when we were very young,” adding that her mother has been clean thirty plus years. “There were sometimes when we had to take care of ourselves and honestly, I didn’t know how to allow anyone to take care of me because I did not know what that really looked like. I was uncomfortable with it.”