Everything changed for Tracy Lawrence in 1991, when he was shot four times. Lawrence was walking a friend back to her hotel in Nashville, when he was attacked in an attempted robbery and shot.
Lawrence was treated for his physical wounds, but now reveals his mental wounds lasted a lot longer.
“I just suppressed it and shoved it down,” he tells Fox News Digital. “And it caused me a lot of problems in my personal relationships, problems in my career.”
At the time, Lawrence was still recording his debut album, Sticks and Stones, which was released several months later. For Lawrence, the timing couldn’t have been worse.
“I was angry back then,” Lawrence concedes, adding that he felt like, “they were trying to take my opportunity away from me, and I didn’t get the mental help that I needed. I’m much more aware of the consequences, whether it’s if you go through a physical altercation or family trauma or whatever those things are.”
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How Tracy Lawrence Moved Forward After Being Shot
Lawrence didn’t have the tools he needed at the time to recover mentally. But now, the 58-year-old urges others to take care of their mental health as much as their physical health, something he wishes he had done 35 years ago.
“I’m a big believer in taking care of your mental health these days,” Lawrence concedes. “I didn’t do that at the time. That was a very traumatic experience for me.”
Lawrence recalls how he dealt with the emotional toll the shooting took on him, which is why he is now so encouraging of others to get mental health help.
“When you overcome a life-altering experience like that, I think there’s a little bit of a God complex that comes with it when you survive something that you probably shouldn’t have,” Lawrence admits. “It caused me to push things to the edge a lot more than I would have if that had not happened to me.
“I try to make it a point when people bring that up,” he continues. “And I talk about it now to make people aware that one of the most important things you can do when you go through something like that is to talk to somebody about it. Don’t suppress it. Purge that thing out and get it out and deal with it and confront it, because if you don’t, eventually it’s going to come out in a way that you can’t control.”
Tracy Lawrence’s Physical Recovery After Being Shot
Lawrence struggled with his mental health in the aftermath of the shooting. But he also struggled with his physical health, including some permanent damage. Lawrence spent several days in the hospital in Nashville, where he had multiple surgeries to remove a bullet from his knee. To this day, one bullet remains in his hip, which doctors deemed too risky to try to remove.
“Once I got past the realization that I wasn’t going to die, the next thing that I worried about was, was I going to lose my leg… I didn’t know how severe the bullet impact was on my leg because I got shot right through the joint in my left knee,” Lawrence recalls. “I really thought there for a while that they were going to have to amputate my leg, and that was pretty traumatic in itself. I still struggle with that injury, too.”
Lawrence reveals that he has already had a total knee replacement, but still deals with ankle issues, a lingering side effect of the shooting.
“I’m probably going to have ankle surgery at the end of this year that I’ve been putting off for a while,” Lawrence says. “So that’s caused residual issues over the years that just had to linger that I’ve never really been able to completely get over.”
Lawrence just announced his headlining No Alibis Tour, which kicks off on March 12.
Photo Credit: Blake Harbison