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Shep Rose starred in Bravo’s Southern charm for 10 seasons
Rose blacked out during BravoCon 2023, forcing him to make lifestyle changes after he was “really mad at myself” for his behavior
The reality star attended an Ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica in January and is now avoiding hard alcohol
BravoCon is usually an exciting time for the network’s stars to meet fans from around the world. But for Shep Rose, last year’s convention in Las Vegas marked one of the darkest moments of his life after spending the weekend in a blacked-out state.
“I was sitting in a ball on the couch wondering what just happened, and I was really mad at myself,” Rose, 45, tells PEOPLE of the aftermath of BravoCon 2023. “There were no huge incidents or anything something similar happened, but I could tell that people weren’t that impressed with my time in Las Vegas, and neither was I. It felt like things were coming to a head, and I was a little scared and didn’t know what to do or who to talk to about it other than my immediate family.
Rose tried to make contact with his Southern charm costars and close friends Craig Conover And Austen Krol but “they were fed up,” he says. “They rejected my advances to try to talk. That was harmful and confusing. We’ve all been through this together over the years, we’ve seen each other at our worst, at our best and everything in between. How can you not be supportive and empathetic? It sucked.”
So Rose leaned on his family and spent the last Thanksgiving after BravoCon with them at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. “They were super cool and nice about it, and they even shared some similar stories, saying, ‘Yes, we also learned that we can’t do it like we used to anymore,'” the reality star says. “I started to conclude that a lot of it is physiological. But old habits are hard to overcome. You think you’re invincible and you think you’re the life of the party, and it turns out you’re not. You are obnoxious and you annoy others and you endanger yourself.”
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As Rose “got all these things running through my head,” he received a “really nice” and concerned phone call from Andy Cohen.
“He was cool, but he said, ‘Hey, I want you to stay on this channel as long as you want.’ We love you, but you can’t do that in front of this person, that person. You just have to be a lot more aware,” Rose recalls. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I beat myself up.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s good to hear.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He says, ‘If you were like, ‘Fuck it, whatever,’ that would have been bad.'”
Rose heard from his friend Bailey Bial, who appeared on television Southern charm in the past, about the Rythmia Ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica and decided to give it a try in January. He calls the seven-night experience “revelatory” and says it helped him untangle “a lot of networks within me.”
“Everything opened up,” says Rose.
When Rose returned home, he explored traditional therapy, although he did not immediately find it suitable. “But it’s in my consciousness, and maybe it wasn’t before,” he says. “Maybe before it was like, ‘Ha, ha, ha, f… them.’ And I’m not like that anymore.”
He also created guidelines for himself around drinking, which largely involves avoiding hard liquor and sticking to beer or wine.
“It’s setting rules for yourself and really working on not breaking them, even though sometimes you get excited around certain friends and stuff. But I know who I can spend time with, and I try to do that,” says Rose.
The Average expectations The author recently celebrated a small victory by moderating his drinking during a college football game.
“I’m such a social animal. It’s important to try to find your fix, so to speak, in a way that’s more palatable than sitting on a bar stool for hours, which is hard not to do, especially in college football or something like that,” Rose says. “But I recently had a really fun time at a college football game on a college campus. I thought, ‘Oh God, Shep, be careful.’ And that was me. I was able to figure it all out. So little profit. Don’t let the good be the enemy of the perfect, but also hold yourself accountable.”
Rose had said he expected the season 10 movie to do just that help him reconnect with Conover, 35, and Kroll, 37, and it ended up making for some tough conversations.
“They’re both sensitive guys, and they’ve both never been wrong in their entire lives,” Rose says. “It’s a complicated triumvirate, and I’m okay with talking about it and dealing with it because it’s a big organism that may be out of control at this point. But I always knew it would be fixed because it wasn’t that bad.”
Conover has also cut back significantly on his drinking, and Rose thinks Kroll “controls himself pretty well” when it comes to partying.
“I’m kind of in the middle of it,” Rose says. “We’ve had to recalibrate that part of it, me, Craig, Austen. and so does Whitney, because it’s easy to do. One day I will have a more stable kind of life, children and wife, and I think that will change me immeasurably. That’s what everyone says, right?”
For now, Rose hopes to “continue to operate in a fair but fair manner,” he says. “That’s all I can do.”
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Southern charm premieres Thursday, December 5 at 9pm ET on Bravo.
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