MÖTLEY CRÜE's NIKKI SIXX Says He Has Been Undergoing EMDR Therapy

MÖTLEY CRÜE bassist Nikki Sixx has revealed that he has been undergoing Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, a treatment for symptoms of trauma.

On Sunday (December 29),Sixx took to his social media to write: "A lot of us talk about New Year's resolution's. I like the idea of resetting myself a few times a year. I spend alot of time up in the National Park in Wyoming. That's a solid restart for me. Another around my birthday and then Dec 31- Jan 6th.

"I am personally on a deep reflective journey right now and as usual it will turn into something. A lyric, a book , a song. Also I've been doing EMDR therapy. That's a golden ticket if you're up for change. I live for change. At least evolution.

"Do you have any new goals or resolutions you wanna share with the rest the class? By the way Happy New Year."

According to the Cleveland Clinic, when you undergo EMDR, you access memories of a trauma event in very specific ways. Combined with eye movements and guided instructions, accessing those memories helps you reprocess what you remember from the negative event. That reprocessing helps "repair" the mental injury from that memory. Remembering what happened to you will no longer feel like reliving it, and the related feelings will be much more manageable.

In a 2019 interview, Sixx opened up about his traumatic childhood, which included his father abandoning the family when Nikki — whose birth name is Frank Carlton Serafino Feranna, Jr. — was three years old. Sixx said: "I had a shitty upbringing, and I'm dealing with that every day. I spent more money on therapy than most rock stars spent on cars.

"My most heartbreaking memory was when my mom called my grandparents and said, 'Come pick him up,'" he told The Guardian. "I was six and she said, 'I'm going to lock the door and I'll just leave you in the porch. She couldn't wait until my grandparents got there. She left with this guy in a truck. That broke me.

"In my deepest, deepest core, the thing that's haunted me the most and still haunts me is the feeling of abandonment — my dad leaving when I was young and my mom leaving, one at three, one at six. I never quite got over that, it's a horrible feeling," Sixx said in an interview with Neon Sunsets. "It always comes back to these childhood issues; you still carry them with you, they're, like, in your DNA."

Sixx later revealed that his name change was inspired largely by his father's decision to abandon his son. "I changed my name because of a long road battling a guy who walked away from me named Frank Serafino — who was my father — and me saying, 'Fuck you, I'm gonna reinvent myself, you weren't there for me, and I am gonna become a man called Nikki, create my own family and fuck you,'" he explained.

MÖTLEY CRÜE will return to Las Vegas for a series of live appearances this spring. "The Las Vegas Residency" will find them playing an exclusive limited run of 11 shows at Dolby Live at Park MGM from March 28 through April 19, 2025.

The CRÜE's third Vegas residency is being billed as a "tell-all show [that] will immerse the audience in the band’s history, leading all the say through their record-breaking Stadium Tour." They previously set up shop in Vegas in 2012 for "Mötley Crüe Takes On Sin City" and 2013 for "Evening In Hell".

This past October, MÖTLEY CRÜE released a new EP, "Cancelled", featuring the previously released singles "Dogs Of War", the title track and a cover of THE BEASTIE BOYS' "Fight For Your Right". To celebrate the EP's release, the CRÜE played a series of club shows in Los Angeles, including a gig at the Troubadour, the Roxy and Whisky A Go Go.