How Kourtney Kardashian Helped Husband Travis Barker Heal Past Trauma

Travis Barker Details How Falling in Love With Kourtney Kardashian Helped Heal Past Trauma

Travis Barker is recognizing Kourtney Kardashian’s impact on his life.

Indeed, the Blink-182 drummer—who survived a deadly plane crash in 2008 before flying again for the first time in 2021—shared how The Kardashians star has supported him through his deepest traumas.

“Falling in love again, my wife gave me so much hope to where I ended up flying again,” Barker exclusively told E! News at the world premiere of Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear at the Tribeca Film Festival June 13, “and believed that I could do it and now my kids fly. It's just insane.”

And Barker—who shares kids Alabama Barker, 20, and Landon Barker, 22, with ex-wife Shanna Moakler, as well as 2-year-old son Rocky Thirteen Barker with Kardashian—also has his children to thank for where he is today.

“The power of love is amazing,” he said. “My kids were my strength from the time they existed.”

In 2008, a private plane carrying Barker as well as his friend Adam "DJ AM" Goldstein, assistant Chris Baker and security guard Charles Still crashed after the tires blew during takeoff. Baker, Still and both of the plane’s pilots were killed in the tragedy.

Though Barker managed to escape the aircraft with AM, he suffered third-degree burns over most of his body. Since then, the music legend—who was previously known to travel by bus or boat following the accident—has been open about healing his emotional wounds from the crash.

“I was dark,” he told Men’s Health in 2021. “I couldn’t walk down the street. If I saw a plane [in the sky], I was determined it was going to crash, and I just didn’t want to see it.”

Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for The Commons at Calabasas

With therapy, the 50-year-old noted how those thoughts have gotten quieter over the years, so much so that he took his first flight post-crash alongside Kardashian—who shares kids Mason Disick, 16, Penelope Disick, 13, and Reign Disick, 11, with ex Scott Disick—in 2021.

“It’s gotten better the further I get away from it,” he explained. “The closer I was to it, it felt like I was closer to the bad stuff than I am to the good stuff. I felt closer to the experience of trying to escape, [to] being in an accident and being burned, trying to grab my friends from a burning plane.”

“That haunted me for a long time,” he added. “And as long as I was closer to that than this good stuff, I was always thinking about that. Now it’s been so many years, it’s getting easier for me. There are days where I’ll wake up and never think about it.”

For more on the couple's blended family, read on…

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