Elizabeth Gilbert’s Untold Story of Love and Addiction

How do you survive when the person you can’t live without begins to destroy you?

In this powerful episode of Midlife Chrysalis, Elizabeth Gilbert joins Chip Conley to share the raw story behind her new memoir, All the Way to the River. She opens up about walking alongside her partner through addiction and relapse, confronting her own patterns of codependency, and finding healing through recovery and surrender. It’s an honest, unfiltered look at love, loss, and what it really takes to stand on your own two feet.

Tune in now to hear Elizabeth Gilbert as you’ve never heard her before.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:40 Introduction to Elizabeth Gilbert

03:06 All the Way to the River book

06:06 Why it took 7 years to write

07:21 A forensic look at repeating patterns

10:36 Love vs. addiction in relationships

13:49 How Liz met Raya & their evolving bond

19:55 Confessing love during Raya’s illness

25:31 Grief, loss, and missing her friend

27:18 Writing in solitude & surrendering to truth

35:00 Surrender, recovery, and true powerlessness

41:21 Dark thoughts & God’s voice

45:15 What sex & love addiction means for Liz

51:36 12-step practices & six years of abstinence

54:35 Reflections on MEA and retreat power

58:22 Wisdom bumper sticker

Learn more about MEA at ⁠https://www.meawisdom.com/

#MidlifeChrysalis #ElizabethGilbert #AllTheWayToTheRiver #GriefJourney #AddictionRecovery #LoveAndLoss #Codependency #HealingFromTrauma #12StepRecovery #SexAndLoveAddiction #SpiritualGrowth #MemoirWriting #MidlifeWisdom #EmotionalSobriety #LifeLessons

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
The person you love the most is going to go.
That can be through death, that can be through estrangement,
that can be through divorce. Like this is something that I
don't think anybody escapes. And this was my moment of that.
I miss the person who was my friend for for 10 years before
we were a romantic couple. That was the purest version of

(00:22):
us, I actually think. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a
crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that
can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.
Well, this episode goes deep quickly and allows you to see

(00:49):
the opportunity of one of the best known writers in the world
today exposing herself in ways that most people wouldn't do.
Elizabeth Gilbert has become a friend known as Lizzie.
Lizzie is someone who loves to go deep in her writing.
Ultimately had Julia Roberts play her and eat, pray, love her

(01:12):
book. But this is not a Julia Roberts
episode. I promise you that.
This is an episode that is dedicated to helping us to see
our shadow side, to help us to understand what addictive
qualities we have. In her case, Lizzie's cases as
sex and love addiction. In my case, it might be
workaholism. In your case, it could be

(01:33):
drinking a little too much. The relevance of this episode is
for anybody who sees that they're powerless over something
and they know they need to surrender to some kind of
healing work. I think you're going to find it
enlightening, inspiring and challenging at times because the

(01:55):
relationship that that Lizzie had with her best friend Raya,
who became her lover and romantic partner was not an easy
one. Highly recommend you buy her new
book, All the Way to the River. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Well, Lizzie, let's take a big deep breath together, OK?

(02:21):
Oh, good idea. Always a good idea.
I love you. And drink some water.
Breathe and drink water. I love you too honey, so much.
I am my breath. That is something I have to
remind myself when I'm in a stressed place.
I'm not stressed with you though, because what?
What a joy to have each other ineach other's lives.

(02:41):
You know, I sent you a photo last night of, of you and me at
a Las Vegas conference that we both spoke at.
And it was January 31st, 2017. And now having read your new
book, which came out yesterday all the way to the river, I know

(03:01):
now know a lot more about what you were going through at that
time. Will you tell us a little bit
about the name of this book? And the story behind it, because
it's a, it's quite a read. This is this, this one's going

(03:21):
to get a lot of attention. And it's it's no longer the eat,
pray, love girl first. Of all hi, honey, I love you so
much. Thank you.
It's always such a joy to talk to you and hi everybody who's
who's listening to this. The book is called All the Way
to the River and it's a memoir about my love story, grief

(03:45):
story, addiction story, and recovery story, all of which
involve my beloved friend who later became my partner who
later became my problem. Raya Elias.
All the way to the River is is what she used to say to me when

(04:07):
she found out she was dying. She used to call me her All the
way to the River friend because we were so incredibly close.
And, and when she was dying, shestarted to call her death the
river. And she said to me, I want you
to walk all the way to the riverwith me.
And I made that promise to her that I would do that.
And during the time of her terminal decline from pancreatic

(04:32):
and liver cancer, she picked up drugs again in a way that she
hadn't in almost 18 years at that point.
She was a heroin addict, speedball cocaine junkie in
recovery who had put drugs down for a long time and she picked
it back up again at the at the end of her life and it was a
nightmare. She was a Hospice patient who

(04:53):
also became a intravenous opioidand cocaine addict all over
again. But that is not the only thing
that happened. I also she went to her most
degraded version of herself, butI also went to my most degraded
version of myself As a world class Olympic long distance

(05:14):
codependent, as a blackout sex and love addict, As a Skid Row
intimacy addict, people pleaser who has always had this idea
that the way to get love is to give the person that you love
every single thing they could ever want or desire and that
will make them love you and makeyou happy.
I was doing that at the same time that she was declining into

(05:34):
drug addiction. And so the story is not just
about, it's not just about deathand grief and friendship and
love. And it's not just about drug
addiction. It's also about codependency and
intimacy, addiction and the places that it can take you,
Including when you said I'm not the nice E pray love lady
anymore, including getting to a point where I was so at the end

(05:55):
of myself that I I decided that it would be a good idea to try
to kill her. But we'll get to that story.
I'm sure somewhere along line. I didn't.
Spoiler alert, I didn't, but I definitely, definitely wanted
to. At one point in the book, you
talk about I'm trying to be good.
And that's when you were saying to someone that the two of you
are not not in a romantic partnership, you're just best

(06:17):
friends. And you said at another point in
the book you talk about the press, The precious reputation
as the best person in the world was at stake.
So there's an element for you inwriting this book which is
incredibly vulnerable and raw and ugly and beautiful as I've
witnessed you now Co leading 2 workshops with you.

(06:41):
I think this unvarnished, insightful Lizzie, who's little
baby Lizzie your, your inner inner little girl has needed

(07:03):
probably to come out for a long time. 2 questions How how has it
been writing a book that is so raw in its emotion and and and
it's storytelling and how liberated do you feel allowing
the world to see the full Elizabeth Gilbert?

(07:26):
Well, I think that before I could show the world the full
Elizabeth Gilbert, I had to figure out who and what that
was. And, and there's a reason that
it took seven years after Reya died for me to even start
working on this book, because upuntil that point, I didn't even
know what had happened, you know, And if I had written this

(07:49):
book directly after she died, I think it would have been a very
different story. It would have been a story about
what a nice person I am and thisterrible thing that I went
through and how mean somebody was to me, right?
Like honestly, I think that's, that's probably the best I could
have come up with at that point.I guess I had enough self

(08:10):
knowledge to to know you cannot be in an insane situation and
not be contributing to that insane situation.
There was a reason that I ended up in this insane situation, but
I didn't know what that reason was.
I couldn't figure out how I had gotten into that point.
And I think that there are probably a lot, I mean, I think

(08:30):
all of us, I think this is a sort of rite of passage of the
human experience and what, you know, I always call Earth school
that many people call Earth school, this idea that Earth is
a school for souls. And you come here to have
experiences that you can't have anywhere else, that you've got
to Incarnate into this being andthen have these experiences that
transform and teach you. And I must have signed up for

(08:50):
the Super accelerated curriculumbecause the Super accelerated
curriculum involves a lot of failure and a lot of shame and a
lot of suffering because those are talk about a chrysalis, like
that's a chrysalis of transformation.
So in many ways, this book is like a forensic.
That's how I thought of it as I was writing it.
I was like, this is a forensic investigation into me to try to

(09:13):
go back and tell this story and be like, how did this happen?
And not only how did this happenthat I became so degraded in
service to somebody who was alsoin a state of degradation, but
how does this happen frequently to me?
Like this is, I would love to say this is the first time that

(09:36):
I have totally blown up my life for somebody.
But it is not the first time I have totally blown up my life
for somebody. And then it wasn't the last,
right? So, So what is my role in the
insanity in my life? I think is the most self
accountable question that a person can ask.
So it's not as if I were necessarily hiding my true self

(09:57):
from the world. It's that I was stumbling
through my life having this secret hidden operating system
guiding my choices and decisionsthat that I that was so far in
my shadow that I didn't even couldn't even see what I was
doing. You know, despite the fact that
it always, literally always ended the same way, literally
always ended the same way. Catastrophe, crying on the

(10:20):
bathroom floor, losing everything, no sense of self.
So, so I think it was more, it was less about like, how do I
present myself to the world as than it was about like what's
literally going on in me that this keeps occurring.
Yeah, you, you actually quote yourself for me, Pray Love, from
2004. And you say here it is 2018 and

(10:42):
you have a you have a sizable quote from the book that
basically could have been written for this book in the
sense that you knew it. It's almost like, you know,
Lizzie, what are you pretending not to know here?
But it feels as if in this new book you have owned it and you

(11:03):
understand the addictive qualityabout it a little bit more.
Do you want to talk a little bitmore about, you know, what's the
difference between, you know, love, you know, a love
relationship and a addiction relationship?
How did you discover in this particular relationship with

(11:24):
Raya that you knew it was addictive?
I have said this the other day to somebody and I feel like
because somebody I was describing love addiction and I
identify as a sex and love addict and I go now to a 12 step
recovery program for that. And I go to meetings every day
like the same way an alcoholic would in recovery, the same way

(11:46):
a drug addict would if they werein 12 step recovery.
I didn't know prior to that thatthere was a program where I
could go to get help. I didn't know there were other
people who acted like me. What I did know was that there
is not a single human being who would look at my romantic
history. If you were to take my romantic
and sexual history and just lay it out on the table from like

(12:11):
age 14 to 50 and just say then this happened, then this
happened, then this happened, then this happened.
There's not a single person in the world who would look at that
and say, well, that looks like an emotionally stable and
healthy human being. That sure looks like somebody
who's got her ducks in the row. You're like, like, nobody would
look at that and including me, you know, So it's not like
during those 35 uninterrupted years of acting out, I thought

(12:34):
that I was killing it. Like I was like, there's
something wrong with me. This is not normal.
I knew I wasn't normal in high school the way that I was acting
out. I even could tell you why I was
that way. I could tell you about my
insecure attachment disorder andwhere it came from.
I could tell you about trauma that happened to me in early

(12:55):
childhood that was a violation of my body that made me feel
like I didn't own my body. I could have sat in a, you know,
I could have written a doctoral thesis by the time I was 30
called why I act like this. But that didn't stop me from
acting like this. And that's where the level,
that's where the term addiction applies here, because there's a

(13:16):
line in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous that says
self knowledge availed us of nothing, right?
So, so, and there's another thing we often say in the rooms
that says discovery is not recovery.
And this is so hard for the mindto understand, especially a
super smarty pants like like me,where it's like, well, if I, if
I can just, I always feel like if I can understand something, I

(13:37):
can conquer it, right? If I can know what it is, then I
will stop doing it. But the nature of addiction is
that it doesn't matter how much you know that what you're doing
is wrong. It doesn't matter that you know
that it's harming you. It doesn't matter that you know
that it harms others. It doesn't matter that you know
that these are your patterns andin love addiction, it's always
about a pattern and never about a person.

(13:59):
It's like this is a pattern thatkeeps repeating.
You're powerless over this. So what eventually happened was
that a friend, 12 stepped me, a friend who had many years of
recovery in a a sat me down one day and was like, hey, listen,
I've been watching you hurt yourself for 35 years.
And there's actually a program of recovery for this.

(14:21):
And I think you might qualify for it.
Why don't you go check it out? And I started to hear people in
those rooms tell exactly the same stories, stories that I had
kept hidden for so long because they brought me so much shame.
Here were people in broad daylight talking about it and
talking about how they found healing from it.
So that was sort of the first ray of hope I ever had for my
life, that I might not have to be a servant to this disease for

(14:44):
the rest of my life. Well, your ray of hope was also
your ray of ray of hope. Let's let's take I mean, so
we've sort of started this conversation maybe talking about
some of the challenges. But you know, you said, you say
in the book, I love who I was becoming as a result of being
with Raya and and she fortified your spine.
She softened your heart. There was a compassion and a

(15:07):
loyalty to her that you just were, you know, you, you deeply
admired. Let's talk about the friendship
you had that led to the romanticrelationship that then led to
the serious challenges. Because we need, we need to see
some of the good stuff here for a few minutes.
What did you love about Raya andhow did your friendship evolve

(15:30):
over the course of time? How'd you meet originally?
Over the course of 20 years, here is what our relationships.
It started because I went to geta haircut from her.
She was this really cool downtown Lower Eastside hair
stylist who was newly sober, newly clean, who was working out
of her East Village apartment, cutting hair and kind of getting
back on her feet. And a friend sent me to her.

(15:52):
And so we started off as like hairdresser and client, and then
we became friends, but like peripheral friends.
And then we became closer friends.
And then, I mean, all of this islike slowly over the course of
20 years. And then we became neighbors and
then we became like muse and patron as I was supporting her

(16:14):
creative projects and inspiring her creative projects.
And then we became best friends.And then we became like hero and
hero worshipper as she became the person who I turned to for
everything in my life. And despite being married to a
very lovely person, Reya became and having a lot of friends in
my life, Reya became the person who and this is where it starts

(16:36):
to turn. Reya became the person who I
truly believed I could not live without.
Like this is where this is wherea sort of shadow side starts to
to increase. She was so strong, she was so
powerful. She was so incredible.
She could handle. She was so fearless about
people. And I'm I've often had a lot of
fear about people that I always felt my nervous system when I

(17:00):
was around her started to feel safe.
And that's not an experience I've had a lot of in life is
feeling like I'm safe when people are in the room.
But when Raya was in the room, Ifelt completely safe.
And when I didn't know what to do, I would turn to her and she
would tell me what to do and guide me.
And so essentially Chip, she became a higher power.
Like I basically turned her intoa God and, and I became her

(17:24):
acolyte. And she had a healthy enough ego
that, and I'm using the word healthier, like she had a big
enough ego that she was perfectly fine with that.
She was like, I will be your Godand you could be my acolyte.
And, and she was quite comfortable with that and I was
too. And then that's where you know,
my, my, my beloved friend Byron Katie, my favorite teacher, has
a line that I think is very accurate to me and to maybe to

(17:47):
many of us. But she said nobody is safe from
me when I need them that much. Nobody is safe from me when I
need them that much. And that is, that's the part it
took me 7 years to figure out about our relationship is how
unsafe a person I became to Rayawhen I needed her that much.

(18:07):
Because then I started manipulating and controlling her
life to make sure that my sourceof safety would never leave me.
And that meant like bribery, flattery, buying you whatever
you want, traveling all over theworld with you, like anything I
can give you to make sure that you never leave me because I

(18:27):
don't know how to provide my ownsense of safety.
And if you're the one who holds that in your hands, I will do
literally anything to make sure that you don't leave.
And what I say in the book is that I had very good reason for
falling in love with Raya. And, and there's so much that
was extraordinary about her. The darkness in me was the
secrecy that I hid about the extent of my dependency upon

(18:50):
her. Long before we became romantic
partners, my dependency upon herwas complete.
And that's my damage. And I often define codependency
is like you become an unhealed wound looking for somebody to
land on, right? And that's what I was.
And I also want to stress here, and I stress this in the book
again and again and again, there's a word that I keep

(19:10):
returning to, and that word is innocence.
And one of the things that I sayin the book is there's a
tremendous innocence to addiction.
There's a tremendous innocence to codependency.
It's like we're all just out here trying to get our needs
met, living in fear and doing things without even realizing
that we're doing them. And so sobriety to me, one of my

(19:32):
favorite definitions of sobrietyis emotional sobriety is the
restoration of choice and the restoration of dignity and the
ability to actually be able to make sober emotional choices
rather than being governed by this operating system that warps
my brain and makes me do shit. That is not an integrity and
that is not in in dignity and that is not safe for me or for

(19:54):
anybody. There's a point at which Raya, I
think a week after her 56th birthday.
And by the way, happy 56th birthday three days ago.
I know here we are where she. Was there there was a she got a
diagnosis and you like a floodgate opened.

(20:17):
You felt this incredible desire and need to be with her in in a
an even deeper kind of way. And you even a even said to her,
do you like me that way? In terms of like, you know,

(20:40):
let's be clear here. Lizzie is known as a straight
woman. You know, Raya is a, you know, a
full on dyke and and you know, lesbian, lovely lesbian, but
hardcore, you know, you know, glamour.
Glamour. Butch dyke.
Glamour. Her definition of herself.
Glamour. Butch Dyke there she so you're

(21:01):
the one saying to her, do you like me in that way?
So talk about that. Talk about that, that moment
where the veil of your affectionand deep love beyond friendship,
love revealed itself both to yourself and to Raya, such that

(21:25):
from that point forward. And to my.
Husband and to your husband and.To my husband, what happened is
that when when I heard six months, they gave her six months
to live. And when I heard that, I
actually saw I actually had a vision.
And I mean, first of all, I collapsed.

(21:45):
I like, like the ground. There was no ground under my
feet. I mean, Reya had become the
ground under my feet. There was no ground under my
feet. It was like falling through a
void of grief and also terror. You know, I also think as part
of the curriculum of Earth school, I don't think anyone's
going to escape this either. As one of the things that we all

(22:07):
universally experience, which isthe person you love the most is
going to go, that can be throughdeath, that can be through
estrangement, that can be through divorce.
Like this is something that I don't think anybody escapes.
And this was my moment of that. Like you are going to now lose
the person who you're completelydependent upon.

(22:29):
But I saw a vision. I saw it clearly in my head.
It was like a movie. And what I saw was that I was
going to be her caregiver because I was her person.
She was my person. I knew I was going to drop my
whole entire life to be her caregiver.
And in this vision, I never toldher who she was to me or what
she was to me. And I saw her dying in a

(22:49):
hospital room and I saw me holding her hand at the last
minute of her death. And I saw her going to her
grave, never having known what she meant to me, never having
me, never having expressed that what I saw.
It was so disgusting. That was the word that I, that I

(23:09):
heard in my mind was that that vision, this actually was so
disgusting, that thought that I would be so cowardly as to let
the love of my life die without ever letting them know that they
were the love of my life. That my soul was appalled.
My soul was appalled by that vision.

(23:29):
And no matter how much I was afraid of chaos and upturning my
life and hurting anybody and allthe reasons that I had kept this
secret for so long, that had to stop.
There was just, there was just no way that I could allow that
to happen. And, and that's what caused me
to go first to my husband and then to Raya and, and you know,

(23:50):
my, my wonderful ex-husband and he and I are still very good
friends. Like he knew, you know what I
mean? People aren't stupid.
It was like, duh, you know, likenot only did he know, like
everyone knew every single person that Raya and I told that
we're together was like they were either like, we thought you
were already together or, or like, you know, obviously like

(24:12):
one of Rey's friends said in other news, you know, Reyes
said, Liz, Liz and I are in love.
And this friend said, in other news, ice is cold.
You know, like this is just suchan obvious thing to so many
people. But you know, that's the thing
sometimes about big giant secrets is that they aren't as
secret as you think. And, and often times telling the

(24:33):
truth to somebody about what's actually going on gives them
their reality back. You know what I mean?
Like the, this was, this had been reality for a long time.
So there was a level at which itwas almost as awful as it was
for everyone. There was almost like a breath
of relief, which is like, OK, we're finally, we're all just
going to finally stop pretendingthat this thing isn't, hasn't
been true for a long time. And then I, and then I went to

(24:54):
Raya and I, I said, do you like me that way?
As if I were like a 12 year old Walker asking somebody a note.
And she just, gosh, it makes me want to cry now.
But she just, she put her hand on her heart and she said, a
cage in my heart just opened and1000 white birds just flew out.

(25:16):
To be able to say this because we had both been so careful
never to cross any boundaries oreven, you know, even.
But yeah, that was the truth. I can feel it, I know, and I can
feel how much you miss. Her.
Oh God, so much. And and it's interesting though,
all these years later and all this processing later and

(25:39):
everything, there's a, you know,I also think like everybody's, I
think by the age of 40, everybody could write a book
called not exactly what I had planned, right?
I think that is 100% sure of everybody's life.
And I think everyone could share.
Everyone can have the same tombstone that says could not

(25:59):
have been otherwise. And I think that's the most
merciful way to see our lives. It's like could not have been
otherwise. The way that this story went.
And the person who I miss after all this, after everything that
went down and all the pain and glory, as Ray would have said,
and all the love and the romanceand the passion and then the

(26:22):
devastation and the degradation and the anger and the resentment
and the fear and all of it and the grief and the recovery.
Who I miss is my friend Raya. I miss the person who was my
friend for for 10 years before we were a romantic couple.
That was the purest version of us, I actually think.

(26:43):
And that's who I miss. I just want my friend Raya to
walk, to walk in the door and belike, dude, want to go to
Target. That's who I want to see, you
know, like that's who I want. That's who I miss.
There's a passage in the book about halfway through.
It's in a chapter called The Truth Remains Standing.

(27:03):
And because for those are for our listeners and watchers, Liz
doesn't have a copy of the book with her.
So, you know, she doesn't like, carry it around with her and
she's not at her home right now.Everybody wants 1.
I didn't. Get one.
I know. So I'm going to read this and
then just ask you to reflect upon it because, you know, to

(27:24):
tell this story, to tell the story of your friendship, your
romance, the love and then the incredible challenges and then
the loss of her. But that sense of liberation for
you to see who you are with a new pair of glasses is really
captured in this in this passage.

(27:45):
So I'll read it. I do not want to tell this part
of the story. And this is as you go into the
the most difficult part of the story.
I do not want to tell this part of the story because part of me
still doesn't want it to be true.
I still don't want Reya to become who she became toward the
end of her life. I want her to remain how I saw

(28:06):
her for all those years before. Heroic, brave, commanding,
honest, astonishing, cool. And I still don't want me to
become what I became at the end of her life.
Desperate, clinging, resentful, lost, powerless, degraded,

(28:28):
insane. I want you, dear reader, to love
and admire Rhea. I want you to love and admire
me. I want you to see us as
beautiful and undefeatable. I want this to be the most
inspiring book of the year. I want this to be a thoughtful
book about death and dying, written by a wise and spiritual

(28:49):
woman who accepts the reality ofmortality with a sense of
compassionate detachment. I want this to be a tale of two
courageous and and amazing soulswho face down death with a sense
of creativity and wild adventure, and who did enough
living in the last months of Raya's life to resonate love

(29:10):
across the cosmos for 1000 more lifetimes.
I want to tell you that our bondwas never broken, not even by
the ravages of cancer or by mortality.
I want to forget how things actually went down.
I want this to have been an entirely different love story.
I want, I want, I want. There it is again, The ferocious

(29:35):
drum beat of the ego pounding away with the blistering furnace
of the self, while meanwhile thetruth remains standing in the
center of the room, patient and timeless, gazing at me with
madding indifference, waiting for me to address it at last.
So let us surrender now and address that truth.

(29:59):
You should have read the audio book Chip.
You have a beautiful reading voice.
I was just very soothed by that.It helps to have good material
so you know this is this is exactly halfway through the
book. And that's where the worm
turned, you know what I mean? Like that's where the story goes
from a story like about what I thought the story was going to

(30:22):
be about to what the story was actually turned turned out to
be. I had to go away for the part
that comes after what you just read.
I had to go away for like 3 weeks and just write that part
in total solitude. I went down to New Orleans and

(30:44):
stayed in this like Haunted Mansion in the French Quarter
during the rainy winter season. And just what all I did was
write and weep and take baths and walk in the rain and write
and weep and take baths and walkin the rain.
And every morning, you know, I have a long time spiritual
practice of communicating with with what I call God every

(31:06):
morning through writing and sortof getting my getting my
direction for the day that way always with this question, like,
what would you have me do today?Who do you want me to be today?
What's essentially what's my assignment today?
And every single morning during that time, I would wake up and I
did not want to write that book.And for every all the reasons

(31:28):
that you just read and and I have a very loving and indulgent
God who lets me off the hook of a lot of stuff.
It's constantly telling me things I don't have to do.
But God was like, bitch, get to work.
I will see you like sucks to suck.
I'll see you at your desk. You know, like this is an
assignment like this is you haveyou.

(31:49):
I know this is hard for you and you're not getting out of this.
You must do this. And so I did.
You asked me earlier in the conversation about a sense of
relief at having finished the book.
And I do feel that because my friend Martha Beck, who I know

(32:11):
you love as well, was the one who introduced me to this
radical concept that was very, very different from what I grew
up believing that I was being taught.
Martha said the truth is always kind, even when it's painful,
even when you don't want to see it, even when you want to hide

(32:32):
it. The truth is always a kindness,
and deception and secrecy are always unkind, even if you think
you're doing it to protect somebody else.
And so I think what I experienced by reliving that
whole story, the awfulness of it, by taking complete self

(32:54):
accountability for the parts that I needed to take complete
self accountability for, by naming things for what they
really were and by leaving nothing out, the universe sort
of felt like a kind place again where it's like, yes, that's
what happened. You know, that's what happened.
That's the truth. That's what we became.

(33:15):
This is why it happened. This is how it happened.
This is who I became during thattime.
And this is how we find our way back to our inherent dignity
after such a nightmare. And so, yeah, I feel it lifted.
It lifted something from me. And I'll, I'll tell you
something else, Chip. So Raya used to when she was

(33:37):
coaching me, you know, always coaching me to be more
courageous, always coaching me to use my voice, always coaching
me to stand up for myself. She used to say, I will not rest
until I see you standing on yourown 2 feet in every single
situation in your life. Every single situation in your
life, I will not rest till I seeyou standing on your own 2 feet.

(33:59):
She was very present in the years after she died in my
consciousness. I felt like I could talk to her.
I felt like I could hear her. I felt like she was guiding me.
With the completion of this book, I don't feel her anymore
as being present. I actually think we can go
backwards on that and say she said, I won't.
I won't rest till I see you standing on your own 2 feet.

(34:24):
I'm standing on my own 2 feet inthe writing of this book and in
my recovery and in the way that I'm living.
So she must now be resting like she must now be able to go.
You know, she also used to say to me, I'm not going to leave
until we're both ready. And then she died and I wasn't
ready, but I, but she didn't leave.

(34:46):
You know people can die without leaving.
There's a soul contract, yeah. And with the completion of this
book, I feel like that contract is that Circle has closed and
she she can go on and I can alsogo on.
So one of the words that is coreto 12 step programs is
surrender. Whenever I think of surrender, I

(35:07):
think of the Wizard of Oz, surrender Dorothy, surrender
Dorothy, the lucky witch of the last.
So what does that word mean to you?
For me, when I have had to surrender, whether it's due to
having a flat line experience orhaving a cancer diagnosis or a

(35:28):
financial challenge or a relationship ending in not the
way I wanted it to, I sort of feel like surrender means
defeated as opposed to liberated.
But I want to sort of understandyour point of view on surrender
and what you needed to do in thecourse of this time where you

(35:48):
saw Reyes spinning out of control in her in her her drug
addiction and maybe an anger addiction on some level too.
I'm blaming addiction and you had to surrender to something
that allowed you to do the thingthat was most difficult, which

(36:09):
was to pull away at this time when you felt like your best
friend and your lover needed youthe most.
OK, so first of all, surrender is, you know, there's a, there's
a line that I often say, which is you don't want to surrender

(36:30):
because you're afraid of losing control.
This is why people don't want tosurrender.
You don't want to surrender because you're afraid of losing
control. But you never had control.
All you had was anxiety. So what I learned in the rooms
of 12 step is that when you surrender control, especially
over another human being, right?When you surrender control over
another human being, you're surrendering something you never

(36:52):
had, right? When you surrender, you're
surrendering something you neverhad.
I never had any power over Rhea,right?
I, I, I am powerless over people.
That is like the very first level of my surrender into
recovery from codependency is having to admit that I am
powerless over people. Most people are powerless over

(37:13):
themselves, you know, like, so I'm going to try to take control
over somebody who doesn't even have control over themself.
You know, like, and I don't evenhave control over myself.
This is all like this mythology that I lived in that I could
control people or that I could control outcome, or that I can
control situations I have no control.
All I ever had was anxiety. All I ever had with was the

(37:36):
anxiety that is, that is inherent in trying to control
things that you cannot control. If I'm trying to control
something I can't control, that's only going to cause me
suffering, right? It's this incredible draining of
energy. I think of it as this hole in
the boat where I'm just like, like leaking energy, pushing
something that I cannot fix. Manager control.

(37:57):
So to let go of that actually restores me to a place where I
have energy over what I can control.
One of the most beautiful thingsI ever heard anybody say in the
rooms of 12 step was she said I am loved beyond measure by a God
who has given me control over practically nothing.

(38:17):
Both of those things true at thesame time, I am loved beyond
like and and what I always thinkin my ego is, well, if God loved
me, God would give me control, you know, but but that's not
actually doesn't seem to be the terms here, right.
So I'm loved beyond measure by aGod who has given me control
over practically nothing. And what this woman then said
was that the tiny, teeny, almostminiscule little measure because

(38:41):
it's it's God has given me control over practically
nothing, not nothing, but practically nothing.
So I'm wasting all my energy trying to construct control
stuff I have no power over. Well, in the meantime, what she
said was the tiny little measureof power and control that God
has given me to play around in is so important that I show up
for it and use it toward the highest good.

(39:03):
So God has given me control, forinstance, over my creativity.
Like I can take that energy and I'm draining into trying to fix,
manage and control people who are out of my realm.
Like way, like I'm way out of myhula hoop when I'm trying to
control other people. If I take that power back, if I,
the irony is every time I surrender to something that I

(39:26):
have no power over, I actually become more empowered for that
which I do have power over, which is again, slim but vital
and sacred. My creativity, my perspective,
my relationship with my higher power, how I choose to behave.
This is stuff I have like been given a slight bit of management
over. And that's where my attention

(39:47):
should be rather than trying to control people.
So. So what happened is that Reya
Reyes spun out into such a degraded place that, as I
alluded to in the beginning of this conversation, I was so
sleep deprived trying to take care of a cocaine addict.
And anyone who lived through the80s knows cocaine addicts don't
sleep and they're also not very nice.

(40:10):
Like cocaine turns people into real assholes.
Like so I'm trying to fix managing control.
Not only somebody who's a reallyangry and abusive cocaine addict
who never sleeps, but who also aweirdly her death sentence.
Has given her in her own imagination and in her own ego
license to do whatever she wantsbecause there are no longer any

(40:33):
consequences. She's dying.
Therefore, like she took whatever restraints she ever had
on herself, she took them off and she gave herself the world's
biggest case of the it's I get to do whatever I want because
I'm dying. So there was no way to control
her. Like she was a she was like a
train loaded with TNT going 1000miles an hour and killing me at
the same time, right? And I'm trying to keep this

(40:56):
thing under control and it's totally out of control.
And I got so spent and she was abusive and I got so spent that
I was like one night at 3:00 in the morning when she was yelling
at me. I was like, she needs to die.
And she was a Hospice patient atthat point.
How do you how do you do an intervention with a Hospice
patient? How do you say to a Hospice

(41:16):
patient if you keep doing these drugs?
She's like fuck. Also got thrown out of the
Hospice at one of the hospices. I mean like, like this is like
this could get where she was at that point.
So so you, you and your mind started plotting a murder.
Yeah, I was like, I've got a great idea.
Here's what happens if you take somebody like me who's first of
all, my drug of choice has been removed, so I'm jonesing and I'm

(41:40):
in withdrawal. So my drug of choice is Reya's
love. So she's pulled that away.
So now I'm super fucked up anyway.
Like if I'm addicted to somebodyand they withdraw their love, I
go insane. The way that a drug addict goes
insane when you take their drug away.
So I'm already insane. So she's insane and I'm insane
and I'm spinning out and I'm sleep deprived and I'm exhausted

(42:02):
and I'm being abused and I don'tsee any way out and she's dying
anyway. So my brains like, you know,
what we should do is we should try to first of all, we have to
try to knock her out because shehasn't slept in days.
But we should because she's immune to all these drugs
because she's a drug addict and she has this incredible immunity
to the efficacy of drugs. So I can remember the doctor at

(42:24):
one point saying, how is she surviving?
I'm like, dude, you tell me medical expert.
Like he's like, she's living on cocaine, opioids, whiskey, beer,
cigarettes and like hamburgers. Like how is she literally alive?
And I'm like, because she's madeout of titanium.
She's like this incredible survivor.
I mean, we were almost in admiration of it, but it was

(42:45):
also a nightmare. So I was like, well, if I could
just get her to take like if I can mix, she was taking morphine
pills by the by the handful. And I was like, if I can get the
sleeping pills into the morphinepill container and I can get her
to take like a dozen sleeping pills, then maybe when she's
asleep, I can put the fentanyl patches that we have for her
pain on her. Like put like 6 or seven of them

(43:05):
on her and maybe she'll just die.
And that was a plan. I mean, that wasn't like, I want
to make it really clear. That wasn't like a passing
thought I had. And I think, and the reason I
speak so openly about this is because I know that caregiver
collapse happens to people and they, they're just like, I'm
going to die if this person doesn't die.
And so this is this seemed like a really good idea.

(43:28):
And I went for a walk. I took all of her medication and
I went for a walk. I sat there at Tompkins Square
Park, probably on the same benchshe used to live on when she was
a homeless drug addict 20 years earlier.
And I'm just counting out these pills and trying to figure out
like, you know, trying to figureout well, how I can kill the
love of my life. And, and I walked back into the
apartment with a plan. And she looked up from this

(43:50):
coffee table that was covered with these big fat rails of
cocaine. And she just looked at me with
those unblinking Raya Elias, kind of like I can always read
the room eyes. And she said, don't you start
plotting against me now, Liz. And I was like, what are you a
fucking witch? Like how, Like how did you know

(44:11):
I was about to kill you? And she just like she just very
soberly said, think very carefully about what you're
about to do. And to this day, I don't know
how she knew it, but she knew it.
And that was my rock Autumn. And that was when I, I left the
apartment again and I started calling people.
Well, actually the next thought I had was I should just take all

(44:31):
these pills and kill myself. And it was at that moment that I
heard the voice that I call God say to me, if you have ever
reached a point in your life where you are ready to murder
another person or yourself, it'svery likely that you've reached
the end of your power. So this is what surrender is.
Surrender is what happens when you reach the end of your power

(44:52):
and, and God said it's very likely you've reached the end of
your power. And that being the case, I would
suggest that you call somebody and ask for help.
It's like game over, tap out. You have gone as far as you can
go on trying to impose your power on this situation.
And now maybe you need to call some people and say I've reached
the end of my power and I need help.

(45:12):
And that's what I started doing that day.
So what does it mean to be a sexand love addict and someone who
knows they are? And what are the practices that
someone could use to actually help them in this situation?
Because there are people listening right now or watching
us who are saying to themselves,Oh my gosh, I have never thought

(45:37):
of myself as a sex and love addict, but I think I have many
of these qualities. So what would you recommend to
someone like that? I can only speak to my own
experience, so I'll answer that question for what it means to me
to be a sex and love addict. And then I'll answer that
question to what I do, which is not a prescription obviously for

(45:58):
anybody else, but this is what'sworking in my life.
So the way that I define myself as a sex and love addict is that
I am somebody who uses people. So it's a very ugly, like we can
say people pleaser, we can say romantic, we can use all these
words, but essentially what it comes down to bare bones.
If I strip away any defensive language, I'm a person who uses

(46:22):
human beings and I use them to provide sensations and feelings
in me that I cannot provide for myself.
So my history of sex and love addiction is that I have used
people as drugs and there are people that I use as stimulants
and there are people who I use as sedatives.
Because I can traditionally havenot been able to regulate my own
nervous system. I will go out there looking for

(46:44):
somebody who will make me feel whose attention the word we use
in my room is the room that I go12 step room I go to is lava
love, attention, validation and approval, right?
So because I could never providelove, attention, validation and
approval for myself, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to
do literally, I will become whatever I need to become and I

(47:05):
will transmutate into whatever Ineed to transmutate into to
force you to give me lava without which I cannot live,
right? So, So what that makes me into
is somebody who other people arenot safe around.
Because if I think that you've got a stash in you where you can
provide love, attention, validation and approval to me,

(47:28):
then I'm going to start manipulating and using you to
try to get that. And oftentimes in my life, I
would overlap and I would have somebody that I was using as a
stimulant and somebody that I was using as a sedative or, or I
would use somebody as a stimulant and get high as balls
on them and then be so jacked upand dysregulated and broken by
that relationship. Because typically the only

(47:48):
people that I can get really stimulated by are people who are
not going to treat me well. That's kind of my thing.
So I'm going to get super stimulated on somebody who's
unavailable because that's an addiction that I have to to
somebody who's an emotionally unavailable person because
that's super exciting to my nervous system.
And then I'm going to get so spun out that I'm going to go
have to find somebody who's veryavailable, who does not

(48:11):
stimulate me, who is maybe like actually maybe bores me.
But I feel like I can control access to the amount of love
that they're going to give me. And I'm going to use them, you
know, until I get so sort of depressed that I'm going to go
find somebody. Just so this is what sex and
love addiction looks like for me.

(48:31):
Another person who identifies asa sex and love addict addict
could tell you a different story.
But that's my story. And it's ugly, you know, it's
ugly what it does to me and it'sugly what it does to other
people. And it's also deeply at cross
purposes to who I am and my truenature.
So who I am in my true soul and in my true nature is somebody
who came to earth to love and toserve other human beings.

(48:55):
And you can call whatever it wasthat I was doing for 35 years by
a lot of names, but you can't call that love and you can't
call IT service. You know, that's that's using
people. I mean, that's so in such
violation. So how I recover is that I go to
a 12 step program that focuses on this.
I worked the 12 steps the way that any addict in with any

(49:16):
other addiction would work. The 12 steps.
I have a sponsor, I do service in my program.
I sponsor other people. But the main thing is that it's
steps two and three in the 12 step of anybody who's familiar
with that, I've made a decision to turn my will and my life over
to the God of my understanding. And what that means to me is
that I'm not very interested anymore, Chip, and what I want

(49:38):
because what I want, and you know this, you know that the
science behind this is very, very clear, that human beings
are very bad at predicting what's going to make them happy.
And guiding your life based on what you want often leads us
over cliffs or into cul de sacs of depression or despair.

(49:59):
And so I don't guide my life anymore as much as I possibly
able to. I do not guide my life anymore
about what I want. I guide my life by what my
higher power suggests that I do.Again, different people in
recovery will have different ways that they're recovering.
But my higher power has asked meuntil further notice, to not

(50:19):
engage in sex and romance with other people as a public
service, as a public service to other human beings, and also as
a way of restoring myself to sanity.
And for the first time in my life, as somebody who was
violated as a child, like this body has never belonged to me.
So for the very first time in mylife, God is giving me space and

(50:41):
opportunity to see who I am whenI'm in emotional and physical
autonomy. And that's been for me the only
place that I can heal. And when I ask God, do you want
me dating? So I don't ask me, I say to God,
like, do you want me dating? And there is such a thing as
sober dating. And I have a sober dating plan

(51:02):
that's 4 pages long that I worked on with my, with my
sponsor in case I ever find myself in the position where I'm
going to be dating. And it's like basically best
practices for Liz. So it's things like no week long
1st dates. A date ends in two hours, It
doesn't end in two weeks, right?It's like we're just like we're
setting up like boundaries and breaks and bumpers to help me

(51:27):
have the best opportunity to notact out the way that I act out
that causes harm. But when I ask current day
should I be dating anybody, the answer has been the same for six
years, which is lol no. So you have been sexually
abstinent and and for the last six years.
I have been and that's been incredible.

(51:47):
You know, it's it's also and andagain, purely this is my own
experience and and I just can't help saying that enough.
Like I belong to a program of recovery, but I follow my major
recovery plan is checking in with my higher power for the
next right action and one day ata time.
For the last six years, it's notlike I haven't had moments of
temptation or people that I'm attracted to.

(52:09):
I'm a sex and love addict. I'm attracted to everybody, you
know, like, but but God's been like gently, you know, like
when, when that thing starts to happen in me, God's like, I'm
going to ask you to step away from this right now because
there's something that we're doing.
It's like we're storing. I was in Amsterdam a couple
years ago and I went in this amazing bike tour with this

(52:30):
woman who took me to all these parts of Amsterdam that tourists
typically see, including this settlement that was being
developed over what was formerlya toxic waste dump.
And all these young environmental kids had taken
over this swamp that was just full of toxins.
And they were bringing this thing back to life by planting
Willow trees, I guess absorb like even lead and mercury.

(52:53):
And and then they built above the swamp, this sort of world
that was built on, on stilts that had like shipping
containers that they've made into homes and performance
spaces and animals and birds were returning to this place and
children were being raised there.
And like the the toxicity levelswere dropping by the year.
It's like, I feel like my entirebeing is undergoing that sort of

(53:17):
a level of restoration that it'sneeded for quite literally my
entire life. And if I were to bring just for
today, if I were to bring another person's, and I also
have no delusions about how insane I can become when I get
lost in someone. So if I were to bring another
human beings energy field into like deep intimacy with this

(53:38):
restoration project right now, it's going to throw the pH off.
It's going to throw. That's what God keeps telling
me. And God's like, will you
actually just come with me and let me show you what I can make
you into if you don't have to bebehaving in these ways that
you've always had to behave? And it's been the most, I've
written three books in the last six years, Chip.
It's been the most creative, spiritual, generative, healthy

(54:03):
period of my entire life. And my friendships have bloomed,
my career has bloomed. My, my body is healthy.
I'm off. When I came into recovery, I was
on antidepressants, anti anxietymedication, sleeping pills,
hormone treatments. I had a raft of doctors and
therapists taking care of me like shamans, healers, you know,
like I had like so many people on speed dial and like, it's all

(54:25):
gone. Like all of that is gone.
And it's just like I'm here, undefended, sober, awake and
alert in the world and happy just for today.
And I have witnessed that in person both in Santa Fe and Baja
because we've been lucky enough to have you come and join us
twice at MEA. Before I go to my last question
for you, any observations about your experience at MBA?

(54:49):
Oh my God, yay. Let's talk about MBA.
Oh, Chip, Oh my God, what you have created.
And for anybody's who's listening, who hasn't actually
been able to or found the time to get yourself to either of
those campuses, OK, I'm so, it'sso part of my emotional sobriety

(55:10):
not to tell people what to do. I strongly wish that you will
have that. All of you will have the
opportunity to experience the magical spaces that that Chip
and the MEA team have created that are part of this concept of
the restoration of the self. Because there's a certain

(55:32):
amount, I'm a big believer in the power of retreat.
And there's something that can only happen in retreat that
cannot happen in your everyday life.
And humans have known this for 10s of thousands of years and
have created sacred spaces of retreat where you can go and be
either alone or in a collective or at MEA, both because there

(55:55):
are opportunities for collectivehealing.
And there's also these tremendous open spaces in nature
where you can go and be in, in the solitude that is, I think,
essential for being able to hearyour inner voice and God's
voice. And the people who show up there
who you magnetize to come there are so extraordinary.
And it's such an honor to have been part of these two

(56:20):
curriculums that we did together.
And also with my beloved friend,Doctor Turai Trent, who's my
hero, who's a person who is suchan amazing teacher and sort of
mother of the world. And to watch people give
themselves this gift in midlife,to recognize that, you know,
they say like, you haven't met everybody that you're going to
love yet. You haven't met everybody who

(56:41):
you're going to become yet, you know, at the age of 506070, like
you're becoming is, is in play. I mean, until the minute that
you die. I remember a Hospice worker
saying to me when Raya was dying, there's no such thing as
a dying person. There are living people and
there are people who are alive and there are people who are

(57:02):
dead. And as long as you're not dead,
you're alive. And as long as you're alive, the
senses can still be delighted. The the mind can still be
transformed, the spirit can still evolve, creativity can
still be indulged. It's like seeing that happen in
real time in a space that's devoted entirely to that is such
a joy. I mean, the first thing we do,

(57:24):
Jim, at the end of one of these sessions with each other is
trying to figure out when we cando it again, right?
Like it's like, when are we going to do this again?
It's so good. We'll be doing this in 2026 at
some point. So yes, for sure.
We will be doing this again and I love that you took the hardest
thing that you had gone through in your adult life and, and put

(57:45):
it through the Crucible of spirituality and transformation
and made it into a gift for others, which I think is part of
our service. You know, like to take the pain,
change from the pain, and then see what you can do to become a
service through that transformation.
I mean, that's the highest calling and you're doing it and
I love you. I.

(58:06):
Love you too so much. One last question.
So MEA is a wisdom school, midlife wisdom school and it the
intention is to help people to distill their wisdom based upon
life experience because our painful life lessons are the raw
material for our future wisdom. So Lizzie, you know, based upon
the last few years, what's a wisdom bumper sticker you might

(58:28):
have that is been forged throughthe Earth school and, and I I
usually I would just say what's the origin story?
You don't even have to have an origin story because you've told
the origin story. But what's the bumper sticker?
Don't miss the curriculum you signed up for.

(58:49):
You know, and I do believe we signed up for everything that
happened to us well in advance because there was something that
you could only get from that. As Mark Twain said, a man who
picks up a cat by the tail learned something that cannot be
learned any other way. And the failures and the
disasters of our lives are things that we could not have
learned any other way. Don't miss the curriculum.

(59:11):
Don't miss the the incredible power of transformation that
these disasters have for you if you're willing to to really look
at your part in them. What a beautiful ending to this
hour together. I love you.
We'll see you soon. I'm excited about this new book.
I, I we're doing our part to make sure that the world knows
about it. Well, that was quite an episode,

(59:33):
right? I mean, I'm, I'm just struck by
three things. Number one is there's a Harvard
professor named Dan Gilbert who says human beings are works in
progress that mistakenly think they're finished.
And I think, you know, for someone like Lizzie, who had
huge success at a relatively young age as a writer with E Pre

(59:57):
Love being the thing that put her on the world stage, I think
she's really saying in this bookand in this episode that more
will be revealed. And in her case, even though she
wrote a little bit about sex andlove addiction, not in that
language in her book E Pre Love.It now became a malady that she

(01:00:21):
was able to own. So, so recognizing that we're
works in progress that are constantly learning more about
ourselves. I'd say second is this topic of
surrender. You know, we like to surrender
to love, but it's harder to surrender to defeat or surrender
to some addiction that is is taking control of us.

(01:00:42):
I just find that on the other side of surrender is liberation,
the feeling that you do not haveto have it all together.
And I think that is a just I think the, the value of
surrender is a a critical part of what I heard.
And then thirdly, you know, here's here's somebody who has
always wanted to be the smart, smart, wise, lovable person in

(01:01:06):
the room and is published. She she could know all this
about herself. She could know the fact that she
had a very difficult relationship with Raya, but to
expose that in a public way, it says two things to me #1 is

(01:01:26):
Lizzie tends to process her lifethrough her writing.
Now again, she didn't have to she that that's her processing
form. And she also does it in 12 step
programs. But you may have a different
form of processing. It might be with a therapist, it
might be with a best friend. It might be coming to an MEA
workshop, but in her case, she writes about it.

(01:01:48):
Now, that doesn't mean the second point.
She has to necessarily publish it.
But the fact that this woman whois, you know, revered by so many
is going to show a very ugly side of herself with this book.
I think at the end of the day, you, you love her even more
because of the authenticity. Powerful episode.
Thank you for being on this journey with me and we'll see

(01:02:09):
you next week. Thanks for listening to The
Midlife Chrysalis. This show is produced by Midlife
Media. If you enjoyed this episode,
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