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 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 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 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 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 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?

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 in each other's lives.

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 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 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 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 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, she started to call her death the river.

And she said to me, I want you to walk all the way to the river with me.

And I made that promise to her that I would do that.

And during the time of her terminal decline from pancreatic 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 also became a intravenous opioid and 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, but I also went to my most degraded version of myself As a world class Olympic long distance 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 make you happy.

I was doing that at the same time that she was declining into drug addiction.

And so the story is not just about, it's not just about death and 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 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 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 in writing this book which is incredibly vulnerable and raw and ugly and beautiful as I've witnessed you now Co leading 2 workshops with you.

I think this unvarnished, insightful Lizzie, who's little baby Lizzie your, your inner inner little girl has needed 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?

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 up until that point, I didn't even know what had happened, you know, And if I had written this 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 this terrible 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 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 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 and then have these experiences that transform and teach you.

And I must have signed up for the Super accelerated curriculum because 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 go back and tell this story and be like, how did this happen?

And not only how did this happen that I became so degraded in service to somebody who was also in 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 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 from the world.

It's that I was stumbling through my life having this secret hidden operating system guiding my choices and decisions that 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 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 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 understand the addictive quality about it a little bit more.

Do you want to talk a little bit more 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 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 a drug addict would if they were in 12 step recovery.

I didn't know prior to that that there 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 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 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 and where it came from.

I could tell you about trauma that happened to me in early 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 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 mind to 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 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 and in love addiction, it's always about a pattern and never about a person.

It's like this is a pattern that keeps 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.

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 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 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 romantic relationship 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 and how did your friendship evolve 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 get a 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.

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 is like 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 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 to turn.

Reya became the person who I truly believed I could not live without.

Like this is where this is where a 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 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, I felt 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 into a God and, and I became her 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 God and 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 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 Raya when I needed her that much.

Because then I started manipulating and controlling her life to make sure that my source of safety would never leave me.

And that meant like bribery, flattery, buying you whatever you want, traveling all over the world with you, like anything I can give you to make sure that you never leave me because I don't know how to provide my own sense 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 her.

Long before we became romantic partners, my dependency upon her was 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 returning to, and that word is innocence.

And one of the things that I say in 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 favorite definitions of sobriety is 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 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.

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, 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 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 affection and deep love beyond friendship, love revealed itself both to yourself and to Raya, such that 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.

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 universally experience, which is 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.

Like you are going to now lose the person who you're completely dependent upon.

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 told her who she was to me or what she was to me.

And I saw her dying in a 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 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.

And no matter how much I was afraid of chaos and upturning my life and hurting anybody and all the 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, 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, like not 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 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 such an 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 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 it was 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 pretending that this thing isn't, hasn't been true for a long time.

And then I, and then I went to 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 and 1000 white birds just flew out.

To be able to say this because we had both been so careful never to cross any boundaries or even, 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 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 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 romance and the passion and then the 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.

And that's who I miss.

I just want my friend Raya to walk, to walk in the door and be like, 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.

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 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.

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 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, 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 woman who accepts the reality of mortality with a sense of compassionate detachment.

I want this to be a tale of two courageous and and amazing souls who 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 across the cosmos for 1000 more lifetimes.

I want to tell you that our bond was 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 drum beat of the ego pounding away with the blistering furnace of the self, while meanwhile the truth 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.

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 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 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 walk in the rain.

And every morning, you know, I have a long time spiritual practice of communicating with with what I call God every morning through writing and sort of 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 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 have you.

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 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 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 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.

This is why it happened.

This is how it happened.

This is who I became during that time.

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 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 your own 2 feet in every single situation in your life.

Every single situation in your life, I will not rest till I see you standing on your own 2 feet.

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.

I'm standing on my own 2 feet in the 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.

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 also go on.

So one of the words that is core to 12 step programs is surrender.

Whenever I think of surrender, I 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 or having a cancer diagnosis or a 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 understand your point of view on surrender and what you needed to do in the course of this time where you 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 thing that was most difficult, which was to pull away at this time when you felt like your best friend and your lover needed you the 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 because you're afraid of losing control.

This is why people don't want to surrender.

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 had, right?

When you surrender, you're surrendering something you never had.

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 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 even have 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 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.

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 things I 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.

Both of those things true at the same time, I am loved beyond like and and what I always think in 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 a God who has given me control over practically nothing.

And what this woman then said was that the tiny, teeny, almost miniscule little measure because 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 measure of 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.

So God has given me control, for instance, 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 my hula 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 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 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 the 80s knows cocaine addicts don't sleep and they're also not very nice.

Like cocaine turns people into real assholes.

Like so I'm trying to fix managing control.

Not only somebody who's a really angry and abusive cocaine addict who never sleeps, but who also a weirdly her death sentence.

Has given her in her own imagination and in her own ego license to do whatever she wants because there are no longer any 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 1000 miles an hour and killing me at the same time, right?

And I'm trying to keep this 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 at that point.

How do you how do you do an intervention with a Hospice patient?

How do you say to a Hospice 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 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 somebody and 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 and I'm being abused and I don't see 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 she hasn'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 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 made out of titanium.

She's like this incredible survivor.

I mean, we were almost in admiration of it, but it was 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 morphine pill 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 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.

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 bench she 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 figure out 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 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 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 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's very 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 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.

And that's what I started doing that day.

So what does it mean to be a sex and 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 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 anybody else, but this is what's working 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 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 have not been able to regulate my own nervous system.

I will go out there looking for somebody who will make me feel whose attention the word we use in my room is the room that I go 12 step room I go to is lava love, attention, validation and approval, right?

So because I could never provide love, 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 will transmutate into whatever I need 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 are not 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, 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 up and dysregulated and broken by that relationship.

Because typically the only 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 very available, who does not 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.

Another person who identifies as a 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's ugly what it does to other people.

And it's also deeply at cross purposes to who I am and my true nature.

So who I am in my true soul and in my true nature is somebody who came to earth to love and to serve other human beings.

And you can call whatever it was that 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 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 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.

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 me until further notice, to not 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 my life, God is giving me space and opportunity to see who I am when I'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 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 have the best opportunity to not act 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.

You know, it's it's also and and again, 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 at a time.

For the last six years, it's not like I haven't had moments of temptation or people that I'm attracted to.

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 woman who took me to all these parts of Amsterdam that tourists typically see, including this settlement that was being developed over what was formerly a 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.

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 levels were dropping by the year.

It's like, I feel like my entire being is undergoing that sort of a level of restoration that it's needed 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 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 be behaving 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 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 anxiety medication, 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 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?

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's so part of my emotional sobriety 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 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 are opportunities for collective healing.

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 hear your 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 curriculums that we did together.

And also with my beloved friend, Doctor Turai Trent, who's my hero, who's a person who is such an 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 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 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, Jim, at the end of one of these sessions with each other is trying to figure out when we can do 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 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.

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 have that is been forged through the 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.

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.

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, 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 Love being the thing that put her on the world stage, I think she's really saying in this book and in this episode that more will be revealed.

And in her case, even though she wrote a little bit about sex and love addiction, not in that language in her book E Pre Love.

It now became a malady that she 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.

I just find that on the other side of surrender is liberation, the feeling that you do not have to 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 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 Lizzie tends to process her life through 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.

Now, that doesn't mean the second point.

She has to necessarily publish it.

But the fact that this woman who is, 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 you next week.

Thanks for listening to The Midlife Chrysalis.

This show is produced by Midlife Media.

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