Life Uncut - "I'm A Sex and Love Addict." Uncut with Elizabeth Gilbert

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Today we are joined again by the phenomenal Elizabeth Gilbert. We recorded an episode with Liz last year titled ‘Being Single Needs A Rebrand’  In that episode we spoke about:  What Liz’s life was like before and after the success of Eat, Pray, Love,  If she were to name ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ again it would be ‘Not exactly what I had in mind’ and How Liz used to drain herself by giving her everything to relationships but now feels being emotionally autonomous  Liz’s latest book “all the way to the river” is an incredibly honest recount of her own experiences of sex and love addiction alongside her wife’s journey through drug addiction and terminal cancer.  Today we speak about: What sex and love addiction actually looks like (it might be more familiar to you than you expect) What it feels like to be out of control of yourself Coping with validation cravings, codependency and grief Why Liz didn’t have a choice but to be honest in this book Having a deep level of intimacy with your best friend A revelation about trigger warnings Being an olympic level people pleaser Why Liz doesn’t read any reviews anymore and what that’s taught her about our sense of self The parameters she’s had to put on herself to reach ‘emotional sobriety’ You can find more from Liz at her website  And on her Instagram  You can watch us on Youtube Find us on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Hosted by Britt Hockley & Keeshia Pettit  Produced by Keeshia Pettit Video Produced by Vanessa Beckford Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! XxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany and I'm Keisha and we are very excited to welcome back a second guest to today's podcast and Keisha is particularly excited. We're welcoming Elizabeth Gilbert who is the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Now, that name probably rings a bell to a lot of you for more reasons than just the fact that you have read her work. We did interview Elizabeth back in 2024, so one year ago, and Laura and I did that episode and we talked about the success of Eat, Pray, Love, what life was like before and after, and how Liz just used to drain herself by giving all of herself to a relationship.

And Keisha was very, very jealous that she wasn't able to do that interview, but she's here today and you have been beside yourself with excitement yeah that episode we titled it being single needs a rebrand and a part that Liz spoke about in that was that probably a better name for Eat Pray Love would have been not exactly what I had in mind and her most recent work it is a book titled All the Way to the River and it's an incredibly honest recount of her own experiences of sex and love addiction alongside her beautiful wife Raya's journey through drug addiction and terminal cancer. Now for context, if you haven't heard of their love story before, or perhaps if you haven't listened to that previous episode, in 2000, Liz and Raya met. They became friends.

They then became best friends and they became inseparable. They fell in love in a less than conventional way. Raya was a musician, a hairdresser, a filmmaker, and also an addict. And in 2018, Raya passed away from liver cancer. Liz walked all the way to the river with her. It was a level of intimacy that I think only some of us are going to be lucky enough to experience in our lifetime. And so today we wanted to chat with Liz about what sex and love addiction actually looks like and particularly what it may look like in women, because I think that we don't hear it spoken about in women as much, what it feels like to be out of control of yourself,

coping with validation cravings, codependency and grief, and some of the most unique qualities of Liz's best friend, Raya, that we can all implement into our own lives. Liz, welcome back to Life Uncut. Thank you. It's so nice to meet you. It's so nice to see you and to meet you. And also, what a cogent and articulate introduction. I feel like you really set this conversation up very nicely. You got a lot covered in a very short amount of time. I feel very impressed. I mean, I'm sure you're told this by probably every single person who has ever read your work. I just feel as though, because I listen to audiobooks, I'm not as much of a reader,

which is not a surprise i'm a podcaster i just feel as though it's like the closest thing that i remember of going to church like that's how i feel listening to liz gilbert i feel like i could end the conversation now because liz gilbert just said that we were articulate well that's me done guys put it in instagram bio well liz as you know we do start every conversation with an accidentally unfiltered it is one of your most embarrassing stories You shared one that was absolutely hilarious last time. Do you have another embarrassing story for us? Well, this one is not so much under the category of embarrassing as just like bizarre, awkward

and kind of uncategorizable, but also surreal and funny. So when my beloved partner Rhea was very near to the end of her life, she was being taken care of by a number of people. but her three point like her point team for caregiving was me her ex-girlfriend and her ex-wife and that just shows who she was as a human being because I want you all to just cast back on all of your exes and imagine don't make me do that mine would not be there three of them three of them gathering to come and be at your bedside and take care of your everyday while you're dying right but like it's also kind of a lesbian thing like a lot of queer women that I

now we're like oh yeah yeah yeah my ex-wife is like the executor of my will and my ex-girlfriend you know is like the godmother to my children and you know it's a whole sort of women are kind of better it's definitely a lesbian thing i think mine would be lining up to be like what can they get from me in my passing like there's any money left over so you know it's it's this terribly tragic and heartbreaking time but also for anybody who has ever sat you know vigil at the end of life there's also a lot of dark humor that can arise even from the person dying you know at various times and so there was this one night where it was actually christmas night and she you know she was a hospice patient she was very very close to the end we could feel that and i

woke up to give her her her painkillers at four o'clock in the morning and she didn't wake up and i couldn't rouse her and her skin was cold and her breath was shallow and i was like this is a great way to begin a podcast, isn't it? By talking about someone's last moments of death. Stay with us, you guys. This conversation is just going to get even more delightful. It's a cliffhanger. It's like, what happened? But what happened was that I went to the other room and I woke up her two exes, other exes, and said, it's happening. This is it. She's going. And it was like we'd known forever what to do with our great love and care for her. And we all went into the bedroom together and we all climbed into the bed with her but before we did that like one of them lit candles and the

other one put on some really sacred music really low and and then we all just held her in the dark and took turns just telling her how much she meant to us and what a grand human she had been and what how she transformed all of us in these very particular ways and then we got really quiet and i could feel like something was transforming in the air and at that moment raya opened her eyes and said the fuck are you guys doing why are these people she's not dead close to dead she's like what are you guys doing and um and we were like oh uh nothing nothing nothing and like you know somebody jumps up and blows out the candles really fast somebody takes the music off you know we're like she's like what

is what's everybody doing in my bed and we're like no nothing nothing nothing nothing every ex is in my bed and she's like are you guys are you guys fucking playing music are you like what the fuck are you doing we're like that's cool it's cool it's cool um we're definitely not having a uh bedside death vigil nope that's definitely not what's going on here nope never to see here and then she's it's up it's like six in the morning she sits up lights a cigarette turns the light on and she goes babe what's today's date and i said it's december 26th and she said cool i want to hit that 70 off sale at lululemon and so we did so we got her out of bed and we took her shopping and she bought all this athleisure wear i mean she had it at that point she ended up dying like

a week later but it was like but in comfort what are we like in brand new why are we in the dressing room trying on yoga gear like for yoga for what like for when it's for when because she wanted to pass away in seamless pants yes she wanted to pass away in style and she and she knew a good bargain she always knew that like after Christmas is when you how you have managed to make one of I can only imagine the most traumatic moments somehow seamlessly no pun intended seamlessly beautiful beautiful and funny and hilarious and wonderful all in one I don't know how you've done it but you've just done a very good job with that well I had a really great conversation with a hospice nurse because we something else had happened I can't remember it was but we had to

excuse ourselves we were in the hallway laughing so hard and and we're you know you just get punchy you're like sleep deprived you're all of your emotions are you know five minutes later you'd be like sobbing. And then like, there's no filters left. And I said, is this awful that we're laughing about this? And, and she said, well, in the nursing business, we say, if you can't laugh at death, you've got to get out of show business. Like you don't belong in a hospital. Like there has to be a sort of level of sort of humor. And I think humanity about, I don't know, just the comic predicament of, of our existence at all, you know, like, and the embarrassment of having a body, like all of it it's just oh i also think it's funny that these people who are so humorous and

it was so obvious to me that raya was just one of the most hilarious people you will ever come across in your life you can't expect for them to live their whole life being hilarious and then in death be the complete opposite like it's not surprising to me that these people who are so funny like the dark humor side of them it continues until their very last breath you know So one of the things I wish I had known before going into that whole situation is I had put Rhea in this category of a dying person because she was diagnosed with a terminal illness. And initially they gave her six months to live. And long after she was gone, somebody who worked in medicine said, you know what, Liz, there's actually no such thing as a dying person. There are people who are alive and there are people who are dead.

and as long as somebody is alive the most important thing is that they get to be themselves you know like they get to be themselves until they can't be anymore like they get to be themselves and they get to have as much agency as they're capable of having and they get to have their personality and they get to have their likes and dislikes like so don't be looking at people and being like that's a dying person yeah that's a person who's having an experience you haven't had yet. You also gave Rhea a gift. You gave her, not many people get to see how people mourn them when they're still alive. But she got to see that. She got to see how you would all mourn. And she felt that when she woke up. She went, that's fucking weird, man. Look, I feel like we could talk about

this forever. And we did talk about it quite a bit in the last episode. If you guys want to go back and have a listen, it's a really, truly beautiful chat. But today we are going to be taking a little bit of a different segue. You identify as a sex and love addict, which we find very fascinating. And you wrote, I'm also a romantic, obsessive, a fantasy and adrenaline addict, a world-class enabler and a blackout codependent. What does this look like? Who is that person? Well, that's been me my whole life. So I want to preface by saying that I can only share about my own lived experience. And so I'm not here representing any organization or group of people or even other sex and love addicts or even other codependents. The only person whose

story I'm qualified to share is my own. But essentially what it has meant is that for the entirety of my life, I've been deep in the paint in this conviction that if I can just find the right person and make that person love me, then I will be okay. And whatever I have to do, whatever I have to do to get that love, the addiction is not necessarily to any particular person, although it feels like it. But what I've discovered in my recovery and in my healing is that the addiction is to a set of feelings or reactions that I have that are stimulated by one person or another and that then I attribute to them. And then I become addicted to those feelings and I want them to keep doing the things that make me have those feelings.

And so what we call it oftentimes in the rooms of recovery is LABA, which stands for love, attention, validation, and approval. So I'm so hungry for love, attention, validation, and approval that I will like, that's my drug. So Raya's drug for most of her life was cocaine and heroin and various other things as well but like those were her primary things that she was seeking and she used them alternately or sometimes together in order to get high or to be stabilized or to perk up or to get low like she's always trying to get the levels right because she when she wasn't during the period of time that she was in recovery and sobriety when she was in active addiction her thing and the thing of many addicts is like i don't feel right and i am not comfortable

in my skin and i need to add or subtract something from this chemistry so that i can be okay i do the same thing traditionally but i do it with people rather than with substances and being with the people triggers the substance within myself that whether it's the cortisol or the dopamine or the epiphenerine. Epiphenerine, I can never pronounce it. Epinephrine is the American way to say it. See, I told you you were articulate. Well, you say adrenaline. Yeah, adrenaline, right? The high, the ecstasy. That's what I'm chasing. You know, all addiction is chasing a feeling. There's a feeling that I want to have. I've had it a few times and I want to get it back. What do I have to do to get it? What do I have to sell? How do I have to degrade myself? How do I have to

manipulate, beg, bribe, like, what do I have to do to get this or something that approximates it, you know, some sort of vaguely adjacent thing. So what that looks like in real terms for me is that for 35 pretty much uninterrupted years, there were like every once in a while, teeny little break, but rarely, I was just going from one person to another person, to another person, to another person overlapping, often having multiple things going at the same time because there were people that I was using as stimulants. And then that would be so disruptive to my nervous system that there'd be people I would need as sedatives. So somebody who is safe for me is like a Xanax or a Valium. And then somebody who's really exciting,

meaning they would probably destroy me, is like the cocaine, right? And so then it's like, how do I get the right exact perfect level where I'm getting the right amount of stimulation and the right amount of sedative? All it really means is that I could not regulate my own nervous system, take care of my emotional needs or cope in the world. And I was constantly looking for somebody else to do it for me. So outsourcing all of my own care into another person. You could say that that's very normal and very human, but just as with any addict, the difference between what I do as somebody who identifies as sex and love addict and a blackout codependent and what a quote unquote normal person might do in intimacy is the same difference between, let's say you have a friend

who you go and have a drink with at the bar and you have a drink or two and you all go home. And then you have another friend that you go and have a drink with at the bar and then you leave and they stay until four o'clock in the morning. And then they find an after party somewhere and then they find a liquor store somewhere. And then they go home with somebody who says they have more alcohol at their house and then they wake up four days later you know and it overstate lines like with someone they don't even like in a complete blackout like that's what I do like I've had relationships where I sort of wake up in the relationship a couple months in and I'm like how are you living with me like how did how did I open a bank account for you like how did I buy

you a car what just happened to my literal whole entire life I mean colloquially it sounds like I mean we use the terms for multiple things that you just said like monkey branching which is relationship to relationship it sounds like you were a love bomber on steroids like you got into a relationship and then you were just in it so deep you speak so eloquently now about how much you've realized exactly who you are and what you were like for the last 35 years but when did that realization happen did it only happen in hindsight recently where you were like wow retrospectively I was like that or were you in the moment knowing exactly what you were doing but just didn't really know how to label it and what to do with it yeah both but I would say like listen I've always known

that the way that I interact in romance and sex is not normal or healthy and a child if you were to lay out my my entire romantic and sexual history which I did have to do as part of my recovery and really look at it on paper and see it. It's quite confronting. Yeah, it's very confronting, but it was actually kind of a relief because it's like, well, let's work this out. Like, let's look at this. Like, you know, a 12 year old would look at that and be like, um, that bitch isn't well. She's not well. That chick is unhinged. She's fucking not okay. She's not okay. Someone go help her. Somebody needs to help her. And I knew that too. And it's not like I wasn't trying to take care of it. I was going to therapy for years. I mean, God, I wish I had back all the money that

I'd spent and all the hours of my life that I spent in therapy just yammering away about this. And, you know, I could have written a doctoral thesis by the time I was 30 called Why I Act This Way. Like there were things that had happened to me in childhood and things about the way that I was raised that were like would push a person to a severe intimacy disorder and definitely a sense of not having any sense of her own body belonging to her, right? So there were things that had occurred. I could map it out and tell you why I was like that, but I couldn't stop being like that. In the rooms of all addiction recovery, there's a line that people say, which is discovery is not recovery. Like you can know why you do it and still do it. You know, and I, there were times

where I would watch myself do things and it was like watching me drive over a cliff. And I was like there i go i'm driving over a cliff and there's not anything in the entire world i can do to stop that from happening what's about to happen right now like no sense of agency and the word in all addiction rooms is powerless like it's powerless over this so and nowhere in all of that therapy and in all of like the shamans that i went to and the doctors that i went to and the experts that i went to like nowhere did anybody use the word addiction until a friend of mine who had very long and robust recovery in AA sat me down one day and basically did an intervention and said, there's this thing called sex and love addiction. And there's a room for that.

Like there's a place in the 12 step cosmos for that. And you qualify. Like you qualify. And I have been watching you for 20 years, hurt yourself in this way again and again and again, and lose yourself and lose everything like lose money and time and resources and dignity like just lose lose lose again and and i think you might want to go check out one of those rooms and and i was so insulted because i was like i'm a thought leader you know like i know oprah let me let me see what oprah thinks does she think i need to go to a love addiction right recently i taught when this book came out she chose it for her book club which is amazing and she had it we had like a meeting with a group of readers about it and she said the most astonishing thing she said in all her years during

the oprah winfrey show and that thousands of people who she interacted with in the audience and people on stage talking about issues and problems that she was confronting she said i think i think about half of those people had real love addiction issues and that that was the root of all of the other problems was this complete inability, this hollowness and emptiness, this vacancy, perhaps coupled with self-hatred, perhaps coupled with really low self-esteem, perhaps coupled with trauma that made them just not be able to fulfill themselves no matter what they put in there. And so, yeah, I started going to meetings and I started hearing my story being told

by everyone in the room. and I was like, oh my God, I'm not the only person who's this unwell. Yeah. Liz, listening to your book, there were so many parts of it that I related so deeply to. We've spoken a million times on this podcast how I had quite an insatiable need for validation. I had very big feelings. I would be at the very start of a relationship and just be willing to move, to put my entire career on hold, to like have this fantasy of what I thought we could become together and how much better their life would be with me in it and it took a lot and a lot of understanding the way that my brain is and we've joked before that I've got the mind of an addict I'm lucky enough to have

never you know gone down a really bad substance route and listening to your book I had this realization of like holy shit this is what it is like it's this it's this love addiction and I'm not sure like we medicated you yeah yeah then I got medication and things got easier so that was my route to recovery but I'm curious about how you found the public perception to you identifying as a sex and love addict I think we have a certain view of what a sex addict particularly is in society like the Russell Brands I think is what generally the general consensus when you say sex addict I think people also can sometimes use it as a bit of like an excuse I'm putting that in quotation marks anyone just listening for cheating on people you know they they say well you know

sorry, I'm a sex addict. Like, you know, there's, I am powerless to this. They probably are. And that doesn't mean that they're not harmful to others, right? We still have to be accountable. But I could have made my life a lot easier sort of publicly by taking the word sex out of that and just saying love addict. But the reason I keep it in is because that's my primary program of recovery is Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. It's part of that for me. The reason, I'd heard of sex addiction and I'd never thought of that as what I was doing because, again, I mean, you just described what you think of. It tends to also to be more associated with men and with behavior surrounding like sex workers and porn addiction and things that I wasn't doing and that didn't kind of relate to me.

So that's, I think, what maybe kept me away from kind of comprehending that those programs might be useful for me. And then again, this is just me speaking of my own experience. The reason that sex belongs in that title when I identify myself as a sex and love addict is that sex is a really big part of my strategy to get lava, to get that love attention, validation and approval. Like I will deploy it and I will deploy it quite mercilessly. And it's not really to do with intimacy or even necessarily always pleasure as it is with exacting a response. Right. So as a woman growing up in the cultures that we grew up in and as a young girl, like there was there came a point when I went from like ugly duckling to like good enough looking that there was this sudden realization that I had this currency now. not at the highest level you know but enough i mean men aren't that juicy you know if you're available so are they you know like if you're breathing yeah if you're you know what i'm saying it's like a friend of mine a guy who's actually the room says like yeah women seem to need a reason to have sex men just need a location um but that's great you know and so that was the exchange it's like literally a currency exchange it's like i'm going to give this and this is part

of the manipulation. And I use that word really frankly as well, because I'm calling myself out on it. Because while there were things that had happened to me in the past that may have been really harmful to my sense of self-worth, and while this culture certainly hammers the self-worth of women and girls in infinite numbers of ways, I became somebody who uses people. And that's very much at odds with my true nature which is one of loving kindness and care of people but I if you're an addict you use you know whatever it is that you're using you're using it you know and when it came time for me to make my amends like I had to really own the fact that I was using these people in these relationships and Liz do you say using it just to clarify do you say when you say

using people and manipulation you use it as a manipulation tool are you saying you're just using sex to get that love attention validation in the relationship because that's what you feel like you needed are you saying you took it to another level and you might be using it to further your career or to manipulate a certain situation outside of a relationship yes sure both all right yes yes yes you know i remember going to an interview when i was like 29 and i was working i was going for an interview to get a job as a staff writer at gq magazine and that was back when magazines like had money and power it was like a big deal like it was like a possibly career busting open move on my part i remember going shopping with a friend who does not behave

in the world the way that I have typically behaved and like I was choosing I knew who I was interviewing with who was like a the guy who was the editor-in-chief and his two top editors who were all men and they were all between the ages of 40 and 60 68 70 like they were old old white guys right and I just remember like choosing my clothing very very very deliberately and my friend sort of looking at what I was and I like pulling out a like a kind of a Hillary Clinton suit for me and being like you could wear this this is very professional and I'm like I'm not wearing that to go get a job at Conde Nast like you know and and she said you're not you're not trying to have sex with these guys you're just trying to get a job and I remember thinking

are you an idiot like do you not do you literally not understand how the world literally like I'm not going to have sex with them but I want to make them feel like I'm going to make sure that they see what my body looks like yeah they're gonna want it when i leave they're gonna want you know they're gonna have it it's gonna cross their mind it's not gonna hurt so you know i remember gloria steinem saying one time years ago about when britney spears was really young and really sexualized and sexualizing herself and somebody said you know are you like are you upset by what britney is doing sexually and with her body and and gloria steinem said i think she's a very intelligent young woman and she's reading the room and this is a culture where this kind

of thing sells, you know, I wish that's not what she had to do or felt that she had to do in order to be really successful and to be a great artist and performer, but she's not wrong, you know? So, you know, it gets mixed up in there. But, you know, a question that I ask myself a lot is like, who would you be? How would you act? And how would you comport yourself in the world if there were no men in it how would you dress would you be wearing that like would you be doing that to your face would you be you know like how much of my life is just has been oriented toward just capturing men's attention i think a huge amount and as much as we like to say we're a progressive society which we are in many senses i would say that it still

stands there's a reason that we have the same sex cells we still know that pretty privilege exists we still know that as much as you don't want to say it's true and no one would admit it people still know how to dress to go into an interview that is in a room of men and and i'm not saying that that's the right thing but i don't imagine reality it's a reality it's a rude reality and i don't imagine a world in which we're ever going to completely outgrow that well i'm not waiting for culture to change anymore you know for me as somebody who wants to live an emotionally sober life. And that's what recovery from that kind of process addiction is, is that you're learning how to live an emotionally sober life. And for me, as an addict in recovery,

there's a point in the book where I was saying something about the patriarchy. And I'm like, well, this isn't, actually, this isn't really, this book's not a rant against the patriarchy. This book is my sincerest effort to take complete and total responsibility for my life and for every single thing I have ever done that contributes to anything that is dysfunctional, toxic, unethical, or outside of integrity. It's not about what anyone else is doing. I mean, that's the kind of remarkable thing about like real recovery and sobriety is it's like everyone's going to keep doing whatever they're doing, you know, but who am I? And how am I going to live a life of integrity, which is what I kind of always wanted but never

could figure out how to do because my needs were so great that I was operating always from this place of great vacant need. I think that the integrity you had in your book and the the amount of honesty was surprising to me. I have a bit of a background for anyone who doesn't know I did an honors in biomedical science and my specific research for a year and a half was in the neurobiology of addiction. So we used to look at the physiological things that were going on in the brain in a way to try and identify what made someone an addict and whenever I used to speak about it I was always really surprised that the way we look at addicts we treat it as though it's a criminal issue not a health issue and I always had a really big problem with that and I think

that the way that we judge addicts the shame that we impart on addicts as that they are lesser people that they're not as worthy in our societies because of the chaos that they might cause Or not as deserving. Yeah, and not as deserving. And that even came into the research world. They weren't as deserving of money being put towards grants that could potentially look at what might cause it. And for me, your book provided every bit of humanity

towards addicts that I've ever read. It was so honest and there were certain parts in it that I thought, fuck, if that was me writing it, I would have been really tempted to leave that bit out. And I'm really glad you didn't because you showed the complexity of what someone who lives with this disease can be like. And you showed it from both sides, from your own but also from Raya's. And I guess I'm curious about, you know,

as someone who was as successful as what you were, as you are, sorry, as successful as you are, you know, why did you feel that you wanted to be this transparent and honest? Was it just simply to help people or was there something healing within yourself being that honest? Well, I didn't want to be. you know i i i worked really really hard for seven years to not write this book i did every single thing i could do to not write this book you learned spanish i wrote two other novels

i wrote this book as a novel that i didn't end up publishing but i wrote it as fiction as a sort of ghost story called nobody leaves where i was trying to sort of write about it without really writing about it with two characters who looked a lot like me and a lot like Raya, but I was like, that's as close as I can get. I can't like, I couldn't for years, I couldn't go into the white hot radioactive nuclear center of this story. And then I wrote a whole version of this book that was just poetry and prayer. And a lot of that ended up in the final version, kind of as filler, but I kept, kept trying to write about it without writing about it, You know, and I kept trying to talk about it without talking about it, but it wouldn't go away. You know, the story wouldn't go away. Like the pressing need to express myself through it and to tell it wouldn't go away. So I kind of feel like I didn't have a choice. And that's hard to explain other than to say that I didn't have a choice. I mean, I had to.

And I did also have this commandment from Rhea, you know, like the whole time I was with her and that she was dying, dying, there I go, calling her a dying person. She was on her journey toward death. You know, she knew that I was going to be writing about her and everyone knew. And I was writing the whole while and I had thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of notes from that time. We talked about what the title should be like. And she was like, always just like, dude, just write the whole thing, like put it all out there. because she lived her life with such transparency. And she knew that that transparency was how, in fact, she had gotten clean when she got clean. So the problem wasn't even that I didn't want to

reveal these things about me because I'm pretty comfortable revealing things about me because I feel like whenever I reveal something about me, what I see is a bunch of people saying, oh yeah, me too. So it doesn't feel like it's that precious. It's not like my precious, precious thing. It's kind of like, this is a way some of us are. The reason I didn't want to write it for so long was because I didn't want to go back and relive it at the excruciating level of detail that I knew I would have to, to tell the story accurately. And once I made the decision to do it, then what I felt was the ethics of it was, if you're going to be telling Rhea's story, then you have to also tell yours. And that means you leave nothing out. So it's not only,

Because the commandment that Rhea gave me was like, don't protect my dignity. I don't need it. You know, but it was also like, I don't need mine anymore either. You know, dignity sometimes becomes something I hide behind. It's also very, I was just really trying to think of you pressing, pressing send, pressing that off at the final coffee. And it's very exposing. It's very like, like you're running around naked when you've just completely bared your

soul to the world. You've put it out there and there's nothing to hide behind anymore. but I imagine there's a sense of relief that comes with that as well because it's done and I guess it also makes it true the second you've written it down and put it out to the world and maybe that's why you avoided it for seven years because you were still coming to terms with that aspect you spoke just a second ago about before Raya passed away you were talking about all sorts of aspects of the book but specifically the title all the way to the river how did you come to that and tell us just what that means to you both. Well, it was an expression Rhea used to use to describe

layers of intimacy of various friendships. And she lived in downtown New York City for the formative years of her adulthood and always identified as a New Yorker. And she used to use the map of downtown New York City as a kind of operative guide to describe different kinds of friendships. So she's like, so Fifth Avenue for her represented because it was right in the middle of the city. She's like, so what she called a Fifth Avenue friend, it didn't mean somebody who lived on Fifth Avenue in New York. It meant somebody who you're completely superficial with. Somebody who you only know their persona and they only know your persona and you don't let them see any vulnerability and they don't let you see any vulnerability. You call them a friend,

but you don't really know them. And then she's like, as you continue further east toward the river, all of it was heading toward east because she lived in the east part of New York. And then you've got your Fourth and Third Avenue friends who you're a little bit more intimate with. Maybe they're work people that you know and like you've seen each other in settings where a little bit more intimacy might be revealed and then you get your like second and first avenue friends who are like people you went to school with and and your neighbors that you've known for a long time and you might have gone to their wedding and like you know their family members you're starting to see kind of beyond the veil of persona but she used to say it wasn't until you got to alphabet city

which is in in new york like avenues a b c and d which can be really gritty your alphabet city friends are your friends who really, really, really know you, like the ones who took the drunk phone call in the middle of the night, who took the car keys away from you, who drove you to rehab, who know about like the abuse, who know about the divorce, who know about the affair, who know about the bankruptcy, like all of the things that you spend your life trying to make sure, who took you to your abortion, who like went to you for the funeral home to get your mother's ashes like all of these deeply raw moments of life that that are the things that we don't want people to know about us like that crew your alphabet city crew

they know you and then she said there's one last layer and that's the river itself the east river that runs up manhattan island and she said if you're very lucky once in your life you'll have somebody who's your all the way to the river friend and with your all the way to the river friend there's no more secrets there's no fronting it's just all like you couldn't hide or lie from them if you tried like they can read your face from 10 blocks away they can you know they just know you and you know them and and she always called me her all the way to the river friend and it was such a badge of honor for me and when she started dying she started calling her death the river and and said i want you to really walk with me all the way to the river and and i did

But as I say in the book, if you've ever walked from Fifth Avenue to the East Village in New York City, it's not necessarily a very nice walk. It's like to be to know someone at that level of intimacy, to really go all the way to the river with somebody is rough. And it's kind of like the end of all fantasy, the end of all projection and the end of all attempts to present yourself in some sort of way. Like you won't be able to after a certain point. You will be known. deeply and if somebody can still love you after they've walked you all the way to the river then you know that's your person and liz in your story you had these two things that kind of were like fire with fire you had someone who was a codependent enabler and you had someone who

relapsed back into drug addiction you almost didn't make it all the way to the river can you talk us through i mean i i know it's such a long story and it was over quite a long period of time where you and Raya were so close you got to the point where things were going on where you you realized that you were actually going to destroy yourself and very fortunately you came back together but what was that period in the middle like for you and how did you come to the realization that you know it was either going to be Raya who died or it was going to be you who died yeah or yeah I mean it was it was it was the ninth circle of hell and now you know I have the privilege of time to slow it down. And part of the reason and part of the way that I wrote the

book, one of the words that I had in my mind as instructive when I was writing the book was forensic. Like I wanted to do a forensic exploration. And that was also for my own healing because at the time it felt like it all escalated or de-escalated so fast that it felt like the rug just got ripped out from underneath both of us so quickly. And what happened was that she, in the pain and the fear and the anger of her cancer diagnosis, there came a point where she started using drugs very heavily. Again, she started using the drugs that were being prescribed to her for painkillers and she started using, she went back to street drugs with that at the same time. And there was a level even at the time of like, well, yeah, of course,

You know, like, why not? You know, you've been given a death sentence. Like, if you want to do cocaine, do cocaine, like whatever. Like, who's going to stop you? First of all, who's ever going to stop Rhea from doing anything that she, who's ever going to stop anybody really from doing anything that anybody decides that they're going to do? And also for somebody who is a drug addict, I don't know how much we can say that it was a decision. It's like addiction did what addiction does. Addiction always waits for the next opportunity. But what happened is that very quickly, the way I experienced it was that once the opioids and the cocaine were in her system, she became somebody I didn't know. After years of love and friendship, she turned into somebody who I experienced as being really awful and really abusive. And I went down to the lowest incarnation of myself, which is a spineless, enabling codependent who will just do whatever you tell me to do if you promise to love me. And that's a really bad combination. um so the thing that took me out of it was this feeling and I've had this a number of times in my life maybe you've had this too where something so awful is going on and you're like I wish there was a grown-up here who could fix this yeah like where where are the adults like where where it's the worst feeling when you look around the room and you realize that you are the adult you're like damn it awful horrible I hate it I had to do it I have you know and every once in a while I have

to do i had to do it last week there was like a big grown-up thing i had to do and i was like surely there is somebody else who can surely there is an adult who can do this and rea for so much of my life had even before we were together romantically when we were friends she had been that person like if there was if there was some sort of shit show going on she was the one who could handle it because she could handle anything it's like send rea in you know like send rea and she'll defend me she'll protect me she'll make sure that i'm okay she'll say the thing nobody else will say she'll stand up to the bully she'll disarm that she'll do whatever like she's amazing but she wasn't there she was lost in a drug haze and so i had to be

i had to become that for myself i had to face that person down who was also really angry and really felt really dangerous to me there was no one else in the room to do it you know and there's but this has happened so many times in my life where there's like when I'm in a predicament that feels like I'm trapped and that there's no way out and this you know it comes around on the on the guitar again and again in life these moments where it's like oh my god I'm trapped I'm trapped in this situation I'm trapped in this relationship I'm trapped in this job I'm trapped in this this interaction I'm like I'm trapped trapped trapped 100% of the time for me it isn't that I'm trapped it's that there's a truth I don't have the courage yet to say and the trap will end when

I open the door and let myself out of the trap and the only way out is to tell the truth and I'd most of time rather stay in the trap we're taught to be people pleasers right like we're taught to keep the peace and it's something that Raya has taught me through your work is that sometimes telling the truth while it might seem like the harder thing at first it is the only way forward what was raya like with telling the truth you know what was she like hiding her true feelings from people she was you know this is why i fell in love with her i mean we often fall in love with people because they possess or contain some aspect of ourselves that we just don't have or feel like is so out of reach. And Rhea was the most honest person I've ever known in my entire life and the

most fearless in the face of honesty. And, and also had a great love for the truth. She used to say, the truth has legs at the end of the day. It's the only thing that stands. It's the only thing left standing in the room after all the bullshit and all the drama and all the manipulation and all the trauma and all the dissembling and deceit, you know, the truth will still be standing there in the room at the end of the day. It doesn't move. It can't be moved. And so when she was ever in any conflict with anybody, she would say, dude, since the truth is where we're going to end up, let's just, let's just fucking start with it. Let's just fucking start with it. Like it's where we're, it's where we're going to end up, you know? So let's just, you put your truth down

and i'll put my truth down and like let's get to it sooner rather than later don't spare my she'd always say like don't spare my feelings i actually want to know she was one of the few people in the world who when they say i would rather know the truth even if it's terrible she meant it you will very rarely hear me say those words like my like i don't know i don't want to know the truth i want you to make me feel good i want you to tell me what i want to hear i want you like lie to me like lie to me don't don't i can't handle it you know i literally did this to my my husband like two days ago i had two outfits i knew what i wanted to wear and what looked better and i said i said baby which one like which one should i wear which one looks more flattering which one

looks better which one are you vibing and i was like tell me the truth it's important and he picks the other outfit I was like why would you say that I was like I was like you could tell I was leaning towards the other he's like I can't win he's like I told you the truth I think Ray's truth-telling also extended to being like a bit of a protector for you you told a story in the book about trigger warnings that I genuinely laughed out loud at I thought it was one of the funniest and obviously I could be projecting here we're very in the world of what you were talking about can you share the story of what happened oh my god the trigger warning so Rhea wrote her own memoir called Harley Loco and I'm always directing people toward it because I'm I'm

like you know if you liked Rhea that you met in my book like go read her story in her own words of her own life and you'll love you'll love her even more but when her book came out she had her insecurities like she like we all have you know and one of the reasons that we vibed so well together when we were vibing well together was that the same things that she was insecure about I'm weirdly tremendously confident about and the things that she was tremendously confident about and I'm terribly afraid of and so together we made like a very powerful duo because like I'm pretty close to creatively fearless like I'll I'll write anything I'll I'll dance I'll sing I'll make art I'll like whatever I'll show I don't mind being vulnerable it takes a lot of vulnerability

to be that creative. And I'm accustomed to being vulnerable, so I don't really care. I'll do it. And Rhea was so tough that that toughness actually made it more difficult for her to be creatively vulnerable. And I had no toughness to dissemble, so vulnerability and creativity are easy for me. But she wrote this memoir called Harley Loco about her life on the streets and addiction. And she was really nervous about it when it came out. And she was nervous about doing events. And she was nervous about taking questions from the audience and nervous about interviews. And so I was like her cheerleader, you know, just like, just get out there and tell the truth. So the first event that she did for her book was at this bar on the Lower East Side. And it was part of a reading series called Voices from the Edge. And I encouraged her to read the opening chapter of her book, which is harrowing. Like, it is harrowing. It's about her basically getting kidnapped and assaulted by a guy during a drug deal gone wrong and then managing to escape and steal all his money on the way out. it's funny running down the streets of New York with no pants on waving a giant wad of money and

being like I got all the money you know like it's just insane so she's I'm like read that I'm like read that section so she reads it and it's you know it's it's violent and it's I mean it's like watching a Tarantino film like the first chapter of her book and after the event and this was I don't know 12 years ago sort of different culture than than where we are now this woman came up to us, recognized me, came up to her after the event and said, what you read was extremely disturbing, very traumatizing, could be very traumatizing to somebody who they'd had similar kinds of experiences of assault. And you really should have given a trigger warning before you read that material. And then she looked at me and said, and if your friend didn't know what a

trigger warning was, Ms. Gilbert, then you certainly should know. Now, I at that point had never heard the term and Rhea had never concerned herself with whether the things that she said were triggering to people for her entire life and but it was what what turned the night was the woman going after me you know like well you should have known Miss Gilbert and Rhea backs this woman into the wall and says listen bitch she's like if you didn't want to get triggered tonight maybe you shouldn't have come to an event at a lower east side bar called voices from the edge you know like you don't want to be triggered by the material like and the women started protesting and rea said did it even happen to you like the thing that i described did it even

did it even happen to you like have you ever had this experience and the woman's like no and rea's like well you're not going to make me ashamed of telling my truth she's like so you're just like blasting us for some shit that didn't even ever like happen in your life she's like listen bitch that shit that you're calling triggering to you that's my life that's my fucking life that i'm telling in my story and you're not going to make me feel ashamed of speaking my truth and telling my own story and if you can't enjoy it just get the fuck out good on it and then she just turned around and she's like babe you want another like you want another beer you know like she's just completely like I'm like how did you just do that like she was so that was so easy for her like it

was so hard for her to write the book but it was so easy for her to have interactions like that so for me as somebody who's world-class olympic distance people pleaser terrified of conflict like how amazing to walk into a room and have Rhea in the room you know and be like well she's gonna handle whatever happens well that's that's interesting I want to talk about that you being a people pleaser. I want to talk about the effects of being a love addict and what effect that has on validation and approval and exactly what you just said, being a sycophant, wanting to people please all the time. Well, it all goes together, I think. And it all comes from, I think if I were to boil it all down to causes and conditions, we could say that it all comes from a feeling of I

am not safe here. I am not safe here on this planet. I am not safe here in this room. I'm not safe here in this family. I'm not safe here in this body. So what do I have to do? Who's going to keep me safe? Who's going to make me feel secure? And I certainly cannot ever make these people and people to me have always felt really frightening. I can't like these people are volatile and they're, you know, like I have to just soothe them and Zamboni them. Like it just calm everybody and like make sure that nobody ever goes off. Like, and that's an enormous amount of energy that I'm taking out of myself to monitor, manipulate, manage, and mother everybody in the room to make sure that nobody ever has a reaction that I can't handle. What's been really incredible

for me about coming into recovery, and I think the opposite of sex and love addiction for me, is a life of emotional sobriety and absolute self-accountability. And the self-accountability means I'm in charge of my own safety. If a situation isn't working for me, it's my responsibility to learn how to use my voice and say, this isn't working for me. If the answer is no, then the answer is no. If people are going to be unsatisfied with me and that's triggering for me because someone's mad at me or doesn't like me as much anymore, then that's my work is to work on the part of me who is in trouble inside, not to try to manipulate the other person to have a feeling about me. So the remarkable gift for me of writing this book and owning this story and the

unexpected gift of it, part of it was going, you know, Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist said, the cave you fear to enter is the one that holds your treasures, right? So like the fact that I didn't want to tell this story for so long, that it was the cave that I feared to enter, that I didn't want to revisit this. And then I did. And then I put it out there in the world. And like, you know, you know, the book is super intense. And the reactions that people are having to the book are super intense in lots of different directions. And what happened in the last couple months being out here talking about the book in public and being judged, you know, and being reviewed and being critiqued and being discussed and being condemned sometimes and

being praised sometimes and having some people say, this book is really heroic and you honored Rhea and your bravery is incredible. And other people say, this book is really exploitative and you've betrayed Rhea and you're an emotional coward and a profiteer and whatever else and everything in between, but actually not much in between. It tends to just be, this book is very polarizing. It's extreme. The book is extreme. And so the responses have been extreme. And something occurred in the last few months where there was so much of it and the views were so polarizing and so polarized. And I don't read, I haven't read a single review or article about the book, but I hear things and, you know, stuff gets in or, or I get direct criticism from people or

whatever, but something happened where, and like, this may seem very fundamentally obvious to some people, but for someone like me, this truly is a miraculous awakening where I was like, oh, it's a really dangerous thing to base my concept of myself upon what people say, because how in the world am I going to hear in one day you saved my life with this book you are my hero and how could you possibly do this to your dead wife and she doesn't even have a voice in what you revealed about her and you're out here profiting from it you know like and you're a fucking fraud like so I'm getting that on the same day so if I'm orienting my sense of my well-being based on what people outside of myself are projecting at me, I'm going to have

a nervous breakdown. I'm just going to die. You can't. There's no consensus. And it made me remember this incredible quote by Georgia O'Keeffe. And she said that before each of her painting exhibits, she would go into the gallery by herself and she would walk around and look at the art alone once it was hung on the wall once it was lit and she would come to her own conclusion about the art and it was interesting because in that quote she never said what the conclusion was but she that was her private thing she just came to her own conclusion about it and then she said once she arrived at her own conclusion about the work all of the flattery and all of the criticism went down the same drain. And in her words, I was quite free. And something happened in the last few

months where for the first time in my life, I'm just as uninterested in the criticism as I am in the flattery. Like I'm like, we're putting both of these down the same drain because neither have anything to do with me. They're a reaction that somebody is having within themselves. Pepita just came in and wants to say hi we'd love to see you to see for Peter Liz firstly congratulations because as someone who has a bit of an unhealthy relationship with validation oh my god I can only imagine how hard that would have been for you to switch the tap off because what a quick way to get that little validation buzz is reading all the five-star reviews like yeah but it's a quick way to send yourself into a spiral too and we speak about this all the time like we've been

doing this podcast six years had over 100 million downloads and I say that just because I need to really set the scene of how large it is and how many people it reaches because the transition from when we were smaller and we had our ecosystem and we had our echo chamber and we had the people that supported us no matter what that transition when you get a little bit bigger and you start to get polarizing thoughts not everyone's going to agree with you anymore not everyone's going to like you that was a really hard place to be a couple of years ago because all of a sudden you're getting the criticism you're getting one person might hate me and and love Laura or Keisha one might hate Keisha and love me or disagree with your opinion and when you get sucked into reading

those responses it can send you downwards very quickly and I we had a conversation recently Keisha and I and we sort of live by the fact now as long as you are truly putting out something to the world that you believe in that is your truth and that you love that's enough because you are never ever going to be able to please everybody and if you start to be a chameleon to fit somebody else's mold it's going to backfire because 10 minutes later as you just said the mold looks different yeah and there are certain people who I was like oh the only way they're ever going to be happy with me is if I never speak or write another word again and even then they won't approve of me But they won't be happy then.

They just won't be triggered because my face and my name won't be in their vision screen, right? But, like, there's nothing in the entire world I'm going to be able to do to earn the love approval, validation, and acceptance of that person or that group of people. And am I a hero or am I a villain? No. You know, neither. I'm a sex and love addict. I'm a sex and love addict in recovery. I'm a codependent in recovery.

Let me live. who is using who is using the gift of writing and communication to to write my way into an understanding of my my own life and you know one of the very first things I said in the book is quoting a line that we often say in 12-step rooms when which is take what you like and leave the rest you know and if there's nothing in here in this book for you then it's not for you and that's okay. Liz what does emotional sobriety look like in practice like what parameters have you had to put on your life. You know, you talk about addiction. Alcoholics have to abstain from alcohol. Addicts that are addicted to substances have to stay away from substances. What have you

got to stay away from? Well, I've got to stay away from people who are in relationships with other people. That's a big one for me. And I've got to stay away from emotionally unavailable people. I've got to be very mindful of when I'm going into fantasy. And I can go from zero to a hundred in fantasy really, really quickly. So I have to be aware like, oh, I'm in fantasy right now. Like I just got triggered into fantasy right now. And I've got tools that bring me sort of back into the expression that they say is like, keep your head where your feet are. You know, it's like I'm here. I'm not in 10 years from now. I have a thing called a dating plan that I, that I wrote with the help of my sponsor and with some fellows. And it's like a four page document. That's

basically like Liz's best practices for safety. And it's, and it's truly for my safety, but it's also a public service. It's also for the safety of other people. And so it'll say something like no week long first dates. My favorite thing to do. It's like, I'm going to meet you. We're going to disappear into each other, you know, and wake up a week later and I'm already fully committed to somebody who I actually really don't know. And you planned your future. Yeah. A lot of it is like of putting on the brakes, you know, putting on the brakes. Like I've got things like I'm not allowed. This is, these are mine and this is just based on my patterning, but it's like no one moves into my house. Like no one moves into my house unless we have been together for two years. You

keep your space. I keep my space. We can go on vacation together. We can visit each other, but like, cause I'm so fast to, and again, this is just my own thing. Other people's dating plans would look differently but that's my pattern it's like i'm coming i'm showing up for the second date with the u-haul and we're moving in and so it's like we're slowing down we're slow like it's all about slowing down like not introducing somebody to my family who i've been with for two weeks and be like this is my new fiance they needed somewhere to go for christmas yeah you know and it's like no no no no no no like and and no mixing bank accounts no you know and then there's there i have these sort of bottom lines of like who I won't be with, you know, like nobody who has an

active addiction, nobody who is still reeling from their last relationship and not, you know, not over it yet. You know, nobody who suffers from untreated depression, nobody who has done less work on themselves than I've done on myself. You know, like I'm not here to be the, to do the emotional labor in the relationship because you didn't want to do any emotional labor on yourself. so basically my dating plan takes all the fun out of I was about to say asking for a friend is life more boring now like where do you get pleasure well yeah and well no it's not no let me let me put it this way when I came into the rooms of recovery and I put it down meaning I surrendered my entire life strategy for survival I'm like I'm not doing I'm not gonna do any of

these things anymore. Life felt both boring and extremely stressful because what happened was that I had to feel everything that I had been doing all that stuff to not feel. And so it was this combination of tremendous anxiety and tremendous boredom. And I've heard from people who have been in withdrawal from substance abuse that that feels like that for them too. Like the world's fucking boring and you're anxious. And what it is, is just like, I'm not well, I've never been well. And all of this boredom, restlessness, the big book of AA calls it restless, irritable, and discontent. All of that restless, irritability, and discontent that I've been covering up with excitement and with thrills and with chasing unavailable people and with intriguing and with flirting and with sex and with all that stuff, now I have to actually feel those feelings. And that was a really hard year or two, really, really, really hard. But I had never gone through withdrawal before. I had never allowed myself to feel pain. I was using people so that I wouldn't have to feel pain. All it ever did was bring more pain, but then I would just find someone else to get rid of that pain with. But once I got in there and then saw the parts of myself that were unhealed, that was unhealed trauma, and once I honestly met my little version, my little eight-year-old version of me, and she looked up at me one day and was like, will you adopt me?

and I was like yeah I've been like farming you out for all these other people to take care of but you're actually mine you're my little spirit you're my little me and when I took accountability for her and when all the parts of me began to trust me and realized that like sober Liz can actually take better care of Liz than any other person in the world can that's what emotional sobriety looks like it's like I'm showing up for my own care and then the boredom was gone and the anxiety was gone and now I'm at this place where I'm like my life is so rich and calm and interesting and creative and full of love that like if you told me someone was moving in here tomorrow I'd call the police like I'd be like oh my god no except for the home invasion it's also really

it's hard when your comparison was your relationship with Raya which was just so wild and intense and tumultuous and like coming off the back of that into a stable and healthy relationship, even if you weren't hyper aware and had your dating plan in place, I feel like anything in comparison is going to seem quote unquote boring because there's nothing that would ever compare to that relationship. But are you really upfront with, you know, somebody that is in AA when they enter a new relationship or whatever it is, they're, they're honest. Like, Hey, I, I, I mean, I, I've had an addiction to alcohol. I don't drink.

Are you really upfront with that? I guess you probably don't have to be. Cause you've got a bestseller book and every podcast. Yeah. But do you have those conversations? Like your plan? Do you just direct them to the podcast? You're like, listen to this, come back to me and we'll work it out from there.

Um, no, I mean, this is as upfront as you can be, you know, like I'm, I'm going to lead with it, but I, you know, just as you should tell someone, if you have a veneer, disease or an std you should tell someone if you have an addiction yeah you know because they get to decide whether they want to mess with that and the only reason to withhold it would be to control the flow of information so that you could control their opinion of you and that's another thing that i try really hard not to do anymore is to try to manipulate other people's opinions of me so the easiest way to do that is to just be really really honest raya was right Liz and please only answer this if you're comfortable too but I mean I feel like you're

comfortable talk about everything where are you at with that are you wanting to you know have another relationship are you currently in that position I am for the first time in my life I'm like oh god no please no it's really difficult for me at this moment and that may change but it's really difficult for me at this moment to even figure out what the value add would be if you take away all the stuff that i used to get high on right and part of the dating plan is like you're not allowed to get high you're just allowed to like meet somebody like and if you take away all that stuff then what i'm left with is do you want a companion do you want to share your life with somebody and no I don't like as of this moment that as of this moment of recording like I do not

I do not want a companion I do not want to share my life with anybody I want to share my life with my friends and I want to share my life with my recovery community and I want to share my life with my neighbors and the people of the world who I visit when I'm traveling but I don't want to share my home with anybody and i don't want to share my bed with anybody like in a way that would signify like a real relationship and what that entails you know i'm not talking about like the fun exciting wild bits i'm talking about like do you want to be negotiated like in in a situation where every decision that you make you have to run through another person no um no thank you I do not. I don't want to have to ask somebody if it's okay that I go to Costa Rica for two

months this winter. I just am going to Costa Rica for two months this winter. I don't want to have to ask somebody if it's okay if I buy this rental property. I don't want to ask somebody where my money should go. I don't want that. One of the side effects for me of recovery in unexpected ways is that my friendships have gotten so much richer because I wasn't really that available as a friend before. I loved my friends, but I was always in drama. I was a drama addict. So a lot of what I would call friendships were me just trauma dumping, you know, calling somebody and just barfing my drama all over them, not taking their advice and going out and doing more drama, right? And then coming to them in tears and crying on their couch and needing them to feed me pizza

and boost me up so that I could go out and do it again, you know. It gets old quickly as well. It does, right? All right, Brittany. No, but it's – I thought it earlier when I didn't say it. If we go right back to the start when you said your friends came to you and they were saying, you have an addiction, you need help, and you said, I got really angry at that.

I got really pissed off at that. And I can only imagine that is because, and I know everyone listening right now, has someone in their life like that. and of course you're always going to be there for your friends but when i say it gets old there's only so much sometimes a friendship can withstand when there is one person that is just doing the same thing over and over and over and we know that's the definition of insanity and you can tell them a hundred times if you go back there to the guy that is abusive to you you're going to end up back here and they do and there comes a point where your friends like go to fucking

therapy like i like i can't keep doing this you know when it's years and years and years and it's this vicious cycle and that's that's what I mean by when I say it gets old quickly like if you keep coming back to your friends and you're refusing to take any advice and you've just said when you did finally take their advice and you went to therapy your whole life has changed well when I went to recovery because I had therapy yeah but when I went to when I went to addiction recovery that's when my whole life changed and then now I'm like one of my great character assets is that I'm a really good friend yeah I have a real talent for friendship it was just buried underneath all of this other stuff that I was up to. And so somebody, once I heard somebody in the rooms

that I go to say, everything I used to think I had to try to get from one man, I now know that I can only get from a group of women. And I love that. So I have this group of women who I'm part of who are my female friends and they uplift and support my life and are so nourishing that it's like would I want to bring anybody up at this moment no and and also honestly I've done enough of it for like 10 lifetimes you know and I I would also I would also caution someone like if somebody came to me and I wasn't me and said I'm dating Liz Gilbert I would be like are you you you really want to do that no I disagree to go well for the people who you know like do you Do you want to be anyone's fourth spouse?

No, Liz, you're like honey. You're a catch. Smooth and sweet and every time you go back to it. Yeah, true addictive. No, I say you and I have joked, Liz, before, but I'll say it again. Like you just need a my relationship. You've got the love. You've got the companion, but he lives in another continent.

You don't have to see him that much. You can still meet up and have a great trip. You are living the dream. You are living the dream. Actually, I have a friend, my friend John Hodgman says the ideal marriage, and he's been married for years and a very solid marriage, he said, but the ideal living arrangement is that my wife and I will each have our own villas separated by a reflecting pool. You watch. I will move to be with my husband eventually. No, you watch.

We have the best, healthiest relationship for years. We'll live together, probably divorce within six months. We'll be like, oh, this isn't as good as I thought. Don't tell him that. well Liz we could talk to you forever and I personally would love to I would love to continue talking to you for a long time your book meant so much to me and I know that you know you're not looking for the validation but thank you from deep down it's just like from the bottom of my heart thank you for putting it mad I'll take it thank you for putting into words some of the

things that you know I've thought about myself and putting them in a way that was honest but not critical like not self-critical and I didn't hate myself for relating to it and you can listen to Liz's book all the way to the river it is sold literally everywhere anywhere that sells books if you want to get the audio version that's how I enjoyed it and thank you so much for joining us again on the podcast oh my gosh anytime anytime you're so articulate and intelligent and lovely you watch my instagram bio change today liz gilbert articulate you are and i just i wish both of you just the greatest greatest happiness and just keep taking care of your own hearts and um all will be well and i know we didn't get to speak about it but i did find it really

fascinating when you spoke so openly about your um your addiction and need for validation from instagram likes from making sure the right people saw what you were doing and you became obsessed we've seen how many views on your reels and I found that fascinating because a lot of people do that whether they want to admit it or not and you sort of went offline and you said you don't read your reviews anymore you don't care for the validation unless it comes to you organically and so we wanted to bring it to you organically you are one you are wonderful your writing is incredible and I know that you just joke about the fact that no one's going to want to date Liz Gilbert that's absolutely absolutely incorrect and I hope that whatever brings you love in the

future and whatever it looks like i'm sure it's going to be the most wonderful things thank you so much thank you both you are just both a delight and thank you thank you thank you and lots of love to everybody out there