We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - Elizabeth Gilbert on Losing the Love of Her Life

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

442. Elizabeth Gilbert on Losing the Love of Her Life  Elizabeth Gilbert comes to Glennon’s home to talk about her love with Rayya Elias—the joy, the devastation, and the truth-telling that came after. Liz opens up about the brutal reality of addiction—Rayya’s drug addiction and her own love addiction—and how their secret lives collided. This is a conversation about intimacy, betrayal, codependency, survival, and recovery. And it’s about how even the hardest truths, once spoken, can set us free. About Elizabeth: Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of nine previous works of fiction and nonfiction, which collectively have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, spent more than 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and been translated into more than fifty languages.  She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. With more than 20 million views of her TED Talk and 2.7 million followers on her social media accounts, she continues to be one of the most beloved and influential writers of our age.. Her new memoir: ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER: Love, Loss, and Liberation is available now.

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one being today we are talking with Liz Gilbert, which is already important to me because I love you and respect you so much. You are just like if you looked at my heart, a big portion of it would just be dedicated to you. Okay. So already it's important to me, but on top of that, what we're talking about today is your new book. which it's called all the way to the river. And this is an early interview, but I'm certain that even by the time it comes out, everyone's going to already be talking about it because it's the most brutal, it's the most beautiful and brutal and transcendent love story that I've ever read.

And it's the most honest and affecting thing that I've ever read. which I always think about every new book you put out, but this time I'm really serious. And because it is, I got to be close-ish to a lot of this while it was going on. We were kind of all in it together, although there is so much, as I've told you, I read it three times because there's so much that I didn't know that reading it felt I read it, the first time I read it, I read it like, like I wasn't even taking it in because it made me feel sympathy for my close people who read my books when they don't know all the stuff going on behind the scenes and how. So this weekend, I said to myself,

Glennon, this is the most sacred talk you've had on this podcast. And the way I used to I would have completed that sentence was, so you better get your shit together. You better freak out. You better. And so what I changed it to because I imagined you in my head was this is an incredibly sacred conversation. So you better relax about it. You better not prepare.

Yeah. You better not prepare. So here we are. Oh, sweetheart. Thank you for that. The part of my heart that has your name and face and essence in it. is exactly the same as the part of your heart that has mine and how do we even prepare for this conversation? I mean, this book is about stuff happening like this is where I think everyone

can relate to this. Ultimately, I think this book is about what happens when you find yourself in a situation despite all your preparation and all your like, I'm doing really well here at life and I'm going to handle this really well and I'm going to be good at this and I'm going to make sure I'm good at this and this is really important so I better prepare and then you look down

and there's no ground under your feet and then underneath the no ground there's like lava and underneath the lava there's crocodiles there's lava-proof crocodiles God those damn lava-proof crocodiles and you're like how

did this happen? You know, how did this happen? I made a whole bunch of choices because I thought that those choices were going to lead me to happiness, success, and well-being. And instead, I'm here with the lava-proof crocodiles. And I am at a point in my life where I actually do not believe that anybody gets to go through their tenure of life of Earth school without this happening. It might not be this exact thing, but like, oh my God, I thought this was going to be A, B, C, and D, and it's 19 green and barf. It's like not even, it's so far off the alphabet. You can't even use letters to describe it. So, yeah, I bet it was shocking to read it. The people who love me have been, have been shocked to read it. I was shocked to live it. I was shocked to

live it. And then I spent seven years trying to figure out what I could do to not have to write this book. And then it was just so obvious that it had to be told. And the only way to do it was the way you have to get through everything, which is just by telling the truth. Okay. So we'll start with telling the truth. First of all, I know, I mean, you lived this story. You lived it, your love story with Rea and then losing Rea. And then you wrote about it. But I know you and I know that you've also thought about how to talk about this. So where is the place that you would want to start? If somebody were, let's say they weren't going to read the book and only listen to this interview, how would you start to explain this situation? I think you just have to tell the

story of what happened, right? I mean, that's the thing I always tell people when they're, when they want to write something is just say what happened. And this book begins with a sort of vision dream that I had on my 54th birthday where Rea kind of appeared in my mind with a list of instructions from Beyond the Graves saying essentially, just say what happened. You know, just write this book and just say what happened and tell the people everything that happened. I mean, that was always her gift when she was sober and when she was in her sanity was this sort of fearlessness around just say it, just put it on the table so we can unpack it and take a look at it. So I would start this interview by just

introducing who I am and who she was and what we were to one another and what happened. Great. Do that. So I'm Elizabeth Gilbert. I'm an author. Yes, you are. I'm an author. Some of you, if you know the story, Eat, Pray, Love, know that at the end of Eat, Pray, Love, I fell in love with this kind and charismatic Brazilian man. And we came to the United States from Bali, where we met and got married. And I was like, great, I've got my life sorted out now. Like I went on the eight pray love journey. I think I got quite a bit sorted out there. But I was like, I'm 34 and I've figured everything. Yeah. Done. I know 34 is four. I think you know how life works now. And I have had my spiritual awakening and I've met this lovely

person. And then there, so then who Rea was. So Rea was somebody who I met because she was my hairdresser. We, she started as my hairdresser. I met her long. I met her long. before the pre-love journey. When I met her, I was in my first marriage. She was in a relationship with a woman who she would be with for a long time. We liked each other. We thought the other one was hilarious. No love at first sight story there. She was my hairdresser and then over the years she became a social friend and then she became a better friend. And then she moved out to New Jersey where I lived. She became my neighbor. And then she became my, I sort of became her mentor for writing. She became my mentor for living because of all the recovery that

she had as a drug addict in recovery. Her 12-step program was kind of the closest intimacy I'd had with what recovery looks like. And I was awed by it. The honesty, the self-accountability, the, yeah, the weeding out of your character defects. I loved all of that. And she was my guide in many ways to how to tell the truth because she was extremely good at it. So we became very reliant on each other. And then we became best friends. I mean, all of this is over the course of like 13, 14, 15 years. We became best friends. And then we became something that we no longer had a word for because we became each other's person. I was married to someone who I loved very dearly. And then that she's my person thing was starting to melt for me into this is

the love of my life. This is my, this is who I love in a deeper way than I've ever loved or trusted anybody. And that was extremely inconvenient and heartbreaking because I also loved my husband. And my decision for what to do about that was nothing, which was as good as I could do at that time. And so I just was like, this is, this is my little thing that nobody needs to know about, which I now recognize as being the definition of addiction. this is my little thing that I do that nobody needs to know about. I do know. I think a lot of people know because it would be very disruptive to everybody if they knew about this and they wouldn't get it.

And I don't want to give it up. So just a secret thing in your mind. Just a little secret thing that was like I love. That I have that I'm going to take to my grave that nobody is going to know about. The universe dislikes secrets and tends to do anything it can to blow them up. And the way this secret got blown up was that Raya was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and given six months to live. And now this little secret that I had of You Are the Love of My Life could no longer

be contained within my body and my spirit. The thought of her dying and I knew I was going to be her person through her death. I knew I was and I ended up being at her bedside. holding her while she died the thought of her leaving without me ever having said you are the love of my life was so appalling that's the word that my soul chose this is appalling i cannot permit this that i had to do the thing that my little secret self hates doing the most which is to tell the truth and so i told the truth and i left my marriage very swiftly and i went to be with rea until she died. And the thought that we both had was, we've got six months. We are going to have the

greatest love story that was ever told in that six months. And we did have that for about six months. But she lived for 18 months. And the secret, so if I had a secret engine, I feel like there's, there's a line I quote in the book by Garcia-Marquez who said, everybody has a public life, a private life and a secret life. And the secret life is, is the sort of operating system that's governing you that you have no power over. Yes. That is often driven by trauma and pain. So my little secret underbelly life was I'm terrified.

The world is the most frightening thing in the world. People are horrifying. Who's got me? Who's going to love me and hold me and protect me? And that's what has governed my life. Is that story, right? And Reyes was, I am so uncomfortable. in my skin. I hate having a body. I hate myself. What substances are out there to make me not

have to experience that? That's what governed her underbelly, her underworld, right? So her underworld came to the surface. My underworld came to the surface. And for her, what that meant was a return to active drug addiction at the end of her life. And I remember her nephew at the time saying, I wish Rea was a nicer junkie. She wasn't a very nice junkie. She was really, really, really mean and vicious and awful. And so this beautiful love story turned into this absolute nightmare of degradation where she went into her most awful incarnation,

which was vampiric, manipulative drug addict. and I went into my most degraded incarnation, which is desperate, people-pleasing, codependent who has no self other than to serve someone else with the hope. The way I've described love addiction and codependency is that it's this terrible mathematical equation, which is I am going to take all the love that I possess and I'm going to pour it into you with the hope that you will give me a crumb of it back. Yeah. So it's so inconcru it's not a direct. It's just bad math. Yes. It's bad math. It's just bad math. And then you become in that I become, I'll keep it on the eye, in that equation, what I become is somebody who has taken my entire treasure, given it to a pawn shop and then stands outside the locked doors of the pawn shop at night being like, can I have like one tiny bit of that back? Can I have back like one tiny bit of the love that I have poured into you? And so that's what we turned. That's what it turned into. And it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare that escalated to the point where I actually gave serious thought to trying to kill her.

Yes. It was so, it was the nightmare that I was in was so awful. I was like, I think I need to murder. I think I need to murder her because I won't be able to survive this. And that's the book. Okay. So I'm just, this is. So it's about addiction.

The book is about addiction and it's about love addiction and it's about drug addiction and it's about codependency and it's also about recovery. It is. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. Bull market, bear market. Rates will rise or fall. Inflation, up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball?

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I'm now thinking because the line that you just first quoted is something that jumped out at me hard, which is the everyone has a public life, a private life, and a secret life. Are you saying that the secret life is sort of your programming that you got as a child? It's your story about what you're doing on this planet. And does everyone have, is the hero of your secret story something that you make that then ends up fucking up your life, right? So like is the hero of Raya decided that the one that could save her from this awful story she had about her place on the planet was, drugs, you decided that the one that could save you from this terror that you had living on this scary planet was Reha. So there's like something that you're putting all, you create a

hero of your secret story. Does that sound right? That is so, I mean, Rea wrote a love song to, she wrote a love song to heroin once. I understand that. I understand that in my body. So tell us about that. That was her savior. It was her savior. And, and the, the thing about addiction of any kind and the compassion that I feel toward an addict of any kind, including me, who is a sex and love addict and codependent, Skid Row codependent, blackout codependent in recovery. Reyes said something one time that I thought was so moving. She said, I needed every gram of heroin I ever ingested or I would not have been able to survive on this planet until the moment that I didn't.

Right. And the moment that she didn't was when she entered into recovery and found a spiritual solution. The secret life cannot be solved by the things that are available of this world. Right. It just, it seems like such a good guess. It seems like, that's the thing I always think when I look back at my younger self. I'm like, oh, honey, that was such a good guess. Yeah, it was close. Oh, it seems like it should work. If you feel like I'm terrified, people are scared. who's going to save me and you meet somebody who presents as really strong and they love you, it just seems like that should do it, right? It seems like it's such an innocent guess.

And it does it in that it band-aids it, you know? And the way that I explain what sex and love addiction feels like in my body is that I use people the way other people use substances. So my entire, I hesitate to even call it a romantic history because it's not very romantic. My entire using history for 35 uninterrupted years. I had one little teeny break in the middle of Eat, Pray, Love, where I put it down, but then I picked it back up again. But from the age of 15, until the age of 50, what I was doing was trying to get my levels right and using other people to try to get my levels right. And living, as I did for a few months with an active drug addict, it was really, I can now see

it's very interesting to watch how addicts are constantly trying to get their levels right. Watching Rea, what's the exact dosage, she became such a chemist, what's the exact amount of cocaine that I can mix with the exact amount of, in her case, morphine and the exact amount of fentanyl and the exact amount of alcohol and the exact amount of cigarettes and the exact amount of sugar so that for like a minute I'm going to hit that thing where it's just I just feel good right so I did that but I did it with people and there were people that I used and I used that word very openly there are people that I used as stimulants and there were people that I used as sedatives so some people for me were like a cocaine high and other people for me

were like a Xanax. And I just went back and forth between stimulant and sedative and stimulant and sedative trying to find the person who could orchestrate my chemistry for me so that I would not have to suffer. Right? And it's such a good guess because it works like all addictions until it doesn't until the cost of using becomes greater than the benefit of using. Okay. Give us an example. Like for somebody right now who's trying to figure, who some bells are going off, if you are a person who uses drugs to be okay, and then that okayness is actually hell, we get that. We've seen that. The beauty of this book is that not a lot of people talk about sex and love addiction. Yeah. So this is going to help a lot of people. What might that look like in your past life? How does one use a person to make themselves be okay? So I'll give you an example of like, what? my pattern could look like. I'm in a relationship, I mean, not in a relationship right now, but let's just say, and you can point to this at various moments of my life, I'm in a relationship with somebody who my nervous system feels secure with. So this is somebody who is a reliable

source of attention. So one of the terms we use in my recovery program is lava, love attention, validation, and affection. Right. So that's what I'm seeking. I'm seeking the right chemistry of lava. Interesting that our conversation began talking about lava, how lava can become very dangerous, right? But that's what I'm looking for. So let's say I've found somebody and when I'm with them, my nervous system feels settled and sedated because I know that they're never going to leave me. I know that they think I hung the moon. Like, I know that I can count on them to be there. Right? And so I'm like, oh, this is good. I can. can actually function, like, this is a good drug for me. This person is a good drug for me.

It's a steady source. It's not a methadone drip. So that aching, empty, hollow place within me that is like, who's got me, who will love me, who is being met. But because I have a disordered nervous system, a trauma-informed disordered nervous system, and I, like many people who grew up in feeling very insecure and anxious, my system is accustomed to enormous amounts of cortisol and adrenaline. That also feels normal to me. So if I go too long without having huge dumps of cortisol and adrenaline, the excitement drugs inside my body, I start to feel unrecognizable to myself. I start to feel a little dead. I start to feel a little scared. I start to feel overly sedated and hungry for drama because drama is home.

And remind me to say something about home when we're done with this. Okay. So drama is home. So now I'm going to go out there in the world. And all this is happening below the level of consciousness, right? Like I always want to reiterate innocence, innocence, innocence. But below the level of consciousness, there's this engine that. It's like, I need stimulation now.

This is not stimulating enough. And then I'm going to find somebody who is dangerous and who is exciting and who has the possibility to annihilate me because there's a level at which my nervous system, there's a level of connection that it can't get unless there's a high that I can't feel unless I'm pretty sure you might kill me. Like, that's, that's the ride that my nervous system needs to go on after a while where it's like, this is not a hot. This is, this, I'm not getting high. Like, I'm getting soothed by this person, but I'm not getting high on this person. So now I'm going to go find somebody to get high on. And it's like, let's get on the motorcycle, like, go all the way to the

Pacific Ocean, baby. Let's like, you know, like, let's just ride or die. Let's go off this cliff together, right? And then we're going to go on that ride, which is usually short and devastating and ends with me wanting to kill myself. Because my nervous system gets used to these levels, these adrenaline dumps, this cortisol drum, this excitement, the drama. I'm a drama addict, right? So it gets used to these high levels of drama and then I need bigger and bigger and bigger, reward in order to get high. And now I'm not getting high off this person anymore. And then I have withdrawal, then I want to die. Now I'm going to go find another sedative. And who's going to comfort me now? Who's going to reassure me and be like, I won't kill you. I won't leave you. I've got you.

I'm your secure attachment. Oh my God. I'm going to fall with relief into you. Thank you. Now you're going to sedate my nervous system for me. We're going to have a little run. And then it's going to be like, but I need to get high. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. And for me, what a sober day looks like is when I am not using anybody. For me, emotional sobriety is I don't want to use another person to regulate my nervous system anymore because that makes me into a vampire. It makes me into somebody with no integrity. And it's the exact opposite of whom my soul wants to be. My soul did not come here to use people. My soul came here to serve. And I can't be of service when I'm using. And that's where my recovery comes.

comes then. So how, before we get to the recovery of it all, what is a story that you can tell us that what's your favorite story to tell about your love story with Rea? And then I want you to tell us a story that will explain to people where you got. Uh-huh. You know, like the love and then the rock bottom. I'll tell the story I told her memorial and you were there and it's my favorite story about Raya. It's my favorite story about Raya too. So we went to a funeral for the mother of a friend and at this funeral there was a drama happening. What I loved about Raya was her ability when she was insanity, sobriety, and recovery to be able to enter into any situation and meet it in this very simple, relaxed, courageous way that allowed the humanity of every person

in the story to be represented while at the same time holding boundaries and being protective. This is why she felt to me like the human embodiment of safety, and this story exemplifies it. So we went to this funeral for the mother of a friend. The drama that was happening was that a grandson of the woman who had died was a very troubled family member of this family. He was a young man in his early 20s who was a meth addict. He had recently gotten out of prison. He had a history of violence. He had a history of drug addiction. And the family did not want him to come to this funeral because he was a disruptive agent who everybody was afraid of. They hid the information from him about his grandmother

dying and about where the funeral was so that he would not show up. He found out about it and he showed up. And you know who's really scary. That guy. So for me, as somebody who's terrified of humans and their unpredictability and their danger, this is a code read. And like for a lot of people who were at that funeral, this was a code red. He was high when he got there and he was enraged and he was in grief. So all of that was happening. So he's like this nucleus of disruption, unpredictability, chaos, and possible assault. This is like the scariest person in the world to me. And he's the scariest person in the world to every single person there.

Reya takes a look at him and is like, oh, hello my brother. Right? Hello, my fellow drug addict. Hello, my fellow lost soul. Like, I see you. She walks right up to him, like in absolute ease. With such mercy. Without being pitying, just this like, I know you and I know who you are.

And she does this thing that she used to do with people that I loved and it makes me tear up now where she would take her fist very lightly and she would tap it, like I'll do it right now in my heart. She would just, when she saw me, she would just tap it on my heart and she would say, how you doing in there? Right? How you doing in there? I used to see her do it with her nieces, her nephews, her friends. How you doing in there?

Like she'd go right into the center because she'd go. could see she was so good at intuiting when somebody wasn't doing well in there. So she walks up to this guy and she does a little tap on his heart and she goes, how are you doing in there? And he just softened for a moment and looked like he was going to fall into her arms and tears. And I wish he had. And he was a little confused because he's like, I don't know who you are, but I also do. And then he just had this like, like exhale. And then it all came back. all the crazy came back and he kind of pushed her away and he walked away. And she came back to me and she was really thoughtful and she's like, babe, I want you to take all of our valuables and

lock them in our car and give me the key and lock the car. And then help me. We're going to go around this gathering and I want you to tell everybody here, don't leave anything that you have that's valuable unattended today. Keep your purse on you, keep your wallet on you, keep your car keys on you lock everything valuable in the car. Don't make a big deal out of it. Just tell everybody. So we did that. And then the funeral went off without incident. So that night, we're at dinner. And I said to her, thank you so much for protecting everybody from him today. And she got tears in her eyes. And she was like, oh, did you think, did you think that I was protecting us from him? she's like no no no honey i was protecting him from the very worst thing that he could have done

to himself today she's like he's probably going to die he doesn't have any support he's really far gone but there's still a window of hope that he might someday recover and get well and if he does as part of his recovery he's going to have to make amends to every single person he ever harmed and i don't want that she just started crying she's like i don't want that poor kid in addition to everything else he's going to have to face that he stole from people at his grandmother's funeral. So we were just helping him not do that today. That was my Rea. Like at her most sane, at her most compassionate, that's the woman who I loved and still love and who still guides me, right?

Who is able to protect not just victims, but they're predators, right? Like that's why I loved Trey. And now the dark counterpart to that is when she made the decision, let me go back here, long before she reintroduced drugs into her system, she made a decision to leave the rooms of 12-step recovery after maybe 13 years of sobriety because she was bored with it, here's the dark side, because she thought she knew better than everyone in the room, because she thought she was cured, because she thought she didn't need anyone. So that same person who had that beautiful strength that could, with such composure,

go into a room and hold everyone, also had this ego that was like, I don't need anybody. I'm the toughest, coolest, most badass. She was believing her own press, essentially, right? And which I fed into and a lot of people fed into. And she was like, I'm not an addict anymore. You know, I'm cured. I don't need a community. I don't need a program of recovery. I don't need a higher power. I am the highest power in the universe. I'm Ray of fucking Elias. So she left the rooms. And I don't know which one came first, but she started drinking and decided that she could handle it. Because she was so good at handling so many things, she was like, I can handle a reasonable amount of alcohol. And she started drinking first secretly and then in a very challenging way publicly

and deciding that she, that she could handle substances because she could handle a crazed meth addict. Why would it seem to her that she could not also handle intoxicating substances? And that's when she started her decline, which turned her at first, what's that at Scott Fitzgerald line, first slowly, then quickly. At first slowly and then quickly, she started to lose all of her attainments. All the dignity, integrity, compassion, and decency that she had built up in the sort of bank of her soul over years of recovery started to drop. So it's like, now I'm going to start keeping secrets. Now I'm going to start judging people. Now I'm going to start thinking I'm the fucking coolest thing in the entire universe. Now I'm going to start

using people. Now I'm going to start being manipulative. Now I'm going to start telling myself that it's okay if I do a little cocaine. And now I'm going to, I'm going to command, because she was very commanding, that somebody who I would have five years ago killed for, somebody who I would have protected, who I would have killed anyone who harmed. I'm going to demand that that person drive across city lines and get me a felony's worth of cocaine and bring it to me with money from their 18. am. And if you don't do that, I'm going to attack you. So that's who she became in her addiction.

So I got to see Rea at her finest and I got to see Rea at her worst. And she got to see me at my finest and she got to see me at my worst. And I feel like that was a contract that our souls made with each other long before the earth's crust cooled that we were going to come here and do this. And we were going to play this story out. all the way to the end, all the way to the river. And then we were going to have to get very, very, very honest. And then one of us was going to have to tell everybody this story. One of us was going to die and the other one was going to tell the story.

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It's interesting the public, private, and secret part because it's such a, one of the gifts we have in this book is, is Reyes journal. Because while she's outwardly, I've got this and she is blustery and she is her ego filled. and she thinks she's better than everyone. You share some things she wrote in her journal during that time that speak of a different secret, Reya. While she's saying all these things, I've got it, it didn't seem from her journals that she felt like she had it. Not even a little.

I have this story in my mind. Some man who was having tremendous mental illness shot himself in the heart and said to his wife, make them study my brain tissue, something is wrong. and he was correct, I feel like, and through that, there was so much that was learned about traumatic brain injury from concussion. He sacrificed himself to say, like, make sure someone sees this. I feel like when Rea gave me those journals, she was essentially doing that. Yeah. And saying, like, connect the dots. I'm giving you the clues so that you can see

and then you can show what it looks like when you keep your secret self-secret. You know, And those secret, and those journals were full of, it was years of, I mean, while she was out there saying she had no problem with alcohol, that it was no big deal for her to drink, that alcohol and drugs are not the same thing, that she's totally got this, that all these, in her words, rigid bitches from the room needed to calm the fuck down and stop being, you know, like let her just do her thing because she was doing it great. And while I was deifying her and making her into my higher power, she was also making those substances into her higher power, she was writing in her journal, am I losing my suburb? variety. Is it drinking? Is it as bad as heroin that I'm using alcohol? I'm a loser and a fuck up. Why can't I do life? Why can't I do life? You know, like, and then she just identifies it. She said, I'm, I go out there in the world and I put on this persona of mightiness, but secretly the insides are rotting. And she was the one who taught me that we are only as sick as our secrets, you know? But I think it's such a slippery slope. You know what I mean? It's such it's the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous describes addiction as cunning, baffling, and powerful.

And one of the things that addiction does is it's a disease that lies to you and tells you you don't have a disease. And one of the things that recovery does is it brings you into a room of a circle of people who start off by saying, I have a disease. I am an addict, not was, am. And that continual reiteration so that I can remember, don't start thinking that you're a normal person who can do things that normal people do. You can't. There's a lot of things that I can do really well. And there's some things that I cannot do at all. Because this is what will happen. Like what, what can you not do? And also, I just want to say, what a service I felt when I read the parts with Rea's journal is that it was another service that Raya was doing for addicts. Yeah.

Because I remember sitting with so many people during my addicted years where they were looking at me and asking about couldn't believe my behavior. Yeah. And I remember thinking, but I'm in here. Like having the feeling of like a, like Jonah and the whale. Yeah. I know all you can see. is this behavior, but I know I'm in here. And I felt like when I read those journals, it just made me emotional because I thought it was a way of Raya helping people who love addicts see that they're in there. It was just, I don't know, it just felt like another.

Tell us, how did you, we can now see Raya's rock bottoms. I know that what I knew at that time, I didn't know she had been drinking. I didn't know any of that part. I didn't know it was a slippery slope. I thought that the pain from the cancer led her to, I thought we went zero to cocaine. Right. I didn't know it was a slippery slip.

That was interesting. Yeah. When the cocaine was introduced, the drama escalated very quickly. Right. You know, within like three days when cocaine was in her system, she, the secret life was the only thing she was. The public life and the private life were gone and it was just that monster came out, you know. But there was a lead up to it. So you're looking at the love of your life.

She's dying of cancer. She's now completely full out addict, drug dealers, the whole cocaine everywhere. You're living in an apartment. How Liz do you shift from my partner is a raging addict and that's my problem to I am a raging addict and my partner's a raging addict and my partner's a raging addict? We have a double problem. Right? Not swiftly. You know, because I didn't, you know, so much of what recovery looks like in the relationship programs, and I'm in all of them.

You know, there's like 12-step recovery rooms for people who are in relationship with people who are addicts. There's 12-step recovery rooms for codependency. There's 12-step recovery rooms for sex and love addiction. There's 12-step recovery for like trauma family of origin stuff. I'm in all of them because relationships are where I get lost. you know but the the main thing that runs through all those programs is sort of these two questions what is my part in this and what can I do today for myself like that's that's what those are the questions right so where I was in this maelstrom of insanity with Rea during that

time was that I wasn't asking either of those questions. I was like, she's the problem and I have to fix it, which is those two things are the exact opposite of what is my role in this and what can I do to take care of myself, right? That's the thing. It's like constantly turning the attention back to what has my energy field done here to co-create this situation? And part of the reason that it took me seven years to write this book was because I couldn't see those things. You know, it took me, they say in the rooms that it takes five years of sobriety to get your marbles back, like it took, like it took so long to pierce through the veils of misunderstanding and chaos in my mind to be able to be like, oh, we co-created that situation.

We together, brick by brick, built a world in which we were living in this fancy penthouse apartment in the East Village in New York City that I gave to her as a gift so that she would have a beautiful place to spend the last months of her life and round the clock teenagers from the neighborhood are showing up with pagers and feed bags of cocaine that I'm paying for. Like we did this. this is our we built this you know this wasn't done to me it wasn't done to her it's like oh well look what we made you know um but it was a lot easier for me to see what she was doing than it was for me to see what i was doing and so that's a slow recovery for me um it didn't it didn't it didn't I mean, I kind of got it enough as it was going on to pull back a bit, but I was still blaming her a lot. I was still a lot of angry after she died, too, like years of angry of like, you stole our love

story from us. We had this beautiful love story that I was entitled to, and you took it, and you shoved it up your nose and shot it up your veins and in your feet, neck, and eyeballs. like, you know, when we were supposed to be having this other story. And I don't see any more that I am entitled. Okay, we're going to pause this gorgeous conversation right now. But don't worry, we're going to return to it on Thursday. And on Thursday, we're going to start by discussing the role a love addict plays

in creating the very trauma and drama that is ruining their lives. And from there, we'll talk about power, what it means to relinquish, it and how to honor the tiny but precious margin we're each given. We'll look at how codependency reverses the sacred order of things, putting other people first, and how recovery is about turning that order back around. We'll see you on Thursday. We can do hard things is an independent production brought to you by Treat Media. We make art for humans who want to stay human. Forever Dog is our production partner and you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram.