This may sound like an outrageous response to Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, “All the Way to the River,” about the destruction and pain of codependency and love addiction, but it filled me with joy, peace and a renewed spirit.
Someone finally told the truth about what it means to experience the depths of despair of these often-minimized complexities. I have been saying for years that codependency kills people, and nobody gets it. But thanks to Gilbert, they do now. When she writes that she was ready to kill her partner or kill herself — that is where the addictive and codependent relational dynamic ends.
I have worked with addicts and their families for more than 30 years. It became clearer and clearer to me after thousands of sessions that the co-addict can be in as much pain — or more — than the addict. Not only do they often not believe they have a problem (which is the problem), they keep focusing on the fantasy that if only their partner would change or get better, then they would be happy. Which, by the way, is a complete delusion. Gilbert so beautifully illustrates that it is not only about the addict getting well; it’s about the partners who sacrifice their own lives to “save” their loved ones who need to transform too.
Throughout the book, she describes the trajectory in her relationship with her wife, Raya — from friendship to “love” to obsession to addiction to loss of self to insanity — all in the belief that she is “helping.” This is the insidiousness of the codependent. The belief is that we are helping or fixing or saving someone when the real truth is that we are not only NOT helping the person, but we are abandoning ourselves to the point of self-destruction. I call this “The Big Lie.”
We are participating in these enabling and disastrous behaviors because we can’t tolerate our own underlying feeling states or witness others’ suffering. We compulsively feel the need to save another, when we really need to save ourselves.
Liz describes the utter insanity around her own denial — not unlike the addict. She dated an alcoholic/addict who was relapsing but her own addiction to her partner overrode the reality of what was truly happening in the relationship. The fears of abandonment, loss of control, losing her love, making her upset, having to be on her own and needing to feel her own feelings kept her from being in reality.
Just like with an addict in denial of their addiction, Gilbert acknowledges her own denial about what was happening in the relationship; until she got to the point where she was fantasizing about killing her by placing fentanyl patches all over her wife’s body.
Intermittently throughout the book, Liz struggles with her own level of self-blame and the expanding awareness of her participation in the relentless destruction of active addiction as she battles with her own recovery from sex and love addiction. This is a painful place to be. She concludes that she did not make her partner relapse; AND she participated in the insanity of her addiction as much as Raya did. She owns it. This is the key to the codependents healing and a very, very powerful statement.
My experience with seeing codependents for years is that it is very hard for them to own their piece in the progression of this catastrophic decline. It’s so much easier to blame the addict. We don’t make anyone pick up alcohol and drugs, but we can influence a relationship dynamic. It is not as easy as just “Letting Them,” like some previous authors have suggested.
This dynamic is the result of years of training in a particular relational interaction — out of the beliefs, perceptions and interpretations of oneself and others developed by early child/parent paradigms. These are unconscious survival behaviors created out of the need for safety. We become detached with our denial, which makes it difficult to recognize our patterns; only to become crystal clear when we hit a bottom in a relationship.
Thank you, Elizabeth Gilbert, for telling the truth and bringing light to this pervasive and culturally acceptable relational paradigm — and illustrating the destructiveness to both people when one thinks it’s their business to solve others’ problems. Give people the dignity of figuring out their own lives.
#QUITLIT Sobees Score: 4 out of 5
Want to hear Senior Sober Curator Contributors, Dr. Sarah Michaud and Amy Liz Harrison, deep dive into the book?
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