Love Addiction Quotes

“My fear of abandonment is exceeded only by my terror of intimacy.”
― Ethlie Ann Vare

“Just because something is addictive doesn't mean that you will get addicted to it. But . . . if your stomach ties up in knots while you count the seconds waiting for a phone call from that special someone . . . if you hear a loud buzzing in your ears when you see a certain person's car (or one just like it) . . . if your eyes burn when you hear a random love song or see a couple holding hands . . . if you suffer the twin agonies of craving for and withdrawing from a series of unrequited crushes or toxic relationships . . . if you always feel like you're clutching at someone's ankle and dragged across the floor as they try to leave the room . . . welcome to the club.”
― Ethlie Ann Vare

“Maybe [the ocean and I] were on the same side, comprised of the same things, water mostly, also mystery. The ocean swallowed things up--boats, people--but it didn't look outside itself for fulfillment. It could take whatever skimmed its surface or it could leave it. In its depths already lived a whole world of who-knows-what. It was self-sustaining. I should be like that. It made me wonder what was inside of me.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“A frequent exchange of text messages is not a relationship. It's not even a pen-pal.”
― Ethlie Ann Vare, Love Addict: Sex, Romance, and Other Dangerous Drugs

“PRAYER FOR A RECOVERING CODEPENDENT

What is missing from your constitution right now, my darling, is not empathy, but courage.

It takes fortitude not to leap into somebody else’s suffering with them and call that love.

It takes faith to know that you are not the appointed arbiter of anyone else’s journey.

And it takes humility to admit that you cannot control anyone—
that you might not even understand what you’re looking at.

What you call a “crisis” might be someone else’s awakening, ten thousand lifetimes in the making.

(The awakening, my love, might even be your own.)

And what you call “care” might be dangerous disruption of an ecosystem of unimaginable delicacy.

How hard that person’s soul might have fought its way through the cosmos for millions of ages
to finally arrive here—on the final precipice of egoic collapse.

How close they might be, at last, to freedom.

All they have to do now is shatter.

Maybe stand back.

Maybe let it happen.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“It was becoming evident to me that addiction is addiction is addiction—that all the ways in which people binge, hoard, numb, act out, control, and self-medicate are just equally desperate attempts to cover up the same deep spiritual pain. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single room in the twelve-step universe that I don’t relate to or qualify for, at some level or another, because my anxious mind never stops looking for ways to escape its host of human dilemmas.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Stepping out of other people’s drama cycles was scary, weird, and difficult for me at first. I felt guilty for keeping the focus on myself, and I wondered how anyone could possibly survive without my overinvolvement in their lives. (Spoiler alert: They all survived. And I gradually started hanging out with healthier people.)”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“I know the voice of God the way a blind, mewling, newborn kitten knows the smell of its mother.

The voice said this: If you have arrived at a point in your life where you are seriously considering murdering yourself or another human being, there is a strong possibility that you have reached the end of your power.

I stopped walking.
I listened harder.
I leaned into the sound of God, offering me wisdom and guidance.

That being the case, continued the voice, perhaps it’s time you called somebody and asked for help.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Child, you keep demanding impossible promises from those who cannot even take care of themselves.
But what joy have you ever derived from being so dependent and unassured, so needy, lost, and afraid?
You keep saying you want to count on somebody—
but I say stop counting.
You keep telling me you crave security because the world frightens you.
But the world, my love, is what you are.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Image management” is something addicts care a lot about, and I am no exception.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Someone else said: “Guess what? A lot of drug addicts and alcoholics in recovery get cancer, or other terrible diseases, and they all have to figure out how to manage their pain while also staying sober in their program. Rayya is not the first addict who ever went through this, and she won’t be the last. She’s not terminally unique, so don’t let her trick you into thinking she’s some kind of special case. Every addict thinks they’re a special goddamn case. But there’s nothing special about her. She’s just an addict with cancer—like many, many others before her. If Rayya wants to die clean and with dignity, she needs to get humble, go back to the rooms, and work with a sponsor to find a pain management plan that will allow her to stay in her sobriety—but are we even sure she wants that? And if she doesn’t want that, there’s nothing you can do to make things better except maybe get the hell out of there.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Still another person said: “Rayya could very well die now behind a locked door as a degraded and angry junkie. That would be a very sad end for her. But there’s only one thing that could make that death even sadder—and that would be if you were sitting on the floor right next to her, also behind that locked door, trapped in that nightmare with her. That would be really tragic, because now we’re talking about two destroyed lives, instead of just one. Don’t let it happen.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Rayya had delivered a perfect death blow—because she, of all people, knew just how to kill me. She knew exactly where my deepest insecurities were hidden. She knew I’d received messages since childhood that my “emotional bullshit” was too much trouble for anyone to deal with. She knew I was terrified that I would always drive away the people I loved by being too needy, too clingy. She knew I’d spent most of my life trying to show people only the “good parts” of me because I was sure that if they saw the pain and fear and need that lurked below the surface, they would find me repulsive and reject me. She had in fact witnessed the most unlovable parts of me, and had once seemed to love them.

But now she was telling the truth: I was disgusting, and she hated me.

And it was with that wicked, blistering sentence—“I wish we’d never gotten together”—that Rayya had taken the last bits of my broken heart and ground them beneath the heel of her motorcycle boot, pulverizing me into grains even finer than cocaine. Grinding me down until there was nothing left of me.

And that was exactly what she’d meant to do to me—for daring to confront her.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Here’s the thing about withdrawal, from any drug, substance, person, or behavior: The reason it’s so excruciating is that not only do you have to feel the pain of losing access to that thing you desire more than anything else, but you also have to feel the pain of every other loss you have ever experienced along your life’s journey. All the previous failures, all the previous crashes, all the previous disappointments. It’s like a twenty-car pileup of failures on an icy highway, and there’s no way to get away from it. Worst of all, withdrawal forces you to feel your original suffering again—the deepest childhood grief or ancestral wound that started you out on this journey of addiction in the first place.

And who wants to feel that?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Addiction serves a purpose. It is medication for an aching soul, relief for a pained body, and escape from an impossible mind. Addiction is a pretty good survival strategy when all your other strategies for living have failed.

As Rayya used to tell me, “I needed every gram of heroin I ever took back in the day, or I would have never made it out of my childhood alive. I could not have survived without my buffer of drugs.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“But for anyone out there whose life is being ruined by an active addict right now, please allow me to say the one thing that I don’t think gets said strongly enough or often enough: it’s okay for you to leave them. Don’t get me wrong: Addicts are precious and suffering children of God, and they do not deserve your contempt.

But if you can ever save yourself from one—run.

It’s okay for you to leave them.

That’s what Rayya used to tell me, anyway, back when she was sober—or at least semisober. It has nothing to do with love, she said. Nothing to do with loyalty. Of course you love them, and you will always love them! But having the courage to cut off contact with an active addict is often the only way to survive their rampages—and it just might be the wake-up call that the addict needs, too.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“I remember once listening to Rayya counsel a friend whose younger brother was lost in heroin addiction. This woman kept trying to save her beloved sibling by paying for one rehab after another, by trying to get him jobs, by bailing him out of jail, by letting him borrow her car, sleep on her couch, exploit her financially, use her soft heart as a landing pad. She was wrung out by years of heartbreak.
I remember Rayya reaching across the kitchen table for this exhausted woman’s hand and saying, “Listen, babe. Let me break it down for you—you don’t have a brother anymore. He’s already gone. You need to understand this. There is no more brother, okay? What you have now is a vampire. I know it’s confusing, because this guy looks like your brother, and he sounds like your brother, but it’s a vampire. And that vampire will drain you of every dime and possession you have, and then he will discard you once there’s nothing left to take. And trust me—that vampire doesn’t give a shit about you. So you better start giving a shit about you, or else you’re gonna wake up one morning and discover that everything in your life is gone, including him.”

“But he could die if I cut him off!” the woman protested.

“Your brother is already dead,” Rayya told her. “And you might need to grieve that. But the only question now is whether he will ever decide to come back to life. That’s a matter between him and God. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

I also heard her tell somebody once, “You can love an active addict for sure—but they can’t love you back.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Attentive readers may remember that I had started attending twelve-step meetings when Rayya was on cocaine and my world was falling down around my ears. You may also remember that I’d hated every minute of those meeting—although I did take some notes.

You may not be surprised to learn, then, that I had stopped attending those meetings as soon as I could—which in my case meant: as soon as Rayya stopped using cocaine and started being nice to me again. Because all my problems were solved after that, right? I mean, why should I have to attend a recovery program designed to support people whose lives are affected by the addictions of others if my “other” wasn’t acting out in her addiction anymore?

And why should I have to attend meetings for sex and love addiction when I was actually getting love again, from someone I was devoted to? Anyhow, I’m way smarter than most people, and I had quickly breezed through all the literature—so I figured that I basically understood all the principles of these programs and had learned all I needed to learn. Obviously.

So I had walked out of the rooms of recovery in late October of 2017 like, Thanks for all the information, everyone—I’m all set now! Nice meeting you! I’ll take it from here!

Except that I wasn’t all set, because I have never been “all set.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“I was not just sorrowful that first summer after Rayya died but also, at times, enraged. It was not only anger at Rayya’s absence that I was feeling; it was anger at myself for how much of myself I had given away—and anger at what she had left behind for me to clean up. She had assigned me the task of handling the details of her estate, for instance, which did not turn out to be an easy job. Rayya had been both contradictory and grandiose with her friends and loved ones about what her bank account actually contained and how she wished her money and possessions to be distributed. With a furiously clenched jaw, I did my best to clean up the confusion she had left behind and to manage everyone’s frustration—including my own. The financial gifts that she had promised to her friends I paid from my own account, because her own account was pretty much empty. I paid off her credit card bills, too—although people told me this was a stupid thing to do. (“Why pay the bills of the dead? What are they gonna do? Dock her paycheck?”)

But martyrdom is a central characteristic of codependency, and so of course I paid her bills—not generously, mind you, but angrily. Victimly. “Why am I still down here serving you,” I remember shouting at Rayya in the woods one day, “when you get to float off into heaven and become fucking music?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“You can’t give an addict a plan because we can’t follow a plan—not even our own plans. (Especially not our own plans.) Until the miracle of recovery happens, we addicts only ever have one plan: Use.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“People often talk about crawling into the rooms of recovery on their knees, but when I turned to twelve-step for the second time, I felt more like I was walking in there with my hands up—like a career criminal turning herself in, ready at last to give up the game.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“As I listened to the other addicts share their life experiences, I began to hear the story of my own life, told in a hundred different voices.

I heard from people who’d had some of the same painful childhood experiences as me, which had led them into the same unmanageable behaviors and compulsions.

I heard from people who, just like me, had blown up marriage after marriage—their own marriages and the marriages of others.

I heard from people who’d lost their jobs, their sanity, or all their money and belongings because of their obsession with some person or another. (“I took one look at that guy from across the bar and said, ‘I would follow that man straight to hell’—and then I did!” said one woman, while the rest of us nodded in quiet understanding.)

I heard from people who had been living in desperate yearning for decades with partners who were emotionally unavailable, or who had lived their whole lives in degrading servitude to people who did not respect them or love them back, or who were pining in fantasy about relationships that had ended years earlier. I heard from people who had traded sex for love, or love for sex, or both for money.

I heard about insecure attachment style and avoidance and unconscious compliance.

I heard about emotional anorexia and cortisol addiction.

I heard terms I’d never heard before but that immediately made sense to me (because I’d been doing those things for years but didn’t know they had names): love bombing, trauma bombing, attention pulling, ecstatic recall, digital stalking, insta-macy.

I heard about assigning magical qualities to others and making them into your higher power.

I heard about mistaking pity, lust, or loneliness for love.

I heard about sexualizing our feelings of guilt, shame, fear, rage, and grief.

I heard about rape, abuse, pregnancies, venereal diseases, pornography, prostitution, suicide, violence . . .

I did not hear a single thing in those meetings that I could not identify with at some level. In fact, to this day, I have still never heard anything in any twelve-step meeting that shocks me. Whenever I hear people talking about their most self-destructive behaviors, I’m either like, “Yeah, I’ve done that” or “Yeah, I would probably do that” or “Yeah, I can see why someone would do that, given the chance.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“It was difficult to know where to find comfort, especially since I could no longer medicate myself with my oldest and deepest fantasy: that someday in the future a magical person would show up, fall in love with me, and fix everything.

Nobody would be showing up now.
There would be no fixing of anything.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“My own sober dating plan is approximately three pages long, and it includes such items as “NO WEEKLONG FIRST DATES.” My plan also forbids me from texting obsessively between dates, dropping any existing plans or projects because of a new relationship, falling into fantasy with someone I have met in my travels (aka not in real life), moving virtual strangers into my home, trying to rescue unrecovered alcoholics or drug addicts; buying expensive gifts for new lovers; or sharing bank accounts with anyone, ever.

If all this sounds boring, or feels like it removes the spontaneity and intensity from romance, that is exactly the point. Spontaneity, for sex and love addicts, is exceedingly dangerous, and intensity is something I am wise to avoid.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“My ultimate goal in recovery is not to end up in a healthy relationship with the perfect partner, my ultimate goal in recovery is to end up in a healthy relationship with myself.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Like all sex and love addicts, I can feel someone’s attention and attraction from a hundred yards away—hell, I can feel them from the other side of a continent.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“My mind was spinning around this inflaming and infuriating thought: Why can’t I be a normal person who does normal things like normal people?

That’s when I heard Rayya’s voice.
“Because you aren’t normal, babe,” she said. “You’re an addict. And addicts can’t do normal things like normal people.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“I read today that all addiction is a form of misplaced worship.
I get that.
And I’ve certainly done that.
I’ve mistaken the delivery device of heavenly pleasure for heaven itself.
And thus I have worshipped so many things— and so many people, too.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“I find these days that all I want for Rayya anymore—if you can be said to want anything for somebody who has been dead for more than six years—is that she be free. Utterly and totally free.

“True love always liberates the beloved,” says my friend Martha Beck, and only now do I feel that I understand the generous, unfettered spirit behind these words.

I want Rayya to be free from the need to take care of me or anybody else—even from beyond the grave. I want her to be free to vanish into the eternal mystery with all her ancestors, and to become music—because that is what she always wanted to be.

And I can feel that Rayya wants me to be free, too. She wants me to live autonomously and happily and peacefully on this side of the divide— in a world that I have finally come to accept as my own, and from which I am no longer trying to escape. (It’s not such a bad world, actually, once you surrender to reality, and once you finally start showing up for your own care.)”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“There is a prayer that we recite in those rooms that I love very much. It simply says, “Dear God—thank you for all that has been given, for all that has been taken away, and for all that remains.”

Like many gratefully recovering addicts, I stand in amazement at all that remains—astonished that I was allowed to keep anything, after all my many years of madness and acting out. By all rights, I should have lost absolutely everything in the course of my various and sundry maelstroms and upheavals. Many people with minds as disordered as mine have indeed lost everything.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River