Page 56 of All the Way to the River

P eople 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.

“Hi, my name is Lizzy and I’m a sex and love addict,” I said aloud for the first time—and the relief I experienced in uttering these words is beyond my capacity to describe.

They call it “claiming your seat” when you identify yourself as an addict at last and join the community of recovery—and it is indeed a beautiful moment.

That moment of surrender, that moment of first belonging.

“Hi, Lizzy,” said all the other sex and love addicts, and I knew I was home.

This time, I didn’t sit next to the exit, or pull a hat down over my head to disguise my identity, or run out of the room as soon as the meeting was over.

I listened and took notes just as I had done on my first visit to the rooms, but I also raised my hand to speak, and I told the truth about myself.

I also bought the literature, collected some phone numbers for fellowship and outreach, and hung around to speak to some people when the hour-long meeting was over.

“I’m so ashamed of all the things I’ve done,” I told one old-timer after the meeting.

“Don’t worry about it, honey,” she said.

“Nobody ever soared into this room on the wings of victory. Just keep coming back. Stick with the women in the program and keep away from the men—at least for now. Stay in the middle of the herd and start working the steps. And listen for your higher power’s voice when you hear other people sharing.

You’ll begin to hear direction for your own life in the stories that other people tell.

Keep an open mind. It’ll all start to make sense eventually. ”

I came back for another meeting the next day, and the day after that, and the following day, too. 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.”

I told my own story, too—in one three-minute share at a time. I began sharing things in those meetings that I had never told anyone before. Things I had buried and denied. Secrets I had planned to take to the grave.

At first I found it frightening to be so vulnerable—especially because I’m a public figure, and I knew there were bound to be some people in the rooms who recognized me.

I was chilled by the thought that some of my fellows might run home and tell their friends that they had seen Elizabeth Gilbert in a meeting for sex addicts—and, worse, that they might share with others what they had heard me confess.

It didn’t help when two young women rushed me after a meeting one night to say, “We’re your biggest fans, and we just had to run over and say hello, because we can’t believe you’re here !

” (This, only minutes after I’d shared a story from my life that was so sensitive I’d never even told a therapist about it.) I felt horrifically exposed, and I walked home in tears, feeling awfully sorry for myself because it was clear that I would never be given the gift of anonymity.

I might very well have stopped going to meetings after that—except divine intervention, once more, saved me.

That evening as I was falling asleep, I heard God say to me: You’ve got a choice here, honey.

You can either protect your anonymity, or you can get well.

But you can’t do both. So you need to decide right now what’s more important to you: your privacy or your recovery.

Fuck my privacy; I needed my recovery.

So the next day I was back at that same meeting, with those same giddy fangirls in the room, and I told the truth about myself again. It didn’t matter what anyone else did with my secrets; I needed a place to share my pain openly and honestly—and I still do.

And I have not left the rooms since.