Page 6 of All the Way to the River

I t is revealing that I have said more about Rayya thus far in this book than I have said about myself, even though this is technically my book.

How very typical of me, to have immediately put my focus upon the other .

It is my way—it has always been my way—to become captivated by other people’s charisma and madness and wildness and beauty. To disappear into their stories and become hypnotized by their existence. To become lost in a trance of themness and to forget who I am, what I am, and where I stand.

So let me back up and tell you who I am, what I am, and where I stand at this moment in my life.

If this were a twelve-step meeting in the recovery fellowship that I attend on a regular basis, and if I were speaking about my own addiction, this is how I would begin: “Hi, my name is Lizzy, and I’m a sex and love addict.”

If I wanted to get more specific about the matter, I might add: “I’m also a romantic obsessive, a fantasy and adrenaline addict, a world-class enabler, and a blackout codependent.”

And then I would say, glancing around a room filled with people who might not look like me but who all act like me: “I belong here.”

I love those words: I belong here.

Those three words save my life, day after day.

“I belong here” means that I belong here on this planet, where I have seldom felt safe or normal.

It means that I belong here in this body, which I have rarely inhabited and which I have freely given away countless times (along with my heart, my time, my spirit, my home, and my money) to many other people to use for their own purposes.

It means that I belong to whatever divine force went through all the trouble to create me, and that my belonging is not dependent upon my “getting it right”—whatever that even means.

I belong here even when I get everything wrong.

Maybe especially then.

“I belong here” also means that I belong in my own story, even if it sometimes takes me a few chapters to get around to remembering that.

Most of all, though, it means that I belong in any room where addicts are gathered in a circle, humbly admitting to themselves, to each other, and to the Gods of their own understanding that they are powerless over their addictions and that their lives have become unmanageable.

There are not a lot of women out there who will publicly admit to being sex and love addicts, because it sounds pretty gnarly.

In fact, it is gnarly. I won’t get into salacious details here, but I will say that my addiction manifests as a sincere yet deeply misguided belief that somebody outside of myself will miraculously be able to heal me on the inside—thereby making me feel safe, cherished, and whole at last. In real-life terms, this translates as a desperate need to have my existence constantly authenticated and reauthenticated through a romantic partner’s touch, eye contact, verbal reassurance, acts of love, or mere physical presence.

How much reassurance is enough for me to finally feel secure?

There has never been enough, frankly.

There can never be enough.

My desperation to be loved is certainly outsize, and it has caused me to act out in ways that are undeniably insane.

Yet I suspect that parts of my story may feel familiar to many of my readers—especially my female readers, who, like me, may have been socialized since birth to believe that they did not possess much inherent value but were estimable only insofar as they were capable of making themselves attractive enough to be chosen .

Failing to succeed in this massively important project of proving yourself worthy of being chosen meant that you were a failure, and that nothing else you ever manifested would have much significance in anyone’s eyes.

Or at least that’s what endless generations of women across a multitude of cultures have been taught—and that’s what I was taught, too.

Sex has always been the fastest and most direct way for me to feel thoroughly chosen , but what I’m really looking for in my romantic encounters is the love, attention, validation, and approval (“LAVA” in the parlance of recovery) that other humans can sometimes provide, and without which I have often felt like I would quite literally die.

Thus I have spent my entire life searching for that magical person who will see me and save me—whether in the short term or the long term.

When my plan for salvation with one person didn’t work out (and it never worked out), I just went looking for LAVA with someone else.

If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, Well, that seems quite normal!

Everyone needs love, after all! , I can assure you that in my case it is not normal.

I am not talking here about the healthy expression of human intimacy; I am talking about a force within me that is both terrified and terrifying and that has always been completely out of control.

I have caused tremendous harm to myself and others through my decades of sex and love addiction.

I have inserted myself into other people’s relationships, and I have broken up families; I have lied to myself and others; I have hurt people whom I promised to cherish; I have crossed bound aries with friends; I have run away from people who cared about me and toward people who didn’t; I have cheated on people and allowed myself to be cheated upon; I have tried to buy love with money; I have triangulated, strategized, and manipulated; I have seduced people and discarded them, just as often as I have been seduced and discarded; I have committed and accepted heartbreaking degradation; I have committed and accepted shameful objectification; I have used other people’s bodies as drugs (both sedatives and stimulants); I have treated my own body with terrible disrespect—and I have never been able to stop.

The closest I’ve ever come to suicide is because of my sex and love addiction, and also the closest I’ve ever come to murder.

That may sound dramatic, but it’s incredibly common: People kill themselves and one another over matters of love, obsession, control, betrayal, and jealous rage every day.

Romantic breakups and divorces are among the primary causes of suicide, homicide, and addiction relapse, and science has now proven that people can literally die of a broken heart.

(The official medical term, by the way, is takotsubo cardiomyopathy .

In such cases, there is often no abnormal arterial blockage to be found—in other words, there is nothing wrong with the organ at all.

It’s just that the small arteries feeding the heart become physically crushed by the experience of acute grief, and this can lead to a heart attack or death.

This condition is five times more likely to be seen in women than in men, causing me to wonder how many cases of women’s cardiac-related deaths are actually caused by brokenheartedness—or perhaps by a long series of emotional disappointments and devastations that wear the body down until the pump finally gives out.)

If we add to this the astronomical rates at which women are harmed and murdered by their boyfriends and husbands, and how difficult (if not impossible) it is for some women to leave their abusers, I think it’s no exaggeration to suggest that sex and love addiction might be one of the leading causes of death for women worldwide.

So I take this problem seriously, because I believe that sex and love addiction is a matter of life and death. In my case, without a doubt, it always has been.

My problem is what’s officially called a “process addiction,” as opposed to “substance addiction,” which was Rayya’s downfall.

Process addictions are characterized by extreme compulsivity around certain behaviors—gambling, shopping, hoarding, eating, sex, control, obsession, gaming, skin picking, etc.

Put simply: Rayya was addicted to drugs; I am addicted to people.

Although I do believe that Rayya was a love addict, as well.

In fact, many folks in the rooms of recovery surmise that love addiction is at the bottom of all the other addictions.

Our famished yearning for love is the great yawning chasm that we keep trying to fill with other things—with drugs, alcohol, food, money, sex, cigarettes, gambling, gaming, success, perfectionism, workaholism, internet addiction, you name it.

Of all the human desires, the need to feel loved is the most fundamental.

When unmet or perverted at a tender age, that need can warp our brains into making dangerous and even insane decisions for the rest of our lives.

From what I now understand, given the latest neurological research, people like me—people with process addictions—have nervous systems that don’t work quite right.

Many of us, having experienced at a young age what are officially referred to as “consistent disruptions of safety,” have trouble regulating our own emotions, taking care of ourselves, telling fantasy from reality, understanding the concept of boundaries, knowing whom to trust, and distinguishing our feelings from other people’s feelings.

As a result, we can end up with an attachment style that is sometimes referred to as “disordered-disoriented”—which describes my romantic history perfectly.