Page 7 of All the Way to the River

Over the years, I’ve used plenty of alcohol and drugs (both legal and illegal) in order to get numb or high—but not nearly at the level that I have used people.

I don’t actually need alcohol and drugs to alter my consciousness, because the pharmacy built right into my brain churns out enormous amounts of dopamine as a reward for the experience of sexuality, physical closeness, and emotional arousal—and at a rate that is estimated to be ten times higher than that of a so-called normal person.

And it’s not only dopamine that my brain overproduces when I’m infatuated with someone; it’s also adrenaline, oxytocin, serotonin, and norepinephrine.

When combined in a powerful rush, these hormones fill me with an almost godlike sense of euphoria, removing my ability to feel pain or calculate risk, warping my perception of reality, and taking away my desire for sleep, food, and fulfillment of other basic life-supporting needs.

Other people might experience pleasurable sensations from romance, fantasy, or sex; I get wasted .

If that sounds fun, it isn’t.

Or rather—as with many addictions—it can be fun at first, but then it quickly becomes hell.

Because here’s how the story always ends up, whenever I fall into desire and obsession to this degree: As my addict brain becomes increasingly tolerant of these abnormally elevated levels of hormones, I will eventually need to score bigger and bigger hits of “reward” to experience the same high that I felt at the beginning of the romantic encounter.

I will do anything to get that release and relief again.

Craving sets in, bringing emotional and even physical pain along with it.

Soon I am neglecting my own life as I increasingly fixate upon the person who has become my source.

My behavior becomes more dangerous, more desperate, more clinging, more demanding, as I insist that the object of my infatuation keep stimulating the release of the hormones that my brain is now telling me I need in order to survive.

If the person cannot or will not deliver the goods anymore, I can’t get my craving satisfied.

And when I can’t get my craving satisfied, my adrenals will crash.

After the crash comes withdrawal. And when I go into withdrawal, I want to die.

That part isn’t very fun.

Like all addicts, then, I have suffered—and I have been the cause of suffering in others.

Like all addicts, I have kept secrets.

Like all addicts, I have lived a double life.

Like all addicts, I have always kept a hidden stash of supply to keep me from jonesing.

(In my case, “supply” would be potential love interests, with whom I was constantly flirting, texting, temperature checking, and testing the waters—in case I needed them someday.) And there is nothing cute or harmless about flirtation when I engage in it.

I’ve heard it said before that drug addicts steal people’s money, but love addicts steal people’s time, energy, and emotional attention—which is even worse, because those thefts hurt people at the level of their heart , at the deepest core of their being.

Those thefts leave wounds that may never heal—deep wounds to all involved.

Like many addicts, I always suspected there was something wrong with me.

I was a full-on romantic obsessive by the time I was in grammar school (I can still tell you the birthday of every boy I had a crush on in second grade).

I knew I was out of control by the time I reached high school, when I kept bouncing from boyfriend to boyfriend, from drama to drama, never able to find peace with anyone.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I knew that my friends didn’t act the way I acted.

My early twenties were an even bigger mess, as I shipwrecked my heart and body upon one rocky shore after another.

But I always thought I could get myself under control by using willpower and common sense—or by finding a new partner.

And many times over the years I did pull myself together.

I got over it and found someone new or even better.

Many times, I believed I had this problem solved—only to discover that I super did not have this problem solved.

The line between a problematic behavior and an addiction is a murky one—perhaps even invisible. But a good test as to whether you’re an addict or not is to answer these three questions as honestly as possible:

1. Have you tried to stop this behavior and you can’t?

2. Have you managed to stop at times—but you can’t stay stopped?

3. Has your behavior brought consequences to your life that might cause a normal person to say, “Wow, I’ll certainly never do that thing again!”—yet you keep doing that thing?

I couldn’t stop; I couldn’t stay stopped; I kept doing that thing.

No matter how costly the consequences, I kept acting out.

One disastrous encounter after another left me shattered, guilt-ridden, shamed, and exhausted.

Lessons kept piling up, but I was never able to act differently, despite being a trustworthy and disciplined person in every other realm of my life.

Like all addicts, I have a disease that is progressive.

Untreated, it just gets worse. And I know this to be true, because the last time I acted out in my sex and love addiction, I was more batshit crazy than I have ever been in my life—and I was nearly fifty years old at the time, with thirty years of therapy and spiritual practices under my belt.

Yet I did things for and within that relationship that no sane or emotionally stable person would ever do.

And I woke up at the end of that encounter exactly the way another kind of addict might wake up in a motel room somewhere off the highway outside Vegas, wrecked and bewildered, with no memory of how she had gotten there—and not sure where that fresh new tattoo had come from, either.

Blinking in the blazing sun, wondering where her money went, and asking in devastated confusion, “How did that just happen?”

Or maybe it would be more accurate to ask: “How did that just happen again ?”

If you’re curious to know how I got this way—how I turned into a sex and love addict—we could sit in a therapist’s office and talk about it for ever.

And indeed, I have sat in therapists’ offices talking about it forever.

But I will not be sharing any of my most traumatic childhood stories here, because those stories involve other people—people who are still alive, people whom I still care about, and people whom I ultimately regard as blameless (whether or not I still choose to have them in my life).

Partially, the reason I don’t blame anybody for my problems is because I don’t think it’s particularly useful to hold others responsible for my fate or for my behaviors.

But I also believe that the people who harmed me had no more control over their compulsive actions than I’ve ever had over mine.

And that is nobody’s fault. We are all descended from the same confounding human bloodline, after all—every one of us born of the same long and tangled lineage of addicts and their enablers; narcissists and their prey; the mentally ill and their beleaguered civilian orderlies; abusers and their apologists; manipulators and martyrs; secrets and secret keepers; suicides and sorrows.

Beautiful people, so many of them.

Beautiful, talented, extraordinary people who all struggled.

Beautiful, talented, extraordinary, and terrified people who were all seeking something outside of themselves that could relieve them from their interior pain.

I’m just one of the lucky ones who finally found her way to the rooms of recovery.

So why am I talking about all this now?

Well, there are a few reasons.

For one thing, very few women ever speak out publicly about sex and love addiction, because there’s so much shame wrapped up in the subject.

Their discretion is understandable (nobody wants to be judged or scorned), but this level of secrecy has also, I’m afraid, prevented many suffering people from learning about the nature of their addiction or finding out where to seek help.

I myself spent many years talking about my ever-cascading relationship insanity in a multitude of therapeutic settings without a single mental health professional ever saying, “Girlfriend, you’re a sex and love addict—and guess what: There’s a twelve-step program for that.

” How I wish I’d known about it sooner! It could have saved me (and a lot of people around me) a considerable amount of pain and suffering.

But the main reason I’m choosing to be so open about my sex and love addiction is because I’m going to be writing a lot in this book about Rayya’s drug addiction and relapse—and I don’t want anyone to think I’m speaking about my beloved friend from a place of judgment, contempt, superiority, or distance.

What she was, I also am. My addiction may have manifested differently from hers, but we both suffered from the same deep spiritual sickness.

But here’s the thing— I didn’t know it at the time .

The whole time I was getting involved with Rayya—becoming her friend, falling in love with her, walking all the way to the river with her, being driven to the edge of madness by her awful relapse into active drug addiction—I didn’t know that I was suffering from a dangerous addiction, too, which was leading both of our hearts into treacherous territory.

I mean, I knew I was plenty messed up, in terms of my romantic relationships, but I didn’t know I was an addict .

And I certainly did not know that, over time, I would become just as addicted to Rayya as she was to drugs.

My addiction doesn’t mean I didn’t love Rayya; I always loved her, and I always will.

My addiction merely means that I needed Rayya at a level that was far beyond healthy.

I came to believe, quite literally, that I could not live without Rayya—that a world without Rayya’s attention and infinitely calming ministrations was a world not worth enduring.

Driven mad by fear and longing, I tried to drain all the love from Rayya into me before she died—as though through some crazy emotional blood transfusion.

In so doing, I turned into a vampire, which is what all active addicts eventually become.

And the whole time we were together, Rayya didn’t know she was an addict, either.

Meaning: She had forgotten. Like all addicts, Rayya had a disease that lied to her—a disease that told her she didn’t have a disease.

Forgetting that she was powerless over her drug addiction, she slid into a relapse. And then she became a vampire, as well.

So what you had when Rayya and Liz came together was a pair of untreated addicts on a slow collision course. It is not surprising that everything went sideways, and that people got hurt. Yet despite it all, I still insist upon believing that we were both innocent—absolutely innocent.

My view of humanity is that all of us are innocent, or none of us are.

Because nobody wakes up every morning and says, “How can I be the most fucked-up possible version of myself? How can I cause the greatest amount of harm to myself and others—perhaps even creating patterns of dysfunction that will impact multitudes of people for generations to come?”

The only thing anyone is ever trying to do is survive their minds, their histories, their dilemmas, their destinies, their days.

And everyone struggles, and everyone flounders, and everyone deploys their very best coping strategies to relieve themselves of suffering, and we’re all doing the best we can.

And most of all, as God only knows: Everyone belongs here.