Hi, I'm Mayan Beallik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our Breakdown, a happy Saturday. Today we're sharing something special that was previously only available over on our substack page. So if you want to get stuff before anybody else hears it or sees it, please head over to substack. But we're releasing here a very special conversation that Jonathan and I got to have with the incredible Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, Big Magic, and her most recent memoir all the way to the river. That's right people, the Elizabeth Gilbert. This is a fascinating conversation because not only is she an amazing storyteller, Her story itself is so powerful and it connects ideas that we touch on in this podcast all the time. She talks about how her path took her from a suburban marriage into this life altering romance with her best friend who became her lover, but her recent book reveals that that love affair was not all it seemed to be. It led to both of them relapsing into their deepest addictions, drugs for her wife and for her the deepest depths of codependency. She came to the point where she was contemplating both murder and suicide and she talks about the differences between discovery and recovery. We're so excited to get to share this conversation with you.

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Not only can you hear these conversations right when they come out, often these conversations are interactive so we cannot wait for you to join the growing breaker community over on Substack. And we really hope you enjoy our conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert. break it down. Many people know obviously Eat Pray Love and they know a bit about your story. If you had to thumbnail, like it was a thumbnail sketch of the journey of your life that was revealed in the Eat Pray Love section of your existence. Why don't we start there? What's this e-Pray love thing everyone's talking about? This current thing. So e-Pray loves a book that it's coming up on its 20th anniversary, which I think is invaluable and hard to imagine. And that was a book that I wrote about a journey that I took alone around the world when I was 34 years old and fresh out of a really debilitating divorce. And then right on the heels of that divorce, even more debilitating, if that could just be said to be so, break up with somebody who I was completely obsessed with. And a suicidal depression and a sense of tremendous failure and loss and dislocation and disorientation. And so I went to try to recreate my life through travel, which I now call, I have a little running to talk about how looking back on it 20 years later, and I love the young woman who did that. I love the young woman in me who had that idea. I call this, my new subtitle for Eat, Pray, Love. The original one was one woman search for everything across Italy, Indian, Indonesia. My new updated subtitle is Good, Guess. Good, guess. Like it's such a good guess. It's like, well, maybe if I go out there in the world and I consume everything that the world has, you know? Food and love and travel and beauty and a new language and a new guy and a new, like, maybe that will work. And it, to a certain extent, it did. And certainly it bettered my life and also remains something that I'm very touched to see has inspired endless numbers of women especially to feel that they have permission to leave relationships, to leave jobs, to see the world, to create their lives in their own image. So it did a lot for me and for a lot of people. What it didn't do and couldn't do was get at the kind of untouchable darkness of my deep codependency and love addiction. That's what it couldn't reach. And that re-emerged the way addictions always do when they're not treated. And 20 years, nearly 20 years later, I found myself with a lot of the same pathologies that I've always had. I wonder, you know, with the framing of sort of repetition compulsion, you know, can you sort of tell us, you met this love in 2000, right? And the notion that we sometimes think we're doing it different, but then we find that we're doing it the same. Can you talk about what that journey looked like for you?

What were the hardest parts? What were the ugliest parts? What were the most beautiful parts? And what did you learn about this notion of repetition compulsion? Yeah, that's a beautiful way to say it. I think one of the really tricky things about addiction is that it's not just that you keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. that you keep doing the same thing and telling yourself that you're not doing the same thing.

And the first person who I deceive in my addiction is always myself because I'm like, yep, but this time it's not, I know it looks exactly like what I always do, but it's not what I always do. And here are the reasons why it's not what I always do. And my particular patterning is what I've heard been called jungle jimming, like just going from one person to another person to another person to another person. And thinking that the problem is just if I could just be with somebody entirely different, then I will be entirely different. And I have 35 years of pretty hard evidence to back up that that's not the case. And yet, when I'm convinced that that is the case, I will do that. So I met Raya Elias in the year 2000. I was already married to the wonderful guy that I met in Init Pre Love. And it wasn't part of the reason that it didn't feel like I was was in any dangerous territory was that we had a 17 year friendship. Like we, we, like knew each other very deeply and at a deep level of trust and, and connection that I do believe was, was real, was, was a genuine kind of love. So this was not some sort of one night. This is a person who became my best friend and then became my person and then

became my intimate and then became my everything and then slowly over the years I pedestalized and pedestalized and pedestalized, Raya until she became my higher power. And I was like, this is the person who has the answer to it literally. I mean, that's how I felt about her. Like, this is the person who has the answers to literally everything in life. This is the person who can keep me safe. This is the person who knows me. This is the person who I know. And then we fell gradually in love. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given six months to live. And I left my marriage to be with her. And that was traumatic. And then she relapsed into her drug addiction and that was also traumatic. And then I, the way I express it is that we both became the lowest versions of ourselves. The lowest version of Reo was just a desperate drug addict. And the lowest version of me is a spineless, enabling codependent who will give poor anything of myself and to somebody to try and get them to take responsibility for my life and my heart. So, we went to a pretty degraded place before she knew. The world appreciates your honesty and your ability to sort of navigate this from a literary perspective and from a deeply psychological and emotional perspective as well. And there's a spiritual component that I wanna get to in a little bit. You know what's funny is when you say what it looks like to make someone your higher power. When you say what it looks like to essentially be in that codependent web, all of the things you're saying, if I put a different tone and a different background, they sound amazing. This is the person I feel safe with. This is the person that I trust. This is the person that if I need anything, I know that I'll get it from them and they'll make me feel better. You could say that as you're wedding vows and be like, this is amazing. What is the difference? Where is that fine line between? This person is my everything? I am deeply in love. I am deeply committed. I know that this is my mirror. That's my person. How do you know that the other side is I am so addicted, right? To this web that I'm in that I will accept crumbs

after I've given it. Where's that line? I think many of us find ourselves on the other side of it and we didn't know we crossed it. Well, isn't that true of every addiction? You know, most I think, you know, certainly in the rooms of recovery, they often talk about what they call the invisible line of say alcoholism. Like, where's the line between a drinker and a heavy drinker? where's the line between a heavy drinker and a problem drinker?

Where's the line between a drinker and a heavy drinker? Where's the line between a heavy drinker and a problem drinker? Where's the line between a problem drinker and alcoholic? Where's somebody? And I think that the original founders of the 12-step world were wise in allowing people to self-diagnose. Because I can't see that line. I don't know what the differences between what the difference is between a very heavy drink or a problem-dream or an alcoholic. I would never feel comfortable diagnosing somebody else's that. And yet, if you come into the rooms of recovery, they give you the opportunity to say, I think I might be able to feel alcohol. And I think a really nice way to do this is to backwards engineer your way into step

one.

So step one and all the 12 step fellowships is came to believe we had a problem.

We were, came to believe we were powerless over blank.

You never know.

It is drugs, alcohol, eating, gambling, spending, cutting, sex, whatever it is, right?

Pornography, prostitution, whatever.

I came to believe we were powerless over this thing, this behavior, this substance, and then they really important, often overlooked, second half of that, first step is, and that our lives had become unmanageable, right? So oftentimes what I guide when people come to me and they're like, do I have a problem? Is this out of control? Has your life become unmanageable? If the answer to that is yes, then you may have a problem. And so what happened over time in my relationship with Reya is what has happened in so many of my relationships, my life became unmanageable. And what unmanageability looks like to me is, I'm not okay. Here's a really good example of

unmanageability for me. This person didn't kiss me good night and say I love you before they went to sleep and now I'm in the bathroom on the floor sobbing. That's called every other Saturday for me because my life has the bottom has fallen out of my life. They don't look at me the way they used to look at me and And now I cannot fucking function.

Like I instead of being like, well, relationships change, I'm what the big book of A, I call a trembling wreck, right? I'm a trembling wreck. I can't do my job. I can't eat. I can't take care of my health. Like, like, unmanageability for me is, you give me this. My mind tells me, you, this person I love, give me this feeling, which is how I have always wanted to feel, without which I now believe I cannot live. And if that is withheld, even in the slightest degree, I'm going to start to fall apart. I'm going to start to not be able to function. And if you remove it from me completely, I will want to kill myself. And I say that very literally, like I will not want to live on this earth anymore. Now that to me is the ultimate definition of my life has become unmanageable. Like I literally can't live without you. And the tricky thing about love addiction and sex addiction is how super celebrated it is. In culture, we're like literally 90% of our favorite songs are about, I can't live with live in this without you. You know, like we love that shit. We make movies about it. We make books about it. Like that's upheld as how you're supposed to feel. But I'm telling you, it's not cute. And it's not pretty what happens to my actual life and the groundlessness of my being when I have given myself to somebody to that degree. And they now, Plenty Doyle quoted to me one time that she was in an alanon meeting where somebody said my higher power used to be the expression on your face. In my higher power is the expression on your face.

And if the expression on your face changes, I have no world. Right? And that's not healthy. And that's somebody being my higher power. Mm-hmm. Again, this is me. This is not anybody else's diagnosis. I know, but this is my stress. This is what it feels like for me. I feel I feel a little called out, but that's for me to deal with the therapy.

This episode is sponsored by No, it's like, this is my story. No, it's not for me. I feel a little called out, but that's for me to deal with.

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