In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert, a writer of successful magazines and author of Short Stories which would be even greater with the publication of “Eat, Pray, Love: a search for a woman for all in Italy, India and Indonesia” six years later, went to have her hair cut by Rayya Elias and ended up meeting her best friend. The two years passed close friends – through Gilbert’s two weddings to men, the adaptation of his memoirs in a film with Julia Roberts and the following books – before the diagnosis of terminal cancer and Elias of Elias of 2016 realizes that she was in love with her. They had a short but tumultuous relationship, fighting mutually on drug addiction problems as Elias cancer progressed. On the death of Elias, Gilbert realized that she was also suffering from an addiction: one to sex and love.
Shelf Help is a chronicle of well -being where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers on their last books – all in order to learn to live a more complete life.
After this death, Gilbert left on a recovery trip which included a romance with Simon MacArthur, a longtime friend of Elias. Gilbert’s latest memoirs, “All the way to the river: Love, Loss, and Liberation”, is his story of how the devastating grief helped her reconcile with his dependence and placed her on the path of healing.
The Times spoke with Gilbert how to recognize the signs of sex and love in ourselves and how to learn to be ok by ourselves. Now authorized for romance, the author has a sober dating plan intended to create limits and avoid jumping too quickly in another relationship. “Better that I take into account, the less the world feels stressful,” says Gilbert, “and whatever the energy, I put in my work, my friends and my community.”
This interview was condensed and published for more clarity.
What were the warning signs for you that you had a problem with sex and love?
Intimate relationships have been a cause of pain and struggle for me from my adolescence until I finally find the help I needed at 50. For 35 years, I used my romantic and sexual partners like others consume drugs. I was constantly looking outside of me for stimulation and sedation. I found partners on which I could go up and other partners who would calm me down. I constantly overlapping relationships, either fleeing someone or someone else. I have never been able to adjust my nervous system, find content with anyone or take care of my inner life. Although I knew that my behaviors were harmful to me and the others, I could not stop repeating the same models compulsively. It was exhausting, inductor of shame and, as I heard the dependence on sex and love describes, roughly as satisfactory as the diversion of a rotating door.
How did the discovery that you were a sex addict and that you love changed your vision of the world?
There was a relief to finally be able to name the thing: “Ah! It is What is the problem with me! It was soothing to sit in a room with other people who behaved in the same way as me.
“For 35 years, I used my romantic and sexual partners like the others consume drugs,” explains Elizabeth Gilbert.
(Deborah Lopez)
Thanks to recovery, what have you learned about how to establish healthier relationships?
The goal of my recovery is to find yourself in a healthy and lasting relationship with myself. I had always looked outside of me for a partner who could save me. During the last six years of recovery, I have learned to assume full responsibility for my own life, to self-deprive and to attach to myself safely. I now hope that there is a sober, healthy, emotionally stable, very resource and compassionate adult woman at the wheel of my life. It is now without consequences for me if I find myself again in a romantic relationship; I have a reliable life partner, and it’s myself.
You write about being “lost in the end of the end of connection”. Does this research seem to you, and what do you do with the additional energy and love you need to give?
It takes a huge amount of love and energy to keep a human (myself) in full swing. For years, my codependence and my in dasting have held me focused on the guarantee that all of my partner’s needs were met, so that, ideally, they could take care of me. It is ineffective and exhausting to pour all your love and resources into one person, with the hopes that they could one day give you. Now, I learn to pour this love, this energy and its care directly in myself, which is so much more rewarding. My creativity is flourishing, my friendships are richer than ever, I travel more and I presented myself worldwide as a whole and satisfied. The better I take care of myself, the less the world feels stressful, and whatever the energy, I put in my work, my friends and my community.
How is dependence on sex and love similar and different from other types of dependence?
A good description of dependence is the “false cult” – do something or someone in your God and sacrifice everything. Our culture teaches us that the disappearance of another person’s heart is what “love” means, and women, in particular, learn not only to seek this kind of extreme attachment, but that they are without it without it. At the start of my recovery, I was asked: “What is this behavior that costs you?” Why don’t you think you can take care of yourself? And why don’t you think they can take care of themselves? ” These questions helped me see the level of my dependence. Historically, I always needed to be with someone I thought I couldn’t live, or someone who, I thought, couldn’t live without me. I would throw away any feeling of balance, reason and integrity, everything so that I can give everything to someone. As with all types of dependencies, I was trying to escape the pain of my reality. The top always works until it is not – so comes the suffering. This kind of attraction, attention and crazy abandonment stops screaming when one of the games changes your mind and begins to move away. Then comes the withdrawal process, which resembles death. It is not an exaggeration: the closest that I have ever reached both suicide and murder was because of my dependence on another person. I would like to be able to say that this extreme level of disorder and violence is rare, but people kill each other and suify each other every day due to the fixing of relationships and obsession. People regularly lose everything (their health, their serenity, their jobs, their money and their families) because of romantic devastation and dysfunction – and again, they find it difficult to move away.
(Maggie Chiang / For Times)
You have now been deleted by your godfather as “ready to date”. What will this process look like for you?
As part of my recovery, I have a “sober dating plan” intended to create limits and brake to know someone. The plan includes articles such as “no first week’s dates”. Knowing how much I am able to throw myself into another human being, I am not in a hurry to go there and to discover if I can survive another relationship. Having had 35 years of relational drama, I was beautiful for me to learn to find serenity in solitude, and I do not want to risk throwing all the earnings that I made. But should I never want a partnership, there is a plan in place to keep myself healthy and sober as possible thanks to this union.
How do we know when we depend too much on someone else and how can we become more dependent on ourselves?
The first step in all the 12 -step programs read as follows: “We have come to believe that we were helpless (a person, a substance or a filling behavior) and that our lives had become unmanageable.” Ask yourself: has your life become unmanageable? If the answer is yes, you could be in a kind of dependence / dependence crisis. If you come from an environment that was dysfunctional, neglect or abusive, “unmanageable” could simply feel at home, and it can be difficult to imagine that there could be a simpler and happier way to live. I learned that it is not necessary to live a non-stop life of non-managability. No matter how chaotic my story is, I can learn to protect my serenity so that I no longer have to drag people in my drama or jump headlong into theirs. Going ahead, my emotional work is to make sure I stay complete – Full of creativity, joy, faith, emotional health, esteem, curiosity, rest, courage and dynamism of life itself. It is also my work to believe that others can recharge this same fullness inherent in themselves, without forcing me to empty my life in their own, as proof of love. My ultimate goal is to be a magnet service for the world, and I can’t be that if I have emptied my life with someone else.
Take -out
From “all the way to the river”
What do you say to people who believe that they will never be happy if they will not find someone with whom to share their life?
I would say that the same thing that my own superior power told me in a meditation once: “Honey, why would we have designed the system so as to guarantee your endless misery? Do you not see that we have designed you so that everything you need.”
