All the way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation by Elizabeth Gilbert

Way to go Liz! This is such an incredible book that dives into love, addiction, codependency, healing, growing, and the power of truth telling. I was captivated from start to finish to learn about Liz’s great love, Rayya. This is a powerful read!

To purchase the book, click HERE. 

 

Below are my favorite excerpts from the book: 

The many ways that people- despite their best efforts at living sane and stable lives-can sometimes get swept into high-octane dramas and traumas, finding themselves washed up on shores that can feel very distant from their true natures. 

 

If you are very lucky, you might find one friend over the course of your whole entire life; who will walk all the way to the East River with you. 

 

(Rayya thinking about Elizabeth)…Who has that much freaking sunshine?

 

Some of my female readers 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.

 

L- love

A– attention

V-validation

A-approval

 

The astronomical rates at which women are harmed and murdered by their boyfriends and husbands, and how difficult it is for some women to leave their abusers. 

 

I have a problem called “process addiction” where they are characterized by extreme compulsivity around certain behaviors- gambling, shopping, hoarding, eating, sex, control, obsession, gaming, skin picking, etc. People with this process addiction, have nervous systems that don’t quite work right. Many have experienced at a young age “consistent disruptions of safety”. 

 

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

 

Drug addicts steal people’s money, but love addicts steal people’s time, energy, and emotional attention. 

 

Codependency is the utter abandonment of yourself in order to fixate upon them. The certainty that you will get all the love you have ever required by pouring your love into someone else’s heart. It springs from a deeply painful unmet need for love, safety, and approval. A timeworn and extremely effective means of avoiding one’s own pain. 

 

What codependency feels like later on: watching in horror as someone else’s life passes before your eyes; wondering in utter bewilderment where your own life went. 

 

What if Earth is nothing but a school for souls?

What if we pass our days moving through an extraordinarily complex educational curriculum that has been carefully tailored to push each soul toward its highest growth, evolution, and ultimate liberation? What if we each agreed long ago to show up in these exact bodies at this precise moment in history- to be dropped into our exact families and influenced by the specific cultures in which we were born, to be blessed or burdened with certain gifts and limitations, to be faced with a series of singular troubles and tests-because there was something our souls could not have learned any other way except through this precise curriculum?

 

What if everything (and everyone) that we label as “difficult” or “an obstacle” or even “dysfunctional” is in fact a deliberately designed construct meant to awaken us to our true natures. 

 

How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me evolve?

 

Codependents have terribly low self-esteem and we don’t know how to take care of ourselves. 

 

I had no agency in the matter- only urgency. 

 

I am not the only person who ever had the big idea of trying to win love, attention, validation, and acceptance by showering LAVA upon someone else. 

 

(Hx of women overgiving) Women give themselves to death. Female partners are often literally pouring life into them, at a steep cost to their own existence. Sociologists call this the “marriage benefit imbalance”- meaning that the institution of marriage benefits men far more than it benefits women. If these stories told the truth from a sociological standpoint, the woman would be running for her literal life to get away from the institution of marriage, while the man would be begging her to take care of him forever so he can live long and prosper. 

 

What is the overgiver getting out of this obviously imbalanced arrangement? What do they think they’re getting? Because nobody overgives for no reason- even if those reasons are deeply hidden or disguised as acts of pure altruism. 

 

“The truth has legs” Rayya used to say. It always stands. When everything else in the room has blown up or dissolved away, the only thing left standing will be the truth. Since that’s where you’re gonna end up anyway, I figure you might as well just start there. 

 

From earliest childhood, my survival strategy was to always give the pleasing answer, never the truthful answer, because it felt safer to be pleasing than to be truthful. So I learned how to read other people’s faces and discern what they needed to be told in any given moment in order to keep them calm and happy. This vigilance turned me into a nervous child, constantly monitoring the room to stay ten steps ahead of everyone else. 

 

How was she telling the truth, extracting the truth, offering compassion without getting pulled into the role of a rescuer, holding perfect boundaries without laying on any shame, and making the suffering person laugh- all at the same time? What sorcery was this? 

 

One of the central characteristics of sex and love addicts is that we assign magical qualities to people, and then we become enraged when those people fail to live up to our fantasies, expectations, and projections. I have often been guilty of the crime of pedestalization. 

 

That is the woman I still love and miss to this day. This was the person I believed I had always needed. And once I saw who she was, I couldn’t let her go.

 

I remembered times in my own life when I couldn’t execute the simplest of actions because I was so overwhelmed by stress, trauma, or despair. 

 

Acronym for GOD- Go Out Doors 

 

Addiction serves a purpose. It is medication for an aching soul, relief for a pained body, and escape from an impossible mind. 

 

It takes fortitude not to leap into somebody else’s suffering with them and call that love.

 

What you call a “crisis” might be someone else’s awakening, ten thousand lifetimes in the making. 

 

If a codependent person in not at the white-hot epicenter of somebody else’s life- mothering, manipulating, managing, and martyring themselves; being validated as “important” and “irreplaceable”; being praised for all that they are “sacrificing” for the benefit of someone else- we don’t even know how to exist. 

 

My child, if you ever find yourself wanting to scream at somebody that you are “the fucking angel around here”, there is a slight to moderate possibility that you are not one. 

 

Knowing that someone is dying is not the same thing as understanding that someone is dying. 

 

This chick’s gotta have a ton of darkness hidden somewhere deep down inside her, if she has all that light. Like, real darkness. Like, to balance all that sunshine? You know what i mean? Because nobody is just one thing, I always wondered where you hid all your darkness, babe. I’m so proud of you, that you discovered it. 

 

When someone who is dying doesn’t want to eat, it’s because their body can’t process it anymore. Forcing food into them only brings its own problems. Same with liquids. Don’t force her to do anything. As she was drifting, she woke and said, “I can see the opening into the box of dreams”. 

 

(As Rayya took her last breath)- My baby, my love- you looked so satisfied. I might even say that you looking thrilled. You looked free beyond any freedom I have ever seen. 

I have never seen a happier face on a dead body. Whatever your friend saw in the last moment of her life, it must’ve been pretty amazing. 

 

(When Elizabeth met with a psychic medium after Rayya’s passing)- The best way she can describe it is this: She has become music now. She says not to be afraid of death, because it’s beautiful. She says that you gave her enough love to keep her heart full for the rest of its journey through the universe. She says you were the biggest surprise of her life. 

 

I’m having too rich an experience exploring my freedom and my serenity to wish for any disturbances right now within my own energetic field. 

 

My ultimate goal in recovery is to end up in a healthy relationship with myself. 

 

(When discussing how a married man propositioned her and she did not respond)- Almost certainly why I was so immediately and devastatingly attracted to him- because we very likely both share the same wound. That kind of shared trauma is generally the only thing that can wake up such an intense and immediate attraction in me. (and then 3 months later saw a photo with his new son that was just born). 

 

Due to staying sober and not chasing thrills, I have discovered someone who dwells within me- someone who had never before allowed herself to be fully seen. 

 

(Talking to herself)- The last thing she needs right now is for me to move yet another romantic partner into our house to drain our resources, confuse my mind, and redirect my time and attention away from her care. I have finally learned that I cannot be abandoned by anybody; I can only abandon myself. I will always be all right, no matter what anybody else does or does not do.

 

What could death ever do to interrupt such an easy bond?  

 

 

 

Yum