The Hidden Addiction: WhenLove Becomes a Substance

She sits in recovery rooms now, Elizabeth Gilbert, and finally hears the language for what she's been doing her entire life. "I have always used people the way other people use substances," she told Rich Roll in a recent podcast conversation, her voice carrying the particular clarity that only comes after you've stopped lying. The sentence contains the entire arc of her new memoir, All the Way to the River: a reckoning with an addiction that recovery culture rarely names, rarely understands, yet thousands of people live out in secret, one relationship at a time.

The Irony at the Heart

There's an irony sharp enough to wound. Gilbert wrote Eat, Pray, Love, a book that rewired how millions of people think about seeking, about love, about transformation itself. The book became a movement, a mandate, a spiritual permission slip for restlessness. Yet what she has discovered—and what she's writing about now with unflinching honesty—is that her entire life has been a desperate, skilled, beautifully-dressed performance of handing her power to other people. "Handing over of the power of your own life force to pour into somebody else is what I used to call love," she told Roll. The words land differently when they're coming from someone who taught millions about the search for meaning.

When Love Becomes a Substance: The Parallel Addictions

The new book isn't only about her addiction. Parallel to her own unraveling is the story of Rhea, her longtime partner, who died of pancreatic and liver cancer seven years ago. Rhea was a heroin and cocaine addict—many years into recovery—who suffered a catastrophic relapse shortly before her death. What Gilbert realized, in the years after Rhea's death, was that while Rhea was using cocaine and heroin, Gilbert was running her own bender: using Rhea, and the people before her, as a substance to manage her internal chaos. The two addictions became a mirror. One used drugs. The other used people. Both were looking for the same thing: relief from an unbearable internal state.

This realization shaped the entire direction of the memoir. Gilbert describes it to Roll as the intersection of two stories: her own awakening to her addiction alongside Rhea's catastrophic relapse. "The book is about my partner, Rehea, who died of pancreatic and liver cancer seven years ago, who had been a heroin and cocaine addict in recovery for many, many, many years, and then had a massive blowout bender relapse right before she died," she explained. "It's also in a parallel way about my addiction that I never had had a name for that I kept acting out in my version of her bender which is I use people the way she used cocaine and heroin."

Writing the Truth: From Fiction to Reckoning

The realization was excruciating to articulate. She tried writing about it as fiction first—a seventy-page novella loosely based on what happened. That wasn't it. Then poetry. That wasn't it either. Finally, as she described it to Roll, she had to do something radically different: "sit down and say what happened." The book she produced is "almost like a post-mortem on a crime scene," she said. "Like what happened here? How did we get to this point?" It's not a vindication. It's an investigation.

The easier part would have been to examine Rhea's relapse: insert heroin, insert cocaine, watch the personality transform. But the harder work—the work that gives the book its weight—is turning the mirror inward. How did the person who believed herself to be generous, spiritual, devoted, and deeply loving become someone who was using another human being as a substance? How did that happen? As she told Roll, the difficulty isn't in understanding the equation of drug addiction. "The harder thing is to look in the mirror and to try to deconstruct like how you went from this person who believed themselves to be something into something else altogether."

The Question of Complicity: What's My Role?

If she had written this book immediately after Rhea's death, Gilbert told Roll, it would have been a different project entirely: a story about what a nice person she was and what a terrible thing happened to her. "But I didn't know what it was," she said. She had just enough wisdom, even then, to suspect that couldn't be the full story. "It can't just be that I'm a really nice, giving, generous, loving person who ended up getting taken advantage of." There had to be something else. Something she'd participated in. Something co-created.

This is the part of recovery most people resist. Not "What happened to me?" but "What did I do?" Not victimhood, but complicity. Rhea used to say to Gilbert, whenever she started feeling sorry for herself:

"There's no victims in this room, Liz."

It was harsh and necessary—the kind of truth that only someone who knows you completely can deliver. In the podcast, Gilbert emphasized the importance of this question, what she called "rigorous honesty to start to unthread, not only why did this happen, why does this always happen?" The work is deconstructing the patterns, seeing how she was lured into the trap, understanding the wiring inside her that impulsed her to make decisions that, with time and distance, she could see clearly were not in her own interest.

The Two Relapses: Drugs and People

The memoir sits at the intersection of two addictions and two relapses. There's the substance relapse—Rhea's return to heroin and cocaine after years of recovery. And there's what we might call a relational relapse: Gilbert's pattern of abandoning herself, handing her power over to romantic partners, manipulating and controlling in the name of love, while maintaining a story about her own generosity and sacrifice. Sex and love addiction. Codependency. Manipulation and control. The clinical language doesn't quite capture how deep it goes—the ways it feels, from the inside, like devotion.

She describes herself in the podcast as repeatedly asking partners, like a character in a Dr. Seuss book: "Are you my mother? Are you my mother?" Walking around, as she put it, "handing my power over to people and asking them to give me back a little bit of it." This is the addiction nobody names. There are no pills involved. No powder. No ritual of ingestion. Just the daily, hourly handoff of your own agency to someone else, dressed up as love. She told Roll that "Addiction is giving up everything for one thing. And recovery is giving up one thing for everything." For her, that one thing was people—the belief that if she just found the right person, if she just loved hard enough, if she just made herself small enough or useful enough, she would finally be safe.

The Blind Spot: Compartmentalized Spirituality

What makes this story particularly raw is that Gilbert had what most people would consider a life of genuine spiritual progress. Meditation. Prayer. A public identity as someone who had figured something out. Yet none of it—not a single practice, not a single insight—protected her from the blind spot. She could sit in meditation and pray for clarity while simultaneously enabling someone else's active addiction and acting out her own pattern of using people. Compartmentalized spirituality, she calls it. Spiritual bypassing in real time.

The ability to be "spiritual" in one compartment of your life while your secret life—the one you hide because it would destroy both your private and public identity—continues unexamined in another. "Addicts secret lives are dark," she told Roll. "And the reason you hide your secret life is because if people knew it, it would destroy both your private and your public life." This is where the depth of the denial becomes visible: not in one catastrophic act, but in the daily compartmentalization, the constant management of multiple identities, the exhausting work of keeping the secret.

The Path to Recovery: Sobriety and Celibacy

By her own count, Gilbert was about four months away from what she calls "walking into the rooms"—entering a 12-step recovery program specifically for sex and love addiction—when she last saw Rich Roll in 2018. She was, she said, "on my last little bender." The language is telling. She doesn't call it a relationship. She calls it a bender. A using. A final desperate attempt to manage herself through another person before she had to face herself alone.

Since entering recovery, Gilbert has been sober for several years—"just for today," as she reminded Roll, echoing the 12-step principle of taking recovery one moment at a time. She's also been celibate for six years, a fact she mentioned almost in passing but which carries enormous weight. Six years of not using people as a substance. Six years of learning what it feels like to inhabit her own body and mind without handing that inhabitation over to another person. Six years of learning to be her own source of safety, her own mother, her own redemption.

This celibacy isn't punishment or shame-based denial. It's a deliberate practice of learning to be with herself, to generate her own sense of wholeness without outsourcing it to romantic connection. It's about what she describes in the podcast as developing a true friendship with herself—learning to be genuinely kind to herself, not just to others.

What the River Means

The title All the Way to the River carries a spiritual weight that feels earned. She's describing the journey to the end of denial, to the edge where you finally have to look at what you've done, what's been done to you, and most importantly, what you've done to yourself in pursuit of connection. It's the journey through the landscape of shame to the place where you can finally see clearly. The image invokes finality and also beginning—the river as ending and edge, as the place where you finally stop running.

The Teaching Deepens: From Seeking to Seeing

What's striking is that this new honesty doesn't contradict her earlier work. It deepens it. Eat, Pray, Love was about seeking. This is about seeing. About the person who looked everywhere for love finally recognizing she was running from herself the entire time. The person who wrote the book that gave permission to restlessness now writes the book that teaches the cost of it.

The recovery rooms where Gilbert now sits are full of people learning the same lessons—people in 12-step communities dedicated to sex and love addiction, to codependency. There are thousands of people recognizing themselves in this pattern: the use of others as a substance, the compartmentalized spirituality, the secret life maintained alongside a public identity. But for those of us who've built a life around her words and thought we were following a map drawn by someone who had figured something out, the admission that she hadn't—that she was lost in her own way—carries a different weight. It's not a failure. It's an expansion. The teacher is not abandoning the teaching. She's deepening it. The person who showed millions how to seek is now showing how to face yourself, which might be the harder work.

Where to go from here

For anyone recognizing themselves in Gilbert's story—the pattern of handing power over, the secret life maintained alongside a public identity, the use of relationships as a substance—the path forward begins with the same rigorous honesty she describes in the podcast. The 12-step communities she's part of (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous, and others) provide structure and witness for this work. But the starting point is simply naming it: What role have I played in this pattern? How am I using people? What am I looking for them to give me that I need to learn to generate myself?

Gilbert's new memoir offers both a map and a warning. The map shows what recovery looks like: the celibacy, the relearning of self-love, the gradual expansion of capacity to be alone with yourself. The warning is that spiritual practice, wisdom, and public success don't provide automatic protection against these blind spots. The work of facing yourself is ongoing. The recovery, as she says, is taken just for today.