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Addiction And Recovery Quotes Quotes

“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.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“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?”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“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.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“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?”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“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.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“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.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“How you can tell you might be in a codependent relationship: You care more about somebody else’s well-being than they do, and/or you believe that you cannot function without them, and/or you believe that they cannot function without you. The codependent’s motto: 'You break it, we fix it!”

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Author:Elizabeth Gilbert
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“What codependency feels like at first: “You complete me!” or “I will be your hero!” 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. The final destination of codependency: rage, emptiness, loneliness, despair. The anthem of the exhausted codependent: “After all I’ve done for you!”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“On the surface, I appeared to be a confident young go-getter. But my inner life was, as it had always been, a tremulous fear-scape. I was neither mature nor emotionally secure, and I wasn’t yet ready for the demands of adulthood. Hidden beneath all my apparent ingenuity was a terrified child constantly asking, “Who’s got me? Who will keep me safe? Where do I belong?” And thus I began my lifelong quest to make other people into my home.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“I once estimated that between the ages of twenty and forty-eight, I lived in approximately twenty different homes. That’s not everywhere I stayed (that number would be incalculable); it’s merely everywhere I lived—everywhere that had my actual name on the lease or the mortgage. And I never lived alone. I couldn’t bear to live alone. I couldn’t bear being alone with the open wound that was my own mind. But I also couldn’t bear the chafe and strain of intimacy. I couldn’t last anywhere, and I couldn’t last with anyone. So I came and went, colliding and separating, roaming the planet, constantly looking for places to land and people to merge with. I sometimes used to call this behavior “being a free spirit,” but my wild instability was quite the opposite of freedom, because I had no agency in the matter—only urgency. Also, if I was so “free,” why did I always end up feeling trapped? It’s because my moves were motivated by desperate situations in which I was running either toward somebody or away from somebody else. I constantly found myself in stories that started out with passion but ended up with shame. So much shame, in fact, that during those years there were entire geographic regions that I had to flee at top speed, because my behavior had created dramas that made it impossible to remain there for another day. Goodbye, Philadelphia! Adios, Oaxaca! Well, I guess I can never go back to Wyoming again!”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous describes how addicts always end up “puzzled and humiliated,” no matter how hard they try to get their lives straight. That’s how I have always felt at the end of my relationships: puzzled and humiliated. And because I have a lifelong tendency to fall in love with people who are either alcoholics or addicts themselves or the adult children of alcoholic or dysfunctional families, my partners were always in a state of disarray, as well. They brought their own disorder to my already disordered life, which added exponentially to my upheavals. One of my most chaotic relationships, for instance, was with a man who, at the time we met, was being fired from his job, breaking up with his girlfriend, and getting evicted from his apartment—all at the same time. “Move in with me!” I said, naturally enough. And so I welcomed him—this heartbroken, unemployed stranger (who, like me, was clearly struggling to find his way in the world)—into an apartment I’d rented for myself only a week earlier.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“It’s worth questioning, in every partnership: Who is playing the traditional role of the woman here?—meaning, Who is pouring more care and nourishment into this relationship (or project, or institution)? And who is the beneficiary of all that care and nourishment? And what is the cost to the overgiver?”

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“Rayya loved the truth. Truth was her religion, her passion. When I asked her why she loved the truth so much, she explained that after so many years of having to hustle and lie as an active drug addict, the truth felt like heaven to her. Truth was her place of safety, a badge of honor, and proof of her recovery. What’s more, she believed that being honest was just the simplest path through life and the surest means of eliminating confusion and drama. “The truth has legs,” she 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.” Maybe this notion sounds obvious to you, dear reader, but to me it felt like divine revelation. I had never before encountered such directness in a person, nor had I ever witnessed someone who placed such trust in the power of simple and unblinking honesty. I had not grown up feeling that the truth was a place of safety—and for reasons that I will not go into here, it wasn’t. 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 and—when I sensed tension coming—misdirecting everyone's attention, or creating some sort of spontaneous and distracting entertainment, or simply running for the hills. It was a tough job for a little kid—making sure nobody around me ever got angry or sad, or disappointed.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“Once Rayya got clean and sober, she never judged people, no matter how badly they were acting out. She never condemned them—not even when she was angry or frustrated with them, not even when she was setting boundaries with them—because she knew what it was like to be at the very bottom. She knew what it was like to be feared and despised. She knew what it was like to live completely outside of your own integrity, a million miles away from your heart. As she said to me once, “Until you’ve stolen money from your father’s wallet to buy heroin while he was sick in a hospital bed, you don’t know what it feels like to need to be forgiven.” She also used to say, “Mercy is what I owe, because mercy is what I always needed—and mercy is what I have been given.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“That night at dinner, I thanked Rayya for taking care of everybody at the funeral, and for protecting us from the dangerous young man. She looked surprised, then her face softened. “Oh, honey,” she said, and suddenly tears stood in her eyes. “Did you think I was protecting us? No, baby, no. I was protecting him. Because here’s the reality, babe: We’re fine, and we’ll always be fine—even if he stole our car! Nobody needs to worry about us. But the odds are that kid doesn’t have much longer to live. He’s really far gone, and he doesn’t have any support system. But there’s always a chance he might get clean some day, with a miracle. And if he ever cleans up his life, as part of his recovery he’ll have to make amends to every single person he’s ever harmed. And I don’t want that poor kid, in addition to everything else he’ll have to face someday, to be forced to deal with the fact that he stole money from people at his grandmother’s funeral. I wouldn’t want that for anybody. So that’s what we were doing today, honey. We were keeping him safe from that—from the worst thing he could do to himself.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“A friend of mine who is familiar with both my messy relationship history and my recent recovery journey asked me the other day, “So where is the line, exactly, between regular love and love addiction?” To which I could only reply, “I’ve got bad news for you, buddy. Nobody really knows.” It’s the same with all addictions. When does a regular drinker become a heavy drinker? And when does a heavy drinker become a problem drinker? And when does a problem drinker become an alcoholic? And when does an alcoholic become a danger to themself and others? It’s often impossible to know exactly when, how, and why these escalations occur. In the rooms of recovery, this is called “the invisible line”—that shady moment when complete dependency sets in, and the addict is no longer capable of living a manageable or dignified life. The invisibility of that line is a large part of the reason that identifying and treating addiction is so difficult. It’s also why addicts of all varieties are so masterful at denying that they have a problem in the first place, and why they are so good at gaslighting and deceiving their loved ones. But if I had to define the difference between regular love and love addiction, I would say that it has to do with the level of intensity—with the sense of urgency, dependency, and desperation that grows by the day until it becomes an obsession, trailing behind it a wreckage of lies, destruction, and self-abandonment. And once that hungry ghost is awakened, it can never really be sated.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“Secrecy is the greenhouse in which addiction blooms, flourishes, and metastasizes. The unfortunate reality of addiction, though, is that all active addicts keep secrets and tell lies. They really have no choice. An addict must lie in order to protect her supply. You cannot be an active addict without lying, because your interior world would collapse. If you didn’t have access to the substance, person, or behavior that regulates your nervous system, and your exterior world would collapse if people knew what you were up to—because what you are up to is not socially acceptable. Hell, what you are up to might not even be acceptable to you, which is how addicts learn to lie to themselves before they lie to anyone else. Thus the addict’s reality becomes split between what she’s doing in the shadows (sometimes even behind her own back) and what she is allowing other people to see.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“This book is not only for people whose lives have been negatively impacted by their own addictions or by the addictions of others—although I do believe those two categories will include pretty much all of us, at some time or another. This book is also about 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.”

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“How the hell did I get here? is a question that I believe everybody will have to face at some point during their passage through life. Perhaps even at multiple points. For who among us has never gotten lost, much to our own embarrassment? Who has not ended up in scenarios that are frightening, alienating, shameful, and spirit-crushing? Who has not kept secrets, or been betrayed, or tried to control the behavior of others? Who has not longed for escape from suffering? And who has not reached for substances, people, behaviors, or distractions that offer temporary respite from the built-in discomforts of existence itself?”

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“It is my way—it has always been my way—to become captivated by other people’s charisma and madness and wildness and beauty. To disappear into their stories and become hypnotized by their existence. To become lost in a trance of themness and to forget who I am, what I am, and where I stand.”

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“There are not a lot of women out there who will publicly admit to being sex and love addicts, because it sounds pretty gnarly. In fact, it is gnarly. I won’t get into salacious details here, but I will say that my addiction manifests as a sincere yet deeply misguided belief that somebody outside of myself will miraculously be able to heal me on the inside—thereby making me feel safe, cherished, and whole at last. In real-life terms, this translates as a desperate need to have my existence constantly authenticated and re-authenticated through a romantic partner’s touch, eye contact, verbal reassurance, acts of love, or mere physical presence. How much reassurance is enough for me to finally feel secure? There has never been enough, frankly. There can never be enough.”

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“My desperation to be loved is certainly outsize, and it has caused me to act out in ways that are undeniably insane. Yet I suspect that parts of my story may feel familiar to many of my readers—especially my female readers, who, like me, 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. Failing to succeed in this massively important project of proving yourself worthy of being chosen meant that you were a failure, and that nothing else you ever manifested would have much significance in anyone’s eyes. Or at least that’s what endless generations of women across a multitude of cultures have been taught—and that’s what I was taught, too. Sex has always been the fastest and most direct way for me to feel thoroughly chosen, but what I’m really looking for in my romantic encounters is the love, attention, validation, and approval (“LAVA” in the parlance of recovery) that other humans can sometimes provide, and without which I have often felt like I would quite literally die. Thus I have spent my entire life searching for that magical person who will see me and save me—whether in the short term or the long term. When my plan for salvation with one person didn’t work out (and it never worked out), I just went looking for LAVA with someone else.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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