AVOID Manifesting TOXIC Love & Find Inner Peace w/ Liz Gilbert “This Almost Killed Me”

Here are the top 10 key takeaways from Elizabeth Gilbert's conversation with Lewis Howes about healing, love addiction, and finding inner peace.

1. Finding a source of infinite love

Elizabeth Gilbert explains that she spent decades trying to fill an "echoing God-sized hole" through relationships with others. She tried different partners, wondering if she needed someone older, younger, male, female, or multiple people. Eventually, she realized no person could provide the infinite, inexhaustible love she craved.

The solution was finding a source of love that could match her needs. Gilbert established a daily practice of writing letters to herself from "unconditional love," asking "What would you have me know today?" This practice became her foundation for healing. She describes it as downloading messages from a loving presence that reminds her she is loved exactly as she is.

2. Recognizing love addiction patterns

Gilbert openly identifies as a sex and love addict. She describes bringing three different romantic partners to the same couple's therapist, desperately trying to make relationships work. Her pattern involved objectifying herself and others, abandoning self-care to attach to unavailable people, and constantly seeking external validation.

She explains that love addicts get high from becoming someone's "everything" or having someone become their everything. The pattern works temporarily, like any addiction, until it inevitably crashes. Gilbert spent 35 years trying different relationship formulas before recognizing this as an addiction pattern requiring recovery support.

3. Reparenting your inner child

A breakthrough in Gilbert's healing journey came through Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACA) recovery work. She discovered she had an inner child she was constantly abandoning and an inner teenager who was furious about this abandonment. When she met her inner wounded child, she saw someone with "the stare of a three tours of duty soldier" - deeply traumatized and hopeless.

Gilbert realized she had been trying to outsource the care of this child to romantic partners. Her inner child told her: "I don't trust you because you constantly abandon me to make everyone feel comfortable, to get approval, to take care of others." She had to prove her trustworthiness by consistently prioritizing self-care and setting boundaries, gradually rebuilding trust with these wounded parts of herself.

4. God as a higher power, not a replacement partner

Gilbert describes how she replaced God with her partner Rayya, and Rayya replaced God with herself. This created an unsustainable dynamic where Gilbert worshipped Rayya and Rayya accepted being worshipped. "I needed a God in human form, and I made Rayya into my God. She must have needed an acolyte because she took me on as her worshiper."

This worked temporarily but ultimately failed, as all human substitutes for divine connection do. Gilbert now sees her relationship with God as central to her recovery. She notes that she's always loved God but never truly trusted God until recent years. She's learned to ask better questions - not "why" but "what do you want me to do?" or "who do you want me to become?"

5. Prioritizing emotional sobriety

Gilbert emphasizes that emotional sobriety must be her primary focus. She states, "Staying emotionally sober within a community and fellowship of people who help keep me emotionally sober is my full-time job." Writing books and other endeavors are secondary to maintaining her emotional health.

She has been celibate for five years, which she describes as "the greatest gift I've ever given myself." This time allowed her to reclaim her body, learn self-comfort, and regulate her nervous system. When asked if she should start dating again, she heard a clear internal response: "LOL no. Hard no, absolutely not." She trusts this guidance, recognizing that her current stability and health are precious.

6. Setting boundaries to honor all parts of yourself

Both Gilbert and Howes discuss the importance of learning to say "no." Howes shares that it took about a year and a half of consistently setting boundaries and disappointing people before he felt comfortable with it. He describes getting physical rashes that his therapist interpreted as his inner child "screaming, trying to get your attention, crawling out of your skin for you to create boundaries."

Gilbert explains that boundary-setting becomes a community service: "The greatest harm I've ever done to other people was through not knowing how to take care of myself." When she doesn't meet her own needs, she becomes needy, clingy, and manipulative, trying to use others as parental replacements or unpaid therapists. Setting boundaries allows her to be safe for others to be around.

7. Creating healthy relationship foundations

Howes shares how he established a new relationship paradigm with his fiancée Martha. He told her she would never be his number one priority - his health would be first, followed by his mission from God, with their relationship third. Though this seemed risky to express, it created a foundation of honesty and realistic expectations.

Gilbert confirms this approach makes sense, suggesting that introducing a higher power provides security in relationships. She recommends asking potential partners, "What do you turn to when you're shattered?" as a crucial question. If someone turns only to their partner when broken, both people will likely get shattered together. Having multiple sources of support, including a spiritual practice and community, creates healthier dynamics.

8. Accepting help from others

Despite her success, Gilbert proudly refused assistance for years. She boasts about not having a personal assistant, turning down offered support at speaking events, and handling everything herself. This self-sufficiency represents the flip side of codependency - "I don't need anybody" becomes an extreme position rooted in childhood experiences.

At age 55, Gilbert finally recognized this as prideful and unhealthy. She recently hired an assistant and is learning to delegate tasks. When asked how Lewis could support her, she mentioned plans for a six-month sabbatical in 2025, during which she won't teach, speak, or start new books. She's allowing herself rest and accepting support from others in this new phase.

9. Loving yourself doesn't diminish drive

Some people fear that self-acceptance will diminish their motivation to improve. One man refused Gilbert's "letters from love" exercise, saying he already knew what unconditional love would tell him - that he's lovable as he is - and feared this would remove his drive to be better. Howes relates to this concern, having been driven by a need to prove others wrong for much of his life.

Both discovered that self-acceptance actually creates sustainable energy rather than diminishing drive. Howes explains he now serves from a place of "proving God right versus proving others wrong," which feels more renewable and peaceful. Gilbert suggests that unconditional self-love provides a "soft landing place" to rest between efforts, not an excuse to stop striving altogether.

10. Community as essential for healing

Gilbert realized that "everything I ever thought I had to get from one man, I now know I can only get from a community of women." She quotes Esther Perel, who notes that we expect romantic relationships to give us everything a community used to provide - an impossible burden on one relationship.

Gilbert's "Letters from Love" Substack community demonstrates the power of collective healing. The project now includes nearly 130,000 people writing themselves letters from unconditional love. A psychology expert called it "the kindest corner of the internet." Gilbert notes that in 13 months, not one person has brought negativity into the space, as people show up with "undefended hearts" to reverse cultural paradigms of self-hatred, perfectionism, and scarcity.