Rachel: I’m a Love Addict and I Was Addicted to a Younger Man

Rachel shares her inspiring story of how she confronted her struggles with love and sex addiction. With the help of a love addiction specialist, Rachel was able to move from a place of deep lows to a place of hope and healing. Host Brianne Davis also discusses the importance of seeking help, and how powerful it can be to take ownership of one's own behavior and thoughts. This engaging and encouraging episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking support on their journey of healing.

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Transcript

[0:00:00] Rachel: I watched my life start to both elevate in really weird ways and then deteriorate into this like, deep bottomless pit of I can't do anything without this man in my life. And he was like a drug. Like could not get enough, like was addicted.

[0:00:28] Brianne Davis: Welcome to the Secret Life Podcast. Tell me your secret, I'll tell you mine. Sometimes you have to go through the darkness to reach the light. That's what I did. After twelve years of recovery in sex and love addiction, I finally found my soulmate myself. Please join me in my novel, secret Life of a Hollywood sex and love Addict. A four time bestseller on Amazon. It's a brutal, honest, raw, gnarly ride, but hilarious at the same time. Check it out now on Amazon. Welcome to Secret Live Podcast. I'm Brianne Davis Gantt. Today I'm pulling back the curtains of all kinds of human secrets. We'll hear about what people are hiding from themselves or others. You know those deep, dark secrets we probably want to go to our grave with are those lighter, funnier secrets that are just plain embarrassing. Really.

[0:01:28] Brianne Davis: The how, what, when, where, and why of it all. Today. My guest is Rachel. Now, Rachel, I have a question for you. Dun, dun dun. What is your secret?

[0:01:39] Rachel: Well, thank you for having me on. And my secret is that when I was in my late twenty s, I had an on and off scandalous relationship with an 18 year old gentleman. And it literally threw my life down the tubes and I almost tapped out on life as a result of it.

[0:02:05] Brianne Davis: Wow. Okay, let's go back. So what started this relationship?

[0:02:12] Rachel: So I had been in on and off long term relationships with different men and none of them seemed to pan out. And I was on my hot shit.

[0:02:24] Brianne Davis: Your shit down stink.

[0:02:26] Rachel: Yeah, I was like, you know what? Fuck a relationship. I'm going to just get some young tail and see what happens. And honestly, I'd never been with anybody younger, but this guy was catnip. He was like kryptonite at this catnip and kryptonite all wrapped up into one package. And I watched my life start to both elevate in really weird ways and then deteriorate into this deep bottomless pit of I can't do anything without this man in my life. And he was like a drug, could not get enough, was addicted.

[0:03:02] Brianne Davis: So can we talk about first how you said elevate? How did things elevate during that time?

[0:03:11] Rachel: This young man came from a really amazing family. And in my relationship with him, or pseudo relationship we'll call it, I got exposed to motherly love, I got exposed to fatherly love. I got exposed to family in a way that I'd never felt cared for and seen. And it was almost like the missing puzzle piece in my life. And so I felt powerful at times, but then the low was like unmanageable, crying in my bed, staring at my phone for 12 hours waiting for text messages, like, kind of crazy, terrible.

[0:03:48] Brianne Davis: So it was almost like was an obsession came over you about him. Did other people know about your relationship at the time?

[0:03:56] Rachel: They did, but they didn't know to what extent I was choosing to participate in to the point where I would call my friends religiously for support, but they'd be like, Just stop seeing that guy. And then the later it would get at night, I would end up on an app called Whisper and releasing my deepest darkest, like, please help me get this guy in my life. Who do I have to be in order to have him in my life forever? And it was terrifying. I was addicted, I was obsessed, I was compulsive. I was spending hours like an FBI investigator on social media. I look back on that part of my life and go, I just want to hug that girl.

[0:04:53] Brianne Davis: So did you stalk him? Was he an available young buck?

[0:05:05] Rachel: As available as an 18 year old can be. I mean, he still lived at home. Like, I supported him in moving out of his parents house. Maybe in ten years, he would have been relationship material, but he was a baby.

[0:05:30] Brianne Davis: A baby. But here's the thing. So your friends knew about the relationship. Did they know how young he was?

[0:05:37] Rachel: They did know, but they didn't see to the extent I was involved. They saw like, okay, well, Rachel's not around anymore, so she must be doing something else. And he and I shared an activity in the world together, so I was always doing, quote unquote, that activity. And what I was really doing was just, like, upending my life and turning myself into bending myself into whatever sort of gumby character I could be that I thought he would want me to be, which included not being anywhere near anybody I was friends with.

[0:06:16] Brianne Davis: So you really isolated yourself in this situation from people, so everything shut out and made it about this one person.

[0:06:28] Rachel: Yeah. And seemingly from the outside, everything seemed fine. I was successful. I had a six figure income, I had my own place. I had it all together. And, yeah, it was jarring, to say the least. When I hit that bottom of, like, I don't want to do life anymore because of this relationship with this person, it was like a two week on, two week off.

[0:06:57] Brianne Davis: So what was that bottom? Can you describe the moment where it just all came just rushing?

[0:07:04] Rachel: Yeah, it was five years ago and five years ago in June, and I had planned my birthday and the girl he had cheated on me with probably three or four times, he was pulling away again. And I uncovered in my social media findings that he had planned a beach day with her on my birthday, and my birthday was going to be at the beach. So after he had just professed his undying love for me, and we were going to be together, and he never wants to see anybody else. And it was just like, I'm canceling my birthday, I'm getting in the car and I'm leaving town, and I'm never coming back. Yeah, it was gnarly. It was very traumatic. It was like I was living in an emergency room, emotional emergency room, 24 hours a day. My adrenaline, my nervous system was just tapped.

[0:08:04] Brianne Davis: Wow. Did you get in that car and drive and go?

[0:08:08] Rachel: I did. I went to where I am from and really had a hard time explaining why I was there and made some excuse why I was there and just found myself driving around and figuring out which telephone pole is just going to run my car into.

[0:08:29] Brianne Davis: I have heard similar people say when they've been in that same situation, like they didn't want to kill themselves, they just didn't want to be around anymore. Is that how you felt?

[0:08:42] Rachel: Yeah, I would say that it just hurt so bad that I didn't want it to hurt anymore.

[0:08:49] Brianne Davis: Right.

[0:08:50] Rachel: And my best thinking was like, there's no way this feeling is ever going to go away unless I end it. And I had exposed myself so deeply to the community that he and I were both in. Just people just like, they looked at me and go, you're a grown woman. What are you doing?

[0:09:12] Brianne Davis: So I had all this judgment from other people because they saw it.

[0:09:17] Rachel: Yeah. There were moments where people would pull him aside and be like, hey, she's dangerous. Don't talk with her anymore. Really had his best interest at heart, but they didn't see the inner workings of what actually was happening. And I'm fully responsible for creating what I created with him, and we co created it together.

[0:09:46] Brianne Davis: I love what you just said because it seems like the blame got put on you, even though, you know, it was both you and him, but it seemed like, did it all come on you all the judgment came on you than him.

[0:10:00] Rachel: I'm sure it didn't. I mean, there's my truth, his truth, their truth, and then the truth.

[0:10:08] Brianne Davis: Did they say in God's truth because God sees it?

[0:10:12] Rachel: God's truth? There's that too.

[0:10:15] Brianne Davis: But.

[0:10:19] Rachel: I think over the last five years, looking at somebody's, like, if you're looking at somebody and you're like, oh, they totally hate me, they totally hate me, they're thinking the worst of me. And then you will go up and ask them, hey, what are you thinking about? I'm thinking about eating a sandwich.

[0:10:34] Brianne Davis: Yeah. It has nothing to do with you ever.

[0:10:37] Rachel: Don't actually give a shit. And if they do, it's because it triggers something inside of them. So I don't truly know, but I know that there were people that pulled them aside and said, like, hey, this isn't a good thing for you. You're young, you're free. Don't get wrapped up in some old ladies stuff.

[0:10:58] Brianne Davis: So here's my next question for you. How did you get out of it?

[0:11:03] Rachel: I reached for a lifeline. I called somebody who had always given a trace to me, talk to me straight and direct with me. And she said, you get to go to a twelve step meeting and you get to get your butt into a counselor and have a conversation about love addiction. Because this isn't you that's dealing this and creating this. This is a part of you that is sick and you get to get help. And boy, I couldn't pick up the phone quick enough that day. Where I found myself driving around telephone to hit myself into a telephone pole was the day I called her. And within an hour of that incident, I was on a phone, phone call, phone therapy session with a love addiction specialist. And she was like, yeah, you are not alone. This is to tee the description of love addiction. And there's hope.

[0:12:02] Brianne Davis: Here's my question for you. And a lot of people ask me this. I've already said I'm out ten years sober in sex and love addiction. And my question for you is do you think you can have a love addictive relationship with one person and then have a healthy one in another? Or are you always going to have love addicted qualities or traits?

[0:12:25] Rachel: Are you saying simultaneously, like, I can be love addicted to somebody else and then at the same time be in a healthy relationship with somebody or like segueing from one to the next, one to the next? Over the last five years, what I've uncovered is that I'm on the spectrum of sex and love addiction. So there are days where I feel anorexic emotionally, there's days where I feel avoidance, there's days where my intrigue button is really high. And for those of you that are listening, there's all different types of sex and love addiction. There's a range. It could even be codependence. Just straight up 101 codependence. I can fall under the umbrella of that. And in the work that I've done, it's when I choose to come from responsibility and ownership and I'm willing to go to the deepest cut of why I'm acting the way that I'm acting or showing up in the world, then I have the option to be in a healthy partnership. But it is only when I'm willing to do that work.

[0:13:27] Brianne Davis: I love how you say that because sometimes with love addiction it's so hard to explain that there are so many different aspects, there's so many different of that personality that can come out at one time. I can go anorexic, I can become obsessive, I can want to flirt an intrigue and it's like, I don't know each day what that character defect will flare up or that behavior will want to act out. So how you just said that, I hope it explained to the listeners that this can come in all forms. It's not just one way.

[0:14:01] Rachel: It's a daily reprieve. Right. One day at a time. I choose to show up as a sober woman that's connected to something greater than myself. And without that spiritual practice, that foundation that I choose into every morning, I'm liable to be right back in that car five years ago, finding the telephone pole or digging into my partner's phone records or something. Yeah.

[0:14:34] Brianne Davis: Because we only have control over ourselves. We don't have control over the person. Love addiction is you're addicted to a person. So they're human. They're going to have their flaws. My husband's going to trigger me sometimes, and I'm going to be like, See you. In other days. I'm going to be like, I love you, but that's okay. I have to do the inner work. So I stay connected and an authentic person.

[0:14:57] Rachel: Yeah. And it has nothing to do with them. If I'm getting triggered by something someone else is doing, it's a gift to me to look at what value or belief that is toxic is arising and doing the work to get in there and rewrite that. This human projected all of the magical qualities that I wanted and a dad and a best friend and a partner and a brother. I mean, he fit every single mold of who I would have wanted to be kept safe by. So I was constantly lefting after that safety from somebody else. And then envy strikes a chord with me growing up, triangulating with other women. So the envy of, I don't want her to have what I want, you can't have it, but I can. So triangulating with men, particularly this one, who would, if at all possible, find the next available woman in whatever room we're in to create that dynamic with.

[0:15:57] Brianne Davis: Wow. So you would walk into a room and that dynamic. Another woman would be, like, psychologically chosen, and you would play out that dynamic.

[0:16:07] Rachel: Almost every time I was in a space with him.

[0:16:11] Brianne Davis: Yeah. Can you name one incident that happened?

[0:16:14] Rachel: Yeah, this activity we were participating in. I walked in one day, and there was a woman in the space that walked by. The space.

[0:16:29] Brianne Davis: I just simply walked by, just walked.

[0:16:31] Rachel: By, walking her dog. And I saw him walk across the room, look out the window, and then within 24 hours, they were having lunch together. And by day three, I confronted him straight up, and he was like, yeah. What? There was no proof. I had no proof that anything had happened. But my gut was like, up. Here we go again. She fits the mold of what he's after, and we were off to the races. And it's not just jealousy for me. It's the idea of creating situations where I'll be abandoned.

[0:17:09] Brianne Davis: Right. That you'll always be like the less than one. Yeah. And I seem like I used to do that, to have a greater than less than with women in different ways. So when you're talking about it's like, oh, I always was either one up or one below a woman with somebody. You know what I mean? But that was your instinct, that you trusted your instinct. There was something inside of you, because lots of people just ignore that. Him looking out a window with a woman. Yeah, but you saw it and then you called it out, which I'm like, that never happens.

[0:17:45] Rachel: Well, I guess it never happens, but the fact that I was calling it out was so that I could be right about being rejected or abandoned. And it's funny because even even after that relationship ended and I really got into the work, I would talk about walking into a room and scanning for who's the prettiest person in the room versus am I the prettiest girl in the room? So that I could assert control and power to be safe. Like, there was a very young part of me that just wanted to be safe everywhere that I went. And what I realized is that it had nothing to do with him. It was just another opportunity to play out the story that I'm not safe.

[0:18:25] Brianne Davis: Oh, my God. That's like Mike drop information that no matter what it was, it was just you setting up that scenario in your head.

[0:18:35] Rachel: Yeah. So the good old cerny prayer that's the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can. And it's crazy and feel like a magician sometimes, but when I take ownership and I am in ownership of my own behaviors, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, sensations, inner dialogue, no shit, my reality changes.

[0:19:01] Brianne Davis: Yeah. It's really 100% when I let go of wanting to have control out of anything outside of myself and just have responsibility for myself. It's so free.

[0:19:15] Rachel: Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, there's been times where I've been in a relationship where I'm like, this person is an alcoholic. They are an alcoholic. I've taken their inventory, and when I took off the magnifying the magnifying glass and picked up the mirror, within a week or two, that person wasn't drinking anymore. They did not have a problem with alcohol. It wasn't even an issue. And it was like, when I really show up and stay on my side of the street, everything I want to.

[0:19:46] Brianne Davis: Manifest, manifest my gosh, I almost have chill bumps right now. I mean, I am having them a little bit. You should see my arm people.

[0:19:54] Rachel: You get it.

[0:19:56] Brianne Davis: But here's my next question. So having this secret relationship, secret like, pattern with this 18 year old guy, who do you think that benefited and who do you think it harmed?

[0:20:14] Rachel: There are so many benefits and so many harms. I would say the harms were subconscious on both of our parts, and the benefits were intentional. You know, like, he learned things from me about life that he never would have learned if he hadn't met me. And there are things I learned about life that I never would have learned if I'd never met him. And I would say that that relationship saved my life or gave me the opportunity to create my life. I often refer to that relationship as, like, I was living in black or white and was forced to go into or chose to go into an emergency room. And when I walked out of the emergency room into the real world again, all I could see was color. And it was like, Holy shit. How have I been missing the taste of things? How have I been missing the color of things? I can feel and hear sound in a way that I never have before because all of my focus was on black or white before. So I benefited massively from that relationship as detrimental and traumatizing and scary and uncomfortable and juicy for a lack of better work.

[0:21:33] Brianne Davis: But here's the thing, and I think this is for me, too. Sometimes the darkest situation and the darkest relationship has seen it for what it was and then moving out of it like you're saying and seeing color, that you actually step out of that horrible fantasy and into reality. And I think I used to think a relationship is what gave the world color, but that's not true. Do you know what I mean? I was so worried about losing that high of dramatic relationship, but really that's not living in truth. That's living in black and white is what you're saying.

[0:22:19] Rachel: Yeah. It's also another way I like to look at it is I no longer I have bumpers on my life. Now I know if I get too high, I hit a ceiling instead of going even further than I would have. And sometimes living within those bumpers or value systems or boundaries. Or boundaries, my favorite word guidelines for my life. There's a little part that's sad that knows what the experience of being high or extremely low feels like. And sometimes life doesn't offer that same level of it's like eating candy or having a meal. I choose to eat meals now instead of binging on candy or soda all day and looking back and going, dude, candy was fun, and going, yeah, okay, I saw what life was like that, and I got really sick.

[0:23:15] Brianne Davis: Yeah. Listen, I'm not saying there's not a little like, oh, that part of my life is over. And then you see somebody doing it, like a friend or somebody, and you're like, that was fun, but you know where that fun leads.

[0:23:30] Rachel: You know, we're good and fast.

[0:23:34] Brianne Davis: And you were hitting that telephone pole.

[0:23:37] Rachel: Yeah, I know that it leads to a hijacking experience, and I'm just not willing to put myself through that. But did it benefit me to go through that at such a young age? Yeah. I mean, I'm seeing people that are in their sometimes 70s who have never even acknowledged that they've been living decades this way. So for me, I feel grateful to have, I would say, course correct in my life. Choosing to get on a path of reality and ownership at an early age.

[0:24:11] Brianne Davis: I love that. Oh my God, you are dropping so many bombs today. For me, I just needed to hear them. But I do have one last question. If somebody is in a type of relationship that has a lot of drama, that's not stable, that they're not really happy with, but they're addicted to, what would be your advice to them?

[0:24:34] Rachel: First and foremost, I would say some people can exist in those relationships and it's fine. I couldn't. So the question I would ask is, like, is your life unmanageable? Is your emotional life unmanageable? Make a list of the things that you're powerless over in this relationship. And then I would have them write out what their vision is, what do they want in relationship? And I would have them hold those two lists together and say, like, are these two things matching up? Is it time to do something about it? And then every person I mean, twelve step isn't right for everybody. It's not fit for everybody.

[0:25:07] Brianne Davis: Yeah, I agree. It's not.

[0:25:09] Rachel: There's transformational tools, there's leadership tools, there's twelve step tools, there's therapy, there's holistic tools. There's all kinds of ways to move from dysfunction to thriving, from surviving to thriving. And the one thing I will say is if you are in a space of losing your mind, you're not alone. There's somebody probably on your block that's having the same exact experience for some different reason or maybe even the same one. So pick up the phone and call somebody and that secrets will keep you sick. The sooner you can let it go and let it out and find a safe space to do that. I'm sure Brian would be willing to be a safe space for anybody knowing that that's what she's up to here. Reach out.

[0:25:57] Brianne Davis: Reach out. And that is where we're going to end. So if you want to be on the show, please email me at [email protected]. Until next time, thanks again for listening to the show. Please subscribe rate share or send me a note [email protected]. And if you'd like to check out my book, head over to secretlifenovel.com or Amazon to pick up a copy for yourself or someone you love. Thanks again. See you soon.

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