Podbit · Call Her Daddy
Riley spent years trying to drag her mother into rehab and keep all the plates spinning, only to watch addiction ultimately claim two family members. The lesson she was forced to learn: you cannot fix it. Surrender is the only option.
Where this was said
At 47:28 · chapter starts 46:31
Alex acknowledges the compounded weight of what Riley has carried — losing both her brother and her mother within approximately two years — and asks how she has thought about processing that grief, both for herself and in how she might eventually explain it to her daughter. [1] — Riley Keough "The only like step that I've actively taken is to like feel my feelings. Which is a lot harder than it sounds." 46:31 Riley's answer is quiet and honest: the only active step she has taken is to feel her feelings. Not to manage them, not to channel them productively, not to make them useful — just to actually let them exist. She acknowledges that sounds simple and is not. Some of the feelings have been unbearable. When her brother died, she describes not being able to see how she could survive it. Her response was to seek out people who had lost siblings, who had lost people to suicide, who had experienced the specific shape of her loss — to hear from them that she was going to be okay. She went on Reddit forums, DM'd strangers on Instagram, read blogs. Anyone who had been where she was.
Riley lost both her brother Benjamin and her mother Lisa Marie Presley within a span of roughly two years, a compounded grief experience she describes as deeply isolating.
Lisa Marie Presley firmly believed that tough love does not work for people struggling with addiction, a view Riley says she fully agrees with.
Self-help fails because people are sold one universal cure by the hyper-responders who had a transformative result from it. The real problem is context: every method works for the right person at the right time, which is almost never you just because the author says so.
Spencer Greenberg was once so socially anxious his heart pounded just approaching a stranger. His therapist gave him homework: go to a bar alone, talk to 5 strangers. Starting with asking for the time, he worked up to asking men for hugs — and his anxiety fell dramatically in 6 months.
A person who flies regularly but obsessively checks weather forecasts before every flight is not doing exposure therapy — they're teaching their brain that flying is only safe with the ritual. Safety behaviors prevent the brain from ever learning that the feared thing is actually fine.
The worry-time technique assigns all worries to one scheduled slot (e.g. 5 PM). Every time a worry surfaces, you write it down and ban yourself from engaging with it until that time. When 5 PM arrives, most worries feel trivial and the act of batch-worrying exposes how little it actually accomplishes.
In a randomized study of 20 habit techniques, 'habit reflection' stood out: recall a past habit you successfully built, write down what helped you succeed, then apply those same strategies to your new habit. It works because it's self-adapting — it uses whatever worked for YOU.
The tiny habits technique — always having a minimal version of your habit you can do when life gets in the way — keeps the mental machinery of habit formation from breaking. Paradoxically, people given a tiny-habit fallback option were MORE successful at the full habit, not less.
Fears and worries act like playground bullies — they want to ambush you. But when you deliberately seek them out and choose the time of engagement, they lose their power. The volitional act of starting the fight on your own terms is one of CBT's most underappreciated insights.
Most downtime defaults are things you regret immediately after — phone scrolling, binge TV. 'Glad you did it' activities meet the same need for rest but leave you feeling like you spent your time well. The switch from a bad screen to a documentary, a book, or a walk costs almost no extra effort but compounds into identity over time.
You rarely control your first reactive thought. But you can train your second thought — the response to the trigger — by asking whether your initial reaction is the most helpful one and replacing it with something equally true but more constructive. Over time, that second thought becomes automatic.
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