Podbit · Call Her Daddy
After losing her brother, Riley found no resources — just Reddit forums and Instagram DMs with strangers. That led her to the death doula community, and eventually she trained and got certified. A death doula does for dying what a birth doula does for birth.
Where this was said
At 54:43 · chapter starts 49:51
Alex opens the conversation about addiction support by noting how many of her listeners are in families touched by it, and Riley engages with unusual depth and specificity. [1] — Riley Keough "Riley spent years trying to drag her mother into rehab and keep all the plates spinning, only to watch addiction ultimately claim two famil…" 47:28 She says she has had multiple family members — not just her mother — deal with addiction, though she declines to name others out of respect for their privacy. She has spent years trying: dragging Lisa Marie toward rehab, making plans, spinning plates. The hardest realization was that the person across from her was not participating in her plan. She was making enormous effort toward someone who was not present to receive it. Eventually, addiction took two of her family members, and she was forced into the surrender she had resisted. She shares her mother's conviction that tough love doesn't work — a view Riley fully endorses — and explains that she never withdrew love during even the hardest moments of her family members' addiction, always operating from empathy. She wouldn't take back the effort. But the lesson, she says slowly, is one she's still not sure she knows how to articulate.
Lisa Marie Presley firmly believed that tough love does not work for people struggling with addiction, a view Riley says she fully agrees with.
After losing her brother, Riley turned to Reddit forums and Instagram DMs with strangers to find people who had experienced similar losses, finding it one of the most comforting resources.
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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