The Geography of Escape

Toward the horizon, the broad limbs of a fir tree stretch out from a trunk still black against the morning sky. The indigo dawn brightens toward vermilion. A scatter of skeletal branches extends on the south side of the tree, high up. Beneath these and northward, a mass of counterbalanced foliage swings above the creek. Branches at the tangled summit render the shape of a bird in a nest. Perhaps it is a bird, not merely branches. At this distance it’s too hard to tell. The trunk slowly rocks in the freshening wind.

Lower down, stands of dense cedar and scrubby fir punctuate the rising landscape. The geography is spare in this light: hidden rills and derelict fences blend into the land’s soft, woolen texture. A scrim of cloud obscures the dawn for a moment, then moves off. Wind from the bay slides across hills warmed by the rising sun. I scan overhead, looking for the first wing-borne travelers of the day, but I do not yet see them. I hear a single call, far off and forlorn, but nothing more. Perhaps the tide is in flood along the crescent of the bay, and the submerged flats offer nothing yet for the black and scavenging birds to find. Perhaps they have been delayed by scattered rain along the lee of the hill.

I wait, and wonder where they come from. Somewhere in the northeast, that’s all I know—the direction of the mountains and the agricultural lands and a hundred other enclaves that might harbor their nests. Sometimes I consider trying to follow them at the end of the day, when they retrace their path in the darkening sky. But they travel diagonally, across the direction of the roads, and it has not seemed prudent to drive with my head out the window, gazing skyward. Then I see a black bird—yes, a crow—scuttling between green treetops along the ridge beside the creek. It glides, flaps into an updraft from the onshore breeze, glides again, then heads for the bay. Behind this outrider I glimpse a trio, loosely gathered, also flying shoreward. Then more birds appear: hundreds, perhaps thousands, in groups and flocks ordered and haphazard, all flying from the northeast, all following the same scent trail. Their wings beat rhythmically against the backdrop of the piebald sky.

Some are sleek and symmetrical, wings like aircraft. Others are colored with flecks of gray or spotted with white. I don’t know if these flecks are signs of disease; but the spotted birds are not noticeably less agile or slower than those with full and glistening black regalia.

The birds fly over for half an hour or more, an armada ghosting above the trees, low enough for me to watch the odd pair tumble and dive in what looks like simple play. Aside from these moments of jostling and jousting, the crows do not pause in their traveling or watch the ground or scavenge. They fly along unseen air currents above the creek, follow the ridge that surmounts the ancient bog, and glide across the flood plain that stretches across farmland and into the sea. They remain within the invisible boundaries of a narrow path in the sky that is perhaps a quarter mile wide. I have not seen them make their passage elsewhere: farther down the bay, south toward the marshlands, or north along the peninsula that steps into the deep waters of the strait. Other birds claim that territory. The crows of my mornings appear here only, south of the river, on high ground above the delta.

By the time the sun has fully risen the crows are gone. Other birds, small flitting flocks of local inhabitants, fly from tree to tree. But the crows have moved onward, toward their destination. And though I believe they seek the shoreline, the expanse of tidal flat exposed by the moon’s ebb, I have never seen them there. Along that shore I see great wheeling flocks of gulls and species of tiny, racing birds that move as one in groups of thousands. They cohere into convoluted shapes offshore: clouds, invisible winds, shape-shifting phantasms. Eagles rest on trees cracked open by lightning and rot, herons stand in the shallows or fly inland, languid on slate-colored wings. But I do not find the crows at the shore.

These morning migrations are more than natural spectacle. They reveal a fundamental pattern: the pattern of departure, of seeking elsewhere, of movement away from one place toward another that might offer what this place cannot. This is the geography of escape, and it manifests not only in the flight paths of crows but in the lives of those struggling with what I call elsewhere addictions—patterns of substance use, behavior, and consciousness that serve a singular purpose: to facilitate departure from the unbearable here and now.

If you are reading this as a parent or loved one, you may recognize someone you care about in these words. The person who seems perpetually absent even when physically present. The one who disappears into substances, screens, or spiritual seeking. The one who can’t quite arrive, can’t quite stay, can’t quite be reached.

If you are reading this as someone who recognizes yourself—who knows from the inside what it feels like to need to leave, to find the ordinary world too sharp or too dull, to seek the exit before you’ve fully arrived—then this chapter is for you too. Not to pathologize you, but to help you understand the pattern, where it comes from, and what might make presence possible.

Why Understanding This Matters

When someone you love keeps disappearing—into drugs, into virtual worlds, into constant travel, into their own head—the natural response is confusion, hurt, and often anger. Why can’t they just be here? Why do they keep leaving? Don’t they care about us?

The answer is more complicated than caring or not caring. The pattern of departure often has roots that extend back to the earliest months and years of life, when a developing nervous system learns whether the world is safe, whether belonging is possible, whether presence invites connection or threat. When those early experiences teach that departure is safer than arrival, that elsewhere is more welcoming than here, a developmental vulnerability forms that can persist across the lifespan.

This isn’t about assigning blame—not to parents, not to the person struggling. It’s about understanding that what looks like choice is often a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive.

The Pathway from Early Experience to Addiction

Here’s what I’ve observed across decades of working with people caught in the elsewhere pattern—a pathway that connects early developmental disruption to trauma responses to mental health adaptations to addictive behaviors:

Early Disruption: Existence and Belonging → During the critical window from the second trimester of pregnancy through approximately three months after birth, an infant learns whether the world is safe, whether their presence is welcomed, whether belonging is possible. When this stage is disrupted—through prenatal stress, birth trauma, NICU care, a parent struggling with depression or their own trauma, neglect, or environmental chaos—the infant learns at a bodily level, before words or conscious memory, that presence is dangerous and existence is precarious.

The Body’s Response: Flight → Unable to physically flee (a fetus or infant can’t run away), the developing nervous system discovers psychological flight: dissociation, absence even while present, the capacity to “leave” without going anywhere. This becomes the primary protective strategy, activated before language or explicit memory.

The Adaptation: Dissociation → Over time, this flight response becomes internalized. The person develops the capacity to “leave” their immediate experience—to separate awareness from the body, to observe from a distance, to split off from overwhelming sensation or emotion. Dissociation is initially adaptive; it allows survival in conditions that would otherwise be psychologically devastating.

The Addiction: Finding Chemical or Behavioral Escape Routes → When dissociation becomes a habitual way of being, substances and behaviors that facilitate departure become compelling. Hallucinogens, online worlds, geographic wandering, extreme spiritual practices—these aren’t just ways to cope with pain. They actively maintain the flight response, keeping the system organized around departure. The addiction participates in maintaining the entire pattern.

The addiction isn’t merely caused by early experience or even just a symptom of it. The addiction participates in maintaining the entire system in a state of perpetual flight—a self-reinforcing pattern that becomes increasingly stable over time.

What Elsewhere Addictions Look Like

The pattern of flight can manifest in many ways, and it doesn’t always look like stereotypical substance abuse.

Hallucinogenic substance use—LSD, psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca, and other consciousness-altering substances—may be framed as spiritual exploration or personal growth work, and indeed they sometimes serve that purpose. But when use becomes compulsive or when the person seems unable to remain in ordinary consciousness, when there’s an urgency to “get out” of normal awareness, you’re seeing the flight response in action.

Online and virtual worlds present another form. Gaming, social media immersion, virtual reality, and other digital escapes can consume excessive hours, often to the detriment of physical health, relationships, and responsibilities. The person becomes more present to the virtual than to the actual.

Geographic wandering—compulsive travel, inability to settle, serial relocation—can look like adventurousness or “having the travel bug,” but underneath may be flight from self and relationship. The person is always planning the next departure, rarely fully arriving anywhere.

Extreme spiritual seeking manifests as constant movement between practices, teachers, and traditions. A kind of spiritual tourism prevents deep engagement with any single path. The seeking itself becomes the escape.

Workaholism and achievement addiction can serve the flight response when they function to avoid presence, feeling, and intimacy—the person disappears into busy-ness, always future-focused, never here.

Intellectual dissociation means living entirely “in the head,” abstract theorizing, excessive analysis that prevents embodied experience and emotional connection.

Key indicators that you’re seeing an elsewhere pattern rather than healthy exploration:

• The behavior feels driven, urgent, non-optional
• The pattern interferes with forming or maintaining intimate connections
• The person seems disembodied, not grounded, floating
• They’re always oriented toward past or future, never present
• There’s anxiety or distress when escape routes are blocked
• The behavior continues despite clear costs

Joseph’s Story

Joseph (not his real name) came to see me as a counselor, though when he entered the office, it was as though he wasn’t sure he wanted to be there. His body language was tentative, prepared for retreat. This tentativeness extended to all of his relationships, all of his commitments. Joseph was a wanderer, though not in the literal sense of being homeless. He wandered through his own consciousness.

He told me about his history with hallucinogens: LSD primarily, though he’d explored psilocybin, ayahuasca, and various synthetic compounds. He described elaborate journeys into inner space, encounters with entities and visions, moments of transcendent understanding. His language was sophisticated, influenced by mystical literature and neuroscience. But beneath the articulate surface, I sensed something else: a kind of desperate reaching, a need to be anywhere but here.

When I asked him about his childhood, the developmental roots of his elsewhere pattern became visible. Joseph grew up in a home marked by unpredictability and emotional violence. His father was volatile, explosively angry. But the volatility started earlier than Joseph consciously remembers. His mother told him, years later, that his father’s violence began during her pregnancy with Joseph—explosive rages that terrified her during the second and third trimesters. She lived in chronic fear during the exact period when Joseph’s nervous system was first organizing itself, learning at the most fundamental level whether the world was safe.

After Joseph’s birth, the violence continued and intensified. His mother, already traumatized and coping with what was almost certainly postpartum depression, struggled to provide the consistent attunement Joseph needed during those critical first months. She was there, physically present, but often emotionally absent—frozen in her own trauma response.

This is the classic disruption of the early belonging stage: an environment of threat during the prenatal period, followed by caregivers who are present but unavailable during the first months when foundational patterns of safety and connection are established. Joseph learned, at a bodily level before explicit memory or language, that his existence created problems. His presence in the family triggered violence. His needs overwhelmed his caregivers. The world was fundamentally unsafe.

The adaptive solution his developing nervous system discovered was departure—not physical flight (impossible for an infant) but psychological absence. Even in utero, exposed to maternal stress hormones, his system was learning patterns of dissociation. After birth, faced with a chaotic and frightening environment, these patterns deepened. He learned to be quiet, to need very little, to vanish into an inner state where he wasn’t a burden to anyone and wasn’t present to the threat around him.

By the time Joseph was a toddler, this pattern was deeply established. He was the “easy” child, the one who never complained, who entertained himself for hours, who seemed content to be alone. His parents, relieved not to have additional demands, didn’t recognize that this apparent self-sufficiency was actually a sign of trouble. Joseph wasn’t securely attached and happily independent; he had learned that connection was dangerous and that his survival depended on not needing anyone.

When he first tried LSD at seventeen, it wasn’t just a recreational experiment. It was coming home to a state he already knew—the state of being elsewhere. The drug formalized and intensified his existing dissociative capacity. The hallucinogen didn’t create the flight response; it simply provided a chemical means of accessing what was already his primary way of being in the world.

This helps explain why Joseph couldn’t maintain relationships. Partners would eventually leave, frustrated by his inability to fully arrive, to be present with them. But Joseph had learned in infancy that being fully present with another person was dangerous. Connection meant exposure to violence and neglect. His nervous system, brilliantly adaptive, learned to protect him through absence. Every relationship in his adult life activated this early learning. When a partner got close, when intimacy deepened, Joseph’s system interpreted this as threat. The flight response activated. He reached for the substances that would take him elsewhere.

For Parents: What This Means About You

If you’re a parent reading this, you may be feeling something complicated right now. Perhaps recognition—that sounds like my daughter. Perhaps fear—what did I do wrong? Perhaps defensiveness—I did the best I could.

Here’s what I want you to understand: the developmental perspective is not an indictment of you as a parent. Most parents do the best they can with the resources, awareness, and circumstances available to them. Many of the factors that disrupt early development—prenatal stress, birth complications, NICU stays, postpartum depression, economic instability, your own unhealed trauma—are not choices you made but conditions you navigated.

At the same time, your best might not have been enough for what your child’s particular nervous system needed. This is a painful truth to hold. But not being enough doesn’t mean you failed as a parent or person. It means you were human, limited, doing what you could within constraints that may have been severe.

The developmental perspective asks us to hold multiple truths at once:

• Early childhood experiences shape vulnerability to addiction
• Most parents do the best they can with what they have
• Your best might not have been sufficient for this particular child
• Not being sufficient doesn’t make you a bad parent
• Understanding what created vulnerability helps guide what might help now
• The person struggling with addiction isn’t weak or making poor choices—they’re responding from a nervous system organized by early experience

Can you hold all of these truths at once? It requires moving beyond simple narratives of blame or excuses into a territory of compassionate understanding that makes room for everyone’s humanity—including your own.

And here’s something else: these patterns aren’t fixed destinies. The nervous system retains plasticity across the lifespan. Early experiences create vulnerabilities, not certainties. Many people who experience disruptions in early belonging don’t develop elsewhere addictions. Many find healing through subsequent relationships, through their own resilience, through circumstances that support nervous system reorganization. The strand of experience continues throughout life. New experiences can change its weight and meaning.

If You Recognize Yourself

If you’re reading this and recognizing your own pattern—the pull toward elsewhere, the difficulty staying present, the way ordinary life feels like something to escape from—I want to speak to you directly.

First: this pattern makes sense. Not in the sense that it’s serving you well now, but in the sense that it developed for good reasons. Your nervous system learned, probably very early, that departure was safer than arrival. That learning may have been essential for your survival. The flight response protected you when you had no other options.

Second: understanding this doesn’t mean you’re trapped by it. The same nervous system that learned departure can learn presence—slowly, incrementally, with support. It won’t happen through willpower or because you decide it should. It happens through accumulated experiences that teach your system something new: that connection can be safe, that presence is survivable, that you can be here without being destroyed.

Third: what you’ve been seeking elsewhere—meaning, transcendence, peace, connection—these experiences don’t require departure. They’re available here, in this body, in this life, in this moment. But you may need help learning to access them without leaving.

Fourth: recovery doesn’t mean eliminating your capacity for imagination, transcendence, or altered states. These are gifts. The question is whether you can access them without needing to flee ordinary life—whether the ecstatic can be found in the garden, in intimacy, in the tasks of daily stewardship, rather than only through substances or escape.

What Elsewhere Provides (And Why It’s Hard to Give Up)

To understand why elsewhere addictions are so difficult to change, it helps to understand what they provide.

Elsewhere offers relief from overwhelm. When the present moment contains too much sensation, emotion, or complexity, departure offers relief. The system down-regulates through absence rather than integration.

It protects against relationship. Intimacy requires presence and vulnerability. For those whose early relationships were dangerous, departure protects against the threat of connection.

It provides access to meaning and transcendence. Elsewhere experiences often feel spiritually significant, providing a sense of meaning that ordinary life may not offer. This isn’t illusory—altered states can reveal genuine insights—but when this becomes the primary source of meaning, the person becomes dependent on departure for existential sustenance.

Each successful escape validates the flight response, confirming the nervous system’s learning that flight equals safety. The pattern deepens.

For many, their capacity for and experiences with elsewhere become central to identity. They’re “the person who’s done ayahuasca twelve times” or “the traveler” or “the gamer.” Their community recognizes and values this identity.

And while elsewhere addictions ultimately maintain trauma responses, they also provide temporary relief from trauma symptoms. The dissociation reduces intrusive memories, hypervigilance, and emotional flooding. This is powerful negative reinforcement.

You can’t simply remove the addiction without addressing the problems it solves. If you take away someone’s primary means of managing overwhelm, protecting themselves from relationship, accessing meaning, and regulating trauma symptoms, you leave them worse off than before. Recovery must involve discovering alternative solutions to the same problems—solutions that don’t require departure.

The Myth of Odysseus and the Sirens

In The Odyssey, long before Odysseus finds his way home, he and his crew are forewarned that they will pass the island of the Sirens. The singing of those celestial voices will cause all who listen to be overcome with longing and be forever lost. Circe the witch tells Odysseus that he must insert wax into the ears of his crew to protect them from this enchantment. And she permits him to be bound to the mast, so that he might hear that siren call but be prevented from casting himself upon the shore.

Odysseus is resourceful, but the singing is more than he can bear. He is overtaken by desire for the island and all that is promised by the Sirens’ song. He strains against the ropes, demands that his crew release him, cannot pass the island without losing himself in its song. He is delivered safely, but only by the constraints of the ropes. His willpower is not enough.

The myth is one we could easily brush off as the bravado of the ancient mariner—but in the addictions field, it illuminates a stubborn truth. Willpower is rarely sufficient to change deeply embedded patterns. Addictive substances or behaviors are the Sirens. No amount of wanting to resist guarantees successful navigation.

When the singing starts, we need to be tied to the mast.

This is what therapists call “supportive constraints”—external structures that make departure more difficult when internal resources fail. Scheduled check-ins with people who care about you. Agreed-upon limits on access to substances or devices. Structured time that supports presence. Communities that value being here rather than being elsewhere.

For families, this is important to understand: you can be part of these supportive structures. Not through controlling or punishing—that rarely works and often backfires—but through offering consistent presence, creating predictable rhythms, being someone who keeps showing up even when your loved one disappears. The constraints work best when they’re experienced as support rather than surveillance.

What Might Actually Help

Given everything we’ve explored about the elsewhere pattern, what can families and loved ones actually do? And what can people caught in the pattern do for themselves?

For Families

See the pattern for what it is. When your loved one disappears—into substances, screens, travel, or their own head—try to remember that this isn’t about you. It’s not a rejection of your love. It’s a nervous system doing what it learned to do to survive. This reframing won’t eliminate your hurt, but it might allow you to respond with curiosity rather than only with anger or grief.

Don’t try to force presence. You cannot argue, threaten, or guilt someone into being here. The flight response is not a conscious choice that can be overridden through willpower—yours or theirs. Pressure often activates the very pattern you’re trying to change.

Offer consistent, non-demanding connection. The most powerful thing you can offer is steady presence without conditions. Not “I’ll be here if you get clean” but “I’m here.” Not “let’s talk about your problem” but “let’s take a walk.” Small, reliable moments of connection that don’t demand anything can slowly teach a nervous system that presence is survivable.

Create anchors without creating prisons. Family rituals, regular meals together, predictable visits—these create structure that supports presence. But they need to feel like invitations, not requirements. The moment they feel like surveillance or control, they’ll activate the flight response.

Take care of yourself. Living with someone who keeps disappearing is painful. You need your own support—friends, therapy, groups for family members of people with addiction. You cannot be a steady presence for someone else if you’re depleted.

Hold hope without demanding change. This is perhaps the hardest thing: to believe recovery is possible while accepting you cannot make it happen. To hold the door open without standing in it, blocking the way.

For People Caught in the Pattern

Understand that presence is a skill, not a switch. You can’t simply decide to be here. Presence must be developed incrementally. Start with very brief moments—seconds, not minutes. Use anchors (breath, sensation, sound) that provide something concrete to return to. Practice in safe contexts before attempting presence in challenging situations.

Build capacity slowly. If you’ve been using substances or behaviors to manage overwhelm, stopping abruptly will expose you to more intensity than your system can handle. Think in terms of gradual transitions rather than sudden stops. Find support—therapy, groups, trusted people—before you try to change the pattern.

Seek relationships that afford safe connection. Not relationships that demand intimacy before you’re ready, but connections that offer steady, non-overwhelming presence. Sometimes this starts with animals, with nature, with a single trusted person. The nervous system needs experiences of connection that don’t lead to harm.

Find meaning that doesn’t require departure. The elsewhere experiences often feel deeply meaningful. That meaning is real—but it’s not the only source. Service to others, creative expression, contemplative practices, immersion in nature—these can provide meaning, transcendence, and connection without requiring you to leave.

Work with the original learning. The flight response persists because it was learned early and deeply. Approaches that address trauma at the nervous system level—somatic therapies, EMDR, other trauma-informed approaches—can help the system learn that safety is possible without departure. This work is best done with skilled support.

Be patient with yourself. The pattern didn’t form in a day and won’t change in a day. There will be setbacks. The shore may come in and out of view. What matters is the overall direction, not perfection.

The Two Tasks of Recovery

Two basic healing tasks lie before the person who has been addicted to elsewhere. The first is to find the ecstatic in daily life: in grounded practices, in the garden, in the tasks of intimacy and stewardship. It doesn’t matter much what form this takes, so long as it connects them to people. People are awkward and troublesome, but traveling with them is the only path to authentic fulfillment.

The second healing task is to discover a means of sharing their imaginative and spiritual capacities, of delivering their visions to the community fireside. People with elsewhere patterns often have genuine gifts—creativity, vision, the capacity to see beyond the ordinary. These gifts don’t need drugs or trances. They need channels of expression: art, writing, teaching, service.

Sometimes Joseph and I speak about him finding the shore. It’s as though people wave to him from there, calling him in. They’ve been calling for a long time. They’ve set watchfires, and have made a clear channel to protect his craft from the shoals. A child writes his name in the sand. All that is required of him is that he turn his tiny craft, face the horizon of elsewhere, and row shoreward.

This turning, this reorientation toward presence rather than departure, is the fundamental shift. It happens when the entire system—nervous system, environment, relationships, meaning-making—reorganizes around being here rather than leaving. When presence becomes more stable than absence. When here becomes more compelling than elsewhere.

When the Pattern Doesn’t Change

There is something else that must be named. For some people, the shore never comes into view. They try the grounded practices, the garden, the tasks of stewardship. They seek community and work with therapists who understand the pattern. They do everything this chapter suggests—and the call of elsewhere remains louder than the pull of presence. The flight response, learned so early and reinforced so long, does not quiet.

If you are one of these people, or if you love someone who is: this is not failure. Some nervous systems are organized at such depth that reorganization requires more time, more resources, or more relational safety than is currently available. Some people will manage the flight impulse rather than dissolve it. Some will find partial presence—here for moments, elsewhere again, returning—and that oscillation may be the best that is possible in this lifetime.

Healing is not one path. The goal is not perfection but continued movement toward what presence can be found, in whatever increments the system can tolerate.

The Storm and the Shore

The autumn storm has the flavor of duende, a wild turbulence of rain and hoary wind and cedar boughs torn and tumbling in the air. A gull rides downwind, moving at twenty knots or more, its neck feathers ruffled. Most of the birds are hunkered down in shallow dells, or in nests near the stream, or in barns among the fields. Offshore, the shallow sea is white with foam. Farther out, where the strait deepens, the swells are perhaps a dozen feet high. Part of me wishes I was out there, riding a windsurfing board or a sailing dinghy, joining the intensity and vitality of it. Such sports can indeed be hallucinogenic and spiritually fulfilling, every bit as good as ayahuasca and much better than eighteen hours of online gaming. Such experiences are capable of distilling vibrancy from the background noise and turbulence of daily life. They lead away from the quotidian and toward the experience of wonder. During storms, one might glimpse clearly the spirits of the sea.

But I consider my experience with such excursions: the danger, the cold, the scars on my leg and head and hands from reckless journeys at sea. I hear that call, the dreaming of the siren song, but I will not follow it today. Too often have I followed it, toward harm to myself and others. Sometimes a taste of death permeates the ecstatic. Today I will walk on the shore with my wife. We will lean into each other in the face of the wind. The crescent bay to the southeast is a blur of cobalt cliffs and gray clouds shredding. A bald eagle perches on a swaying tree nearby, close enough that we can see the taut tendons holding its talons to the wood. The bird gazes indifferently upon us as we pass.

We sidestep hummocks of wind-borne kelp blown onto the path by the storm. Wet shards of the stuff are scattered among the blue-tinged stones, now dark with rain, that demarcate the path. A trickle of muddy water meanders across the gravel, snakes down the hill with its slick and unruly vegetation, and empties into the canal dug in the lee of the dike by farmers a century ago. I follow the descending runoff with my eye: toward the bracken-filled canal, into the sluggish stream that empties the waters into the bay. On the far side of the stream, a field of ripened and now moldering pumpkins—mud-spattered, thick roots entangling—spreads toward the old airfield.

And there they are: the crows of my mornings. Slicing with their beaks into pumpkins, fashioning impromptu jack-o’-lanterns. Black wings flutter. The crows gorge, scrabble, take flight for brief spells in the blustering wind. Theirs is a celebration of homecoming, of defiance of the earth’s parceling. They possess the land as it possesses them. Along the old road and in the field of feasting, their clan has found its own belonging, each to each.

This is what recovery looks like: not the elimination of the flight impulse, not the complete dissolution of the capacity for departure, but the discovery that here—this muddy field with its rotting pumpkins, this storm-blown shore with its scattered kelp, this ordinary moment with its particular textures—can provide what we thought we could only find elsewhere. The crows haven’t stopped being birds of migration and movement. But they’ve found a place where they can feast, where they belong, where they can be together.

For the person who has been addicted to elsewhere, recovery means learning what was never learned in infancy: that belonging can be safe, that presence is survivable, that existence doesn’t create problems but solves them. It means the nervous system discovering, perhaps for the first time, that connection doesn’t inevitably lead to violence or neglect or abandonment. Being fully here, in this body, in this relationship, in this moment, is not only possible but can be the source of the very experiences—meaning, transcendence, connection, peace—that were sought elsewhere.

The wanderer finds the shore. The flight response quiets. Presence becomes possible. The nervous system learns a new truth that contradicts its earliest learning: I belong here. I can stay. I am safe.

For families, the work is to hold the possibility steady—to be the fire on the shore, calling your loved one home. Not by demanding or controlling or fixing, but by remaining present, remaining connected, remaining open to the moment when they turn toward arrival.

The wanderer can find their way home. The crows in the pumpkin field remind us: what we’ve been seeking elsewhere might be available here, in this moment, in this life, among this particular community of care.

For Further Reflection

If You’re a Parent or Loved One

• When you watch your loved one disappear—into substances, screens, travel, or their own head—what happens in you? Can you notice your own reactions without being consumed by them?
• What was your loved one’s earliest experience like? Were there stresses during pregnancy, complications at birth, separations in infancy, chaos or instability in the early months? Understanding doesn’t mean blaming anyone—it means seeing the pattern more clearly.
• What consistent, non-demanding connection can you offer? Not connection with strings attached, but simple presence that doesn’t require anything of them?
• How can you take care of yourself while continuing to care about someone who keeps leaving? What support do you need?
• Can you hold hope for their recovery without needing them to change on your timeline?

If You Recognize the Pattern in Yourself

• When did the pull toward elsewhere begin? Can you trace it back to your earliest experiences?
• What does elsewhere provide that here seems unable to offer? Relief from overwhelm? Protection from intimacy? Access to meaning? Understanding the function helps find alternatives.
• What small moments of presence are tolerable? Not hours, but seconds or minutes. Where does your body feel least like fleeing?
• Who in your life offers safe, non-demanding connection? If no one comes to mind, that’s important information. Finding such people—or one such person—may be the most important step.
• What meaning might be available here, in ordinary life, without departure? What would you need to be able to access it?
• What kind of support might help you work with this pattern—not to force change, but to create conditions where presence becomes more possible?