The Geography of Stillness

A narrow bridge of crumbling steel stretches across the inlet from the upscale neighborhood on the south shore to strip clubs and run-down stores on the north side. Beneath both ends of the bridge, where its foundations are anchored in the rocky shore, enclaves of the addicted and the homeless spread out among bushes and between security fences. I do not see these makeshift communities as I pass over the bridge in my car, though I know they are there.

Instead, my eye is drawn to the view of the ocean—cobalt, smooth, rippling—and to the high office towers ahead, sharp and glittering in the slanting sun. The bridge span rises, eases downward again, carries me toward my destination. I look for pedestrians at the jumping spot: two hundred yards before the north end of the bridge, on the west side. Not at the summit of the curving span, where the altitude would be most effective, but slightly farther down the slope, where the terminus of the fall is just offshore. Jumpers, like most people who attempt to commit suicide, are often ambivalent. Following the impulses of human nature, they hedge their bets. Indeed, many who jump from here, and from the companion bridges to the east and west, do survive. I have pulled them from the waters myself: broken, sputtering, alive.

Recently, a man at the downtown clinic killed himself with an overdose of heroin. He spoke to no one about his plans, gave no warning. He simply disappeared from treatment, and by the time the counselor tracked him down the man was dead. We talked about the incident in our counseling group, about the ones who vanish, who inevitably leave us with the sense that we should have done more, should have seen it coming, should have acted. But the counselor had acted: by carefully questioning the man to evaluate his risk of suicide, by following the due diligence of the counseling profession, by watching for cues—withdrawal, isolation, avoidance—that did not appear. All the counselors have lost clients to suicide, but rarely has any of them lost a client who spoke about suicide. In sharing their despair, clients often defuse it. Those who follow through typically don’t disclose their plans to anyone. They make up their minds, often impulsively, and they go.

But today no pedestrians loiter at the jumping spot. Perhaps they have been held back by the color of the sea, or the shimmer of the sun on rooftops down by the park, or by a glance of acknowledgment from a passerby. Sometimes that’s all it takes: a small and innocent and unknowing act to anchor against the gravity of dissolution.

This bridge, with its jumping spot and its hidden communities beneath, represents something essential about what I call addictions of solace: the perpetual proximity to endings, the waiting at the edge, the cold water below. These are not addictions of escape or departure like we explored with elsewhere patterns. These are addictions of numbing, of freezing, of substituting chemical comfort for the human warmth that was never reliably available.

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 frozen, unreachable. The one who has withdrawn into opioids or sedatives, who drifts rather than lives, who seems to be waiting for something that never comes. The one you cannot seem to warm no matter how you try.

If you are reading this as someone who recognizes yourself—who knows what it feels like to be frozen, to find that nothing satisfies, to discover in opioids or benzodiazepines the only warmth you’ve ever reliably known—then this chapter is for you too. Not to pathologize you, but to help you understand why the cold settled so deep, and what might make warmth possible.

Why Understanding This Matters

When someone you love disappears into opioids—nodding off, drifting away, unreachable even when present—the natural response is fear, grief, and often helplessness. Why can’t they just stop? Don’t they see what they’re doing to themselves? Don’t they want to live?

The answer is more complicated than wanting or not wanting. Opioid addiction, and the depression that almost always accompanies it, often has roots that extend back to the earliest months of life, when a developing nervous system learns whether needs lead to satisfaction, whether reaching out brings response, whether the world is a place where comfort can be found.

When those early experiences teach that needs are futile, that reaching out doesn’t work, that comfort is unreliable or absent, a profound vulnerability forms. The nervous system learns to freeze—to stop asking, to conserve energy, to wait in passive resignation. And when that person later discovers substances that can artificially provide the comfort they never reliably received, those substances become powerfully compelling.

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

The Pathway from Early Experience to Addiction

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

Early Disruption: Need Fulfillment → During the critical window from one month to eighteen months, an infant learns whether their needs matter, whether reaching out brings response, whether satisfaction is possible. When this stage is disrupted—through parental depression, absence, neglect, or overwhelming chaos—the infant learns that needs are dangerous or futile.

The Body’s Response: Freeze → Unable to flee or fight, the developing system organizes around freezing. The infant stops crying, stops reaching, appears passive or “easy.” Energy withdraws inward. Metabolic processes slow. The system learns to wait rather than act.

The Adaptation: Depression → Over time, this freeze response extends beyond acute circumstances into a generalized stance toward life. The person develops what we recognize as depression: difficulty initiating action, sense of futility, withdrawal from engagement, flattened affect, inability to experience satisfaction even when needs are met.

The Addiction: Opioids and Benzodiazepines → Substances that provide chemical comfort, that artificially satisfy the unfulfilled need for soothing, that numb the pain of chronic deprivation become compelling. These aren’t escape drugs that facilitate departure; they’re solace drugs that provide what was never reliably available: warm holding, relief from distress, the feeling of needs being met.

The addiction maintains the freeze response. It doesn’t just result from the freeze or the depression—it actively keeps the entire pattern stable. By providing artificial solace, opioids and benzodiazepines remove the urgency that might otherwise motivate the person to actively seek real connection, to risk reaching out again. The addiction becomes part of a self-reinforcing system that keeps the person passive, waiting, frozen.

The Learning of Futility

During the first months of life, an infant is entirely dependent. They cannot meet their own needs for food, warmth, comfort, and connection. Their survival depends on responsive caregiving. When this responsiveness is consistent, the infant’s developing system learns something fundamental: I have needs, I can communicate them, and the world will respond. The system learns that reaching out works, that needs lead to satisfaction.

But when caregiving is inconsistent, absent, or overwhelming—when the infant’s cries go unanswered or receive unpredictable responses—the system faces an impossible situation. The needs remain (they’re biological imperatives), but the environment offers no reliable way to meet them.

The infant cannot flee (they lack mobility) and cannot fight (they lack power). The only available response is to freeze—to shut down, to stop asking, to minimize need expression, to wait in passive hoping. This is the freeze response: metabolic slowdown, withdrawal, conservation of energy.

Consider the developmental experiences that create this vulnerability:

Maternal depression is perhaps the most common disruption. When a mother struggles with postpartum depression, she may be physically present but emotionally unavailable. The infant sees the caregiver, reaches out, cries for response—but receives little or no emotional attunement. The mother may feed the baby but do so mechanically, without the eye contact, vocal responsiveness, and emotional presence that allow the infant to feel truly met. The infant learns: my needs don’t matter, or worse, my needs burden others.

When primary caregivers are using substances, their availability becomes profoundly unpredictable. Sometimes they’re responsive, sometimes they’re absent even while present, sometimes their responses are inappropriate or frightening. The infant cannot predict what kind of response expressing needs will bring.

Parental mental illness—anxiety, psychosis, bipolar disorder—creates environments where the infant’s needs may be met erratically or may be overwhelmed by the parent’s own distress. The infant learns they must manage the caregiver’s emotional state rather than the caregiver managing theirs.

Infants in hospitals, foster care, or other institutional settings during this period often experience multiple caregivers, none of whom can provide consistent responsiveness. There may be adequate physical care—feeding, changing, basic hygiene—but the emotional attunement is absent.

Even well-intentioned parents in chaotic circumstances—poverty, housing instability, domestic violence, multiple young children—may be unable to provide the consistent responsiveness infants require. The needs are valid, the parent may want to respond, but the environment makes it impossible.

These early experiences create a profound developmental vulnerability—a nervous system that organizes around the freeze response, that learns needs are futile, that develops a stance of passive waiting rather than active seeking.

Claire’s Story

Claire (not her real name) is thirty-four years old and has been using opioids since she was nineteen. She has overdosed three times. She describes the experience of overdose not with fear but with something closer to longing—it’s the closest to peace she’s known. No struggle, no reaching, no wanting. Just drifting in cold water.

Claire’s history reveals the developmental foundation of her pattern. Her mother struggled with severe postpartum depression following Claire’s birth. For the first year of Claire’s life, her mother was present physically but emotionally absent—frozen in her own depression, unable to respond to Claire’s needs with anything beyond mechanical care. Claire was fed, changed, kept clean. But there was no eye contact, no cooing responsiveness, no attuned engagement with Claire’s emotional states.

Claire’s father, overwhelmed by his wife’s illness and his own anxiety, threw himself into work. He was rarely home during Claire’s infancy. When he was present, he was preoccupied, distant. Claire learned, during that critical first year, that her needs were a burden that exhausted the few resources her parents had. She learned to be quiet, to need little, to wait.

By the time Claire was two years old, her mother had recovered somewhat from the depression. But the damage was done. Claire had already organized around the freeze response. She was described by everyone as an “easy” child—quiet, compliant, no trouble. But this easiness was actually a red flag, a sign that Claire had given up on active need-seeking.

Throughout childhood and adolescence, Claire struggled with what was eventually diagnosed as depression. She had difficulty initiating activities, felt a pervasive sense of futility, withdrew from social engagement. She went through the motions of school and family life but felt like she was watching from a distance. Nothing felt satisfying.

At nineteen, after a wisdom tooth extraction, Claire was prescribed opioid painkillers. The first dose was a revelation. For the first time in her life, she felt okay. Not happy exactly, but held. Safe. Warm. Like she imagined an infant must feel in a good mother’s arms. The chronic, background sense of deprivation—which she’d lived with so long she didn’t even recognize it as abnormal—suddenly lifted. She felt complete.

She extended the prescription by claiming continued pain. When it ran out, she found ways to obtain more. Over months and then years, her use escalated. She moved from prescription pills to street drugs, from occasional use to daily dependence. Her life narrowed around obtaining and using. She lost jobs, relationships, housing. But none of that mattered because nothing had ever really mattered. The opioids were the only thing that made the frozen waiting tolerable.

When Claire overdosed, it wasn’t exactly a suicide attempt, though it wasn’t exactly an accident either. She described it as a kind of drifting—she took more than usual, felt herself sliding away, and didn’t particularly care whether she woke up. This is the closest to peace she’d known: not striving, not wanting, not hurting. Just drifting in cold water, finally able to let go.

Understanding Claire’s pattern through the developmental lens reframes it. She’s not weak or self-destructive. She’s not failing at recovery because she lacks motivation. Her system learned, before language, that needs are futile and satisfaction is impossible. The freeze response saved her when she was an infant with no other options. Depression is the ongoing manifestation of that freeze. And opioids are the only thing she’s found that makes the freeze feel like something other than slow death.

For Parents: What This Means About You

If you’re a parent reading this, you may be experiencing something complicated. Perhaps recognition—that sounds like what happened with my son. Perhaps guilt—I was depressed when he was a baby. Perhaps defensiveness—I did everything I could.

Here’s what I want you to understand: the developmental perspective is not an accusation. Many of the factors that disrupt early need fulfillment—postpartum depression, economic stress, your own unhealed trauma, medical crises, circumstances beyond your control—are not choices you made. They’re conditions you navigated as best you could.

Postpartum depression alone affects roughly one in seven mothers. It’s a medical condition, not a character flaw. If you were depressed during your child’s first year of life, you were likely doing everything you could just to survive. The emotional availability that infants need is hard to provide when you’re struggling to get out of bed.

At the same time, the impact on the infant is real regardless of the cause. Your best might not have been enough for what your child’s nervous system needed during that critical window. This is painful 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:

• Early experiences of unmet needs create vulnerability to depression and opioid addiction
• Most parents do the best they can with what they have
• Your best might not have been sufficient for this particular child’s needs
• Not being sufficient doesn’t make you a bad parent
• Understanding what created vulnerability helps guide what might help now
• The person struggling with opioids isn’t weak or giving up—they’re responding from a nervous system organized by early experience

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 need fulfillment don’t develop opioid addictions. Many find healing through subsequent relationships, through circumstances that provide what was missing. The strand continues. New experiences can change its meaning.

If You Recognize Yourself

If you’re reading this and recognizing your own pattern—the frozen feeling, the sense that nothing satisfies, the way opioids or sedatives provide the only warmth you’ve known—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 needs were futile, that reaching out didn’t work. The freeze response protected you when you had no other options. The depression isn’t weakness—it’s the ongoing manifestation of that protective freeze.

Second: the opioids aren’t just about getting high. They’re providing what your system has been desperate for since infancy—the feeling of being held, soothed, okay. That’s not moral weakness. That’s a nervous system finding the only reliable source of comfort it’s ever known.

Third: understanding this doesn’t mean you’re trapped. The same nervous system that learned to freeze can learn to thaw—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 reaching out can bring response, that needs can actually be met, that human warmth is possible.

Fourth: recovery from opioids is different from other addictions because of this underlying pattern. Taking away the opioids without addressing the frozen need leaves you worse off—exposed to all the pain the drugs were managing, without anything to replace them. Recovery means finding human sources of warmth before giving up the chemical ones. It means medication-assisted treatment not as failure but as bridge. It means learning, often for the first time, that your needs can matter to someone.

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

To understand why opioid addiction is so difficult to change, it helps to understand what the drugs provide.

Solace substances offer relief from chronic deprivation. When you’ve never reliably experienced the feeling of needs being met, when there’s a constant background sense of something missing, opioids fill that emptiness. They don’t transport you elsewhere; they make here tolerable.

They provide substitute soothing. Opioids deliver the down-regulation that responsive caregiving should have provided in infancy. They calm the nervous system, reduce distress, create a sense of being held and safe. This isn’t just pleasant; it’s what the system has been desperate for since infancy.

They protect against the pain of reaching out. Active need-seeking requires vulnerability—asking for help, expressing needs, depending on others. For someone whose early experience taught that reaching out brings disappointment or burden, opioids remove the necessity of this terrifying vulnerability.

Each time the substance provides comfort without requiring relationship, it confirms the original learning: chemical comfort is reliable, human responsiveness is not. The freeze response is validated as the correct strategy.

They make freezing feel intentional. Unlike stimulants that create uncomfortable activation, opioids support the metabolic slowdown of the freeze state. They make freezing feel like choice rather than suffocation.

You can’t simply remove the addiction without addressing the problems it solves. If you take away someone’s only source of comfort without providing alternatives, you leave them worse off than before. Recovery must involve discovering that human warmth can be reliable—a terrifying proposition for someone whose earliest experience taught the opposite.

Why We Resist What Would Help

There is another layer to this that families need to understand: people resist what would help them precisely because what would help requires them to feel.

The frozen person doesn’t want to move because movement brings the body back online—activates the sensations that numbing was designed to avoid. Thawing means feeling the urgency of unmet needs, the pain of deprivation, the vulnerability of reaching out. The freeze response exists precisely to protect against these feelings. Asking someone to give it up is asking them to feel what they organized their entire system around not feeling.

This is why arguments don’t work. You cannot reason someone out of a nervous system state. The frozen system doesn’t negotiate verbally. It responds to accumulated experience—to repeated encounters that contradict its predictions about the futility of needs. Recovery requires not persuasion but patient presence, not argument but accumulation of evidence that the world might be different than what the system learned.

The person isn’t choosing to stay frozen. They’re protecting themselves from something that once felt—and may still feel—unsurvivable. What looks like resistance is often the system doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep them safe from the overwhelming pain of needing and not receiving.

Ophelia: An Ancient Pattern

Standing half in the shadow of the awning, pale and uncertain, the woman I see outside the clinic resembles a small and skittish bird. Many details of her appearance—the tilt of her head, the slight fluttering motion of her hands, the way she brushes an errant strand of hair from her face—remind me of the countless opioid-addicted men and women I’ve known. She could be any one of them: drifting, drowning. Of all the cultures of the addicted, opioid and benzodiazepine users live nearest to the edge of collapse and surrender and suicide. They become paralyzed by the cold.

She is Ophelia, the avatar of sadness. Shakespeare found her drifting in the waters of European mythology, fashioned her into a symbol of disillusionment, and gave her a role in Hamlet. In the play, after Hamlet rebuffs Ophelia and accidentally kills her father, she becomes wild with bewilderment and grief. She wanders the grounds of Elsinore castle, singing and chanting in a manner reminiscent of many opioid users I’ve known: mournful, romantic, plaintive.

Ophelia and her mythological sisters die because the world is cold and nothing but love will warm them. As with opioid users who have not found consistent and nurturing bonds, they come adrift, and go under.

In the nineteenth century, when opioid use was rife among writers and artists, the painter John Everett Millais completed a famous portrait of Ophelia floating downstream, pale and dead and yet still singing. He used as his model a girl of nineteen named Elizabeth Siddall. For the portrait, Elizabeth dressed in a floral gown and lay for long periods in a full bathtub. Her red hair spread across the water. Millais painted from a few feet away and kept the bath warm with oil lamps placed beneath the tub.

But he became so absorbed in his work that he forgot to replenish the lamps. The flames stuttered and the water cooled. Elizabeth, however, did not complain. She grew chill and waited, modeling perfectly a dead girl in cold water.

She did not recover from the hypothermia. She developed a persistent illness—deep chill and relentless cough. And ten years after playing Ophelia in the bathtub, Elizabeth Siddall died from an intentional opioid overdose. She had been depressed, had given birth to a stillborn child, had painted a self-portrait that depicts her as gaunt and haunted. She was drawn under by the currents of frailty, carried downstream, and lost.

This story captures something essential about solace addictions. Elizabeth Siddall didn’t complain when the water grew cold. She waited, froze, modeled death perfectly. This is the freeze response in its essence: the capacity to endure the unendurable by shutting down, by stopping protest, by accepting the cold as inevitable. And when the freeze becomes chronic, when the cold penetrates too deep, opioids offer what they always offer: warmth without the vulnerability of asking to be pulled from the water, comfort without the terror of needing rescue.

What Actually Heals: Belonging, Not Steps

Research on recovery from addiction—including opioid addiction—reveals something the programs themselves rarely emphasize: the mechanism of change is not any particular set of steps or techniques. What heals is belonging. The actual predictive factors for sustained recovery are social support, recovery-oriented networks, and purposeful contribution to others.

This makes sense when you understand the freeze pattern. Someone whose nervous system learned that needs are futile, that reaching out brings disappointment, that human warmth is unreliable—this person doesn’t need a program. They need evidence that contradicts the original learning. They need experiences of being welcomed, being useful, being connected. Of mattering to people who matter to them.

I think of a moment during a group outing when the trail was blocked by a deep puddle none of us could cross alone. A woman in the group—quiet, often withdrawn, struggling with her own history of addiction—noticed a log on the far side. She was wearing boots; she could reach it. She waded in, dragged the log into place, then stood in the middle of the puddle holding out her hand to help each person cross. By the end, she had become essential. Not because she followed instructions. Not because she completed steps. Because the community needed her, and she showed up.

This is what recovery looks like when it works: not the completion of a curriculum but the discovery that you can be seen and not destroyed, that you can contribute and be valued, that belonging is possible even for someone whose system learned early that it was not.

For people with solace addictions, this is particularly important. The freeze response is fundamentally relational—it formed in response to relational deprivation. It reorganizes most reliably through relational experience. Programs, steps, techniques—these can provide structure, but they cannot provide the fundamental human experience of being held, welcomed, needed. Only people can do that.

What Might Actually Help

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

For Families

Understand that you’re seeing the freeze response, not laziness or lack of caring. When your loved one seems passive, withdrawn, unable to initiate—they’re not choosing this. Their nervous system is in a protective mode it learned long ago. This reframing won’t eliminate your frustration, but it might help you respond with patience rather than pressure.

Understand why they resist what would help. Don’t take resistance personally. The frozen person resists thawing because thawing means feeling—and their entire system organized around not feeling. You cannot argue them into recovery. You can only provide accumulated experiences that teach their system something new.

Don’t demand activation before the person is ready. Pushing someone in freeze to “just try harder” or “snap out of it” often deepens the freeze. The system interprets pressure as threat, confirming that the world is unsafe for need-expression. Meet them where they are.

Provide reliable, non-overwhelming presence. The most powerful thing you can offer is consistent availability without demands. Not “I’ll be here if you get clean” but “I’m here.” Show up when you say you will. Follow through on small promises. Be predictable. This may feel insignificant, but for someone whose nervous system learned that human responsiveness is unreliable, every instance of reliable presence is data that contradicts the original learning.

Respond to small communications as though they matter. When someone in freeze expresses a preference, makes a request, or initiates contact—however small—that’s activation. That’s the system testing whether reaching out might work. Respond reliably. Make it worth their while to risk again.

Create opportunities for contribution. Recovery happens through belonging, and belonging happens through being needed. Can your loved one help with something? Contribute to something? Be essential to something? Not busy work to keep them occupied, but genuine contribution where their presence matters. This contradicts the original learning that their needs were burdensome—it teaches them that their presence is valued.

Support medication-assisted treatment. Methadone and buprenorphine are not “trading one addiction for another.” They’re providing the nervous system regulation that allows developmental repair to happen. For many people, medication-assisted treatment is not a bridge to eventual abstinence but a long-term component of recovery—and this is appropriate. Insisting on abstinence as the only valid outcome replicates the original deprivation: withholding what works because of an ideal about what should work.

Take care of yourself. Living with someone who is frozen is exhausting and lonely. You need your own support—friends, therapy, groups for family members. You cannot be a reliable presence for someone else if you’re depleted.

For People Caught in the Pattern

Understand that thawing takes time and cannot be forced. You cannot will yourself out of freeze. The pattern formed before you had words or choices, and it won’t dissolve because you decide it should. Be patient with yourself.

Understand why you resist what would help. If you find yourself avoiding the very things that might help you—therapy, groups, connection—this makes sense. What would help requires you to feel, and your system organized around not feeling. The resistance isn’t weakness; it’s protection. But the protection that saved you as an infant may be imprisoning you now.

Find one reliable responder. Recovery from solace addiction requires the experience of reaching out and being met—probably hundreds or thousands of times before the nervous system updates its learning. Find someone who can be consistently present: a therapist, a sponsor, a friend who shows up. Start with one.

Find belonging, not just treatment. Programs and steps can help, but what actually heals is the experience of being welcomed, being useful, being connected. Look for communities—recovery communities, spiritual communities, activity-based communities—where you can belong. Where your presence matters. Where you can contribute something only you can offer.

Practice needing in small doses. The terror of needing others doesn’t dissolve all at once. Start with tiny requests—asking for a glass of water, expressing a preference about where to sit. Notice what happens when you reach out and someone responds. Build from there.

Choose physical activities that challenge freeze, not comfort it. This is counterintuitive, but important: slow, warm, enclosing practices like restorative yoga or passive stretching can actually make freeze more comfortable rather than helping you thaw. What helps freeze is activities that require initiation—that demand you reach out and make something happen. Contact improvisation, team activities requiring quick decisions, anything that requires spontaneous action without time for the familiar pattern of waiting and assessing. The goal isn’t to find activities that feel good (freeze often feels like relief); it’s to find activities that require the activation your system has learned to avoid.

Consider medication-assisted treatment as part of recovery, not failure. Methadone and buprenorphine can provide the regulation your nervous system needs while you do the slower work of learning that human warmth can be reliable. For many people, this is a long-term or permanent part of recovery—and that’s okay.

Address the depression alongside the addiction. They’re not separate problems; they’re manifestations of the same pattern. Antidepressants, behavioral activation, light therapy, gentle movement—anything that increases arousal and activation can support the thaw. Don’t wait for sobriety to address mood; work on both tracks.

Learn to notice when needs are met. One of the cruelest aspects of this pattern is that even when good things happen, the system often can’t register satisfaction. Practice noticing small moments when needs are actually met—the warmth of a cup of tea, a text returned, a promise kept. The nervous system can learn to register these, but it takes practice.

Be patient with setbacks. Recovery from solace addiction rarely follows a straight line. The system has been organized around freeze for decades; it will return to that configuration when stressed. Relapse isn’t failure—it’s the system reorganizing back to its stable state when repair is incomplete. Each time you return to trying, you’re teaching the system something new.

The Two Tasks of Recovery

Two fundamental healing tasks lie before those recovering from addictions of solace. The first is to learn—often for the first time—that needs can lead to satisfaction, that reaching out can bring response, that the world contains people who will reliably show up. This learning cannot happen through insight or willpower; it requires repeated experiences of reliable responsiveness that gradually teach the nervous system something new.

The second task is to thaw from the freeze. This is terrifying because the freeze was protective. Activating again means feeling the urgency of unmet needs, the pain of deprivation, the vulnerability of needing others. The work is to discover that the person can tolerate these feelings, that activation doesn’t lead to overwhelm, that they have resources now that weren’t available when they first froze as infants.

Sometimes in counseling sessions with people who carry these patterns, I notice the moment when a tiny bit of activation appears. Someone who has been mechanically answering questions suddenly expresses a preference. A person who has been passive suddenly makes a request. Someone who has been waiting suddenly initiates. These moments are profound. They represent the system organizing toward something other than freeze, if only briefly.

When the Pattern Doesn’t Change

And yet, for some people, the freeze does not thaw. They do not find the reliable responder, the therapist who shows up every week, the medication that manages withdrawal, the housing that provides stability. They do the work this chapter describes—and the frozen waiting persists. The nervous system, organized so early and so deeply around the futility of needs, does not reorganize.

If you are one of these people, or if you love someone who is: this is not failure. Some systems are organized at such depth that thawing requires more time, more resources, or more accumulated experiences of responsiveness than one lifetime can provide. Some people will manage the freeze rather than dissolve it—learning to function within the cold rather than fully warming. Some will find moments of thaw that don’t last, returning to freeze, reaching again, returning. This oscillation may be what recovery looks like for them.

The goal is not perfection but whatever warmth can be found and held, in whatever increments the system can tolerate.

Coming to Shore

I exit the clinic and make my way down the sidewalk. Ophelia—the woman who represents everyone whose needs went unmet, everyone who learned to freeze and wait—gazes in the opposite direction and does not see me. She stands, immobile, negotiating with herself. Such moments are private, and easily spoiled by well-intentioned interventions. She must decide. I leave her to it, hoping I will meet or hear of her again. I glance back to see Elias, my supervisee, still near the door, fiddling needlessly with the notice board, stalling. He’s making himself visible, waiting for her to choose. He’s providing what she may have never had: consistent presence without demands, someone who will wait with her while she decides whether to risk reaching out.

This is the essence of recovery from solace addictions: someone who will wait at the shore, holding the possibility steady, ready to respond when the person frozen in the cold water decides to reach for help. Someone who understands that the reaching itself—not the rescue that follows—is the most difficult part. Someone who knows that thawing takes time, that activation is terrifying, that learning needs can lead to satisfaction requires hundreds or thousands of experiences where needs are actually met.

Sometimes people come to shore. They reverse the inward spiral by finding bonds stronger than their own fragility, by discovering relationships that reliably respond, by learning gradually that their system’s oldest beliefs about the futility of needs might not be true anymore. They come to be held by such bonds the way an infant is carried in the dark—the experience they needed during that first year but never reliably received.

But they must first call out, before the cold water lays final claim to them. And we must be there, consistent and responsive, modeling the possibility that reaching out can work, that needs can lead to satisfaction, that the freeze can thaw into life again.

For families, the work is to stand at that shore, steady and reliable, waiting with patience and compassion for the moment when the person decides to reach toward life again. Not rescuing—the reaching must be theirs. But present, available, ready to respond when they do.

The one frozen in cold water can find their way to shore. The work is to be the warmth that calls them back.

For Further Reflection

If You’re a Parent or Loved One

• When you watch your loved one frozen—passive, withdrawn, unreachable—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 disruptions in caregiving during the first year—depression, illness, separation, chaos? Understanding doesn’t mean blaming anyone—it means seeing the pattern more clearly.
• What reliable, non-demanding presence can you offer? Not presence with conditions attached, but simple availability that doesn’t require anything of them?
• How do you respond when they express a need or preference, however small? Do they have reason to believe reaching out to you will bring response?
• Where might your loved one find belonging—not just treatment, but community where they can contribute and be valued?
• How can you support their recovery without insisting on a particular form (like abstinence without medication)? Can you accept medication-assisted treatment as valid recovery?
• How can you take care of yourself while continuing to care about someone who may not visibly respond?

If You Recognize the Pattern in Yourself

• When did the freeze begin? Can you trace it back to your earliest experiences?
• What do opioids or sedatives provide that nothing else has? Warmth? Soothing? The feeling of being held? Understanding the function helps find alternatives.
• Why do you resist what might help? If you find yourself avoiding therapy, groups, connection—can you recognize this as protection rather than failure?
• Who in your life has been reliable? If no one comes to mind, that’s important information. Finding one reliable person may be the most important step.
• Where might you find belonging? Not just a program with steps, but a community where you could contribute, where your presence would matter?
• What would it feel like to express a need and have it met? Can you imagine that without terror? If not, that’s the freeze talking—it learned long ago that needs bring disappointment.
• What small need might you risk expressing? Not a large one, but something tiny. A preference for tea over coffee. A request to sit in the sunshine. Notice what happens.
• What physical activities might challenge your freeze rather than comfort it? What requires you to initiate, to reach out, to act without time for the familiar waiting?