I’m wondering where the bullet will come from: a passing car, or a man in the shelter of the trees, or a sidewalk pedestrian who ambles across the lawn and takes aim through the front window. Perhaps there will be a spray of bullets, or a trio of thugs with baseball bats. Perhaps the fear itself will be sufficient, and no one will come.

I should be listening instead of entertaining imaginary catastrophes. He’s talking about night sweats, his family in the east, the number he used to call to get his cocaine, the way the guards at the youth detention center used a fire hose to quell a fight in the cafeteria. He remembers being punched into a corner by the water, rolled by it onto the floor, made sodden and vulnerable and furious. He twitches, frets, and fidgets. It grows dark outside. I wonder why I did not draw the curtains before he arrived.

He does not seem to notice my anxiety, this man who shot his own brother. He speaks anxiously, in the manner of someone unaccustomed to exploring his inner life. He has lived on the surface of things, skating and drifting, allowing his bewilderment and anger to fester. His voice is tight, his speech is fast. He runs words together in small bursts, each one punctuated by a quick sniff and a moment of silence. Perhaps the sniffing is an artifact of his habit, or an allergy to the grasses out front. I don’t know. I don’t know whether he knows, or is aware of what he’s doing. He has been running too long, always looking for the next refuge, wearing himself thin.

He has come as far as he can, to the west coast with its great sea of promises. But his pursuers have found him even here. They have beaten him, and imprisoned him naked in a small cage, and tossed hypodermic needles into him like darts into a dartboard. If they find him again they will kill him. Still he perseveres, seduced by the rush and its illusions of empowerment.

He prattles on, unaware of my hypervigilance, of my gaze shifting too frequently toward the street. I am aware that the risk to me is paltry. They are not likely to come for him here. It will happen on a crowded street, probably, with a brief and scuffling struggle. Or perhaps he will be able to cut yet another new deal. He’s working on it. And I hope he succeeds in remaining alive. But I resent being put at risk by him—however small the immediate danger might be. I don’t like his speediness, either, his impulsive lurching speech and the unconscious manner in which he bounces his right leg rhythmically. He’s impulsive and reckless. He forgets, too easily, his responsibilities to his own dignity and frailty. He wears too much black. He’s flippant, too convinced of his own specialness to play by anyone else’s rules. And look where this has delivered him: into the habits of a fugitive, a runner without purpose, a hyena jeering at lions.

This vignette captures something essential about what I call addictions of departure: the perpetual motion, the scanning for threat, the inability to settle, the way anxiety permeates every interaction. These patterns—stimulant use, compulsive activity, chronic restlessness, commitment avoidance—have developmental roots in the period when a young child is learning whether the world is safe enough to explore, whether their autonomous impulses will be supported or punished, whether they can trust their own movement through space.

If you are reading this as a parent or loved one, you may recognize someone you care about in these words. The person who can never sit still. The one who seems driven by some internal motor that never shuts off. The one who moves from crisis to crisis, job to job, relationship to relationship, always scanning, always restless, always running from something they can never quite name.

If you are reading this as someone who recognizes yourself—who knows what it feels like to have a mind that won’t quiet, a body that can’t settle, a nervous system that seems permanently set to high alert—then this chapter is for you too. Not to pathologize you, but to help you understand where the restlessness comes from, and what might eventually make stillness possible.

Why Understanding This Matters

When someone you love seems driven by constant motion—using stimulants, unable to commit, always looking over their shoulder, cycling through jobs and relationships and places to live—the natural response is frustration and confusion. Why can’t they just calm down? Why do they make everything so chaotic? Why can’t they just settle?

The answer is more complicated than choice or character. The pattern of perpetual motion often has roots that extend back to toddlerhood, when a developing nervous system learns whether the world is safe enough to explore, whether autonomous movement is supported or punished, whether they can trust their own judgment about where to go and what to do.

When those early experiences teach that the world requires constant vigilance, that danger can come from anywhere, that trusting your own impulses leads to harm, a profound vulnerability forms. The nervous system learns to stay perpetually alert, scanning for threat, ready to adjust behavior instantly. And when that person later discovers substances that can make this exhausting state feel powerful and purposeful rather than chaotic and frightening, 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 recklessness is often a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive unpredictable circumstances.

The Pathway from Early Experience to Addiction

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

Early Disruption: Autonomy → During the critical window from approximately eight months to two and a half years, the child learns whether autonomous exploration is safe. When this stage is disrupted—through overcontrol, inconsistent boundaries, environmental danger, or punishment for independent action—the child learns that the world requires constant vigilance.

The Body’s Response: Orient (Hypervigilance) → Unable to predict when or where threat will come from, the developing nervous system remains in perpetual alert. The child scans constantly, assesses every situation for danger. Movement becomes both compulsive (must keep moving to stay ahead of threats) and directionless (no destination is safe).

The Adaptation: Anxiety → Over time, this chronic hyperorientation extends into generalized anxiety. The person experiences constant worry, difficulty relaxing, the sense that something bad is always about to happen, restlessness, hyperarousal, racing thoughts, an inability to be still.

The Addiction: Stimulants and Compulsive Activity → Substances and behaviors that match and support the hyperaroused state become compelling. Stimulants don’t create the anxiety; they make it feel purposeful, powerful, controlled. Movement addictions (workaholism, exercise addiction, geographic instability) provide external justification for the internal restlessness that never stops.

The addiction maintains the orient response. Stimulants keep the nervous system activated, confirming that vigilance is necessary. Compulsive movement prevents the settling that might allow the person to recognize they’re safe. The addiction becomes part of a self-reinforcing system where hypervigilance justifies the stimulants, the stimulants maintain hypervigilance, and settling becomes increasingly impossible.

The Learning of Danger

Beginning around eight months, the infant becomes a toddler who can move. They crawl, walk, climb, explore. Their curiosity drives them outward. They want to touch everything, go everywhere, try everything. This is the period when children learn whether their autonomous impulses are supported, whether the world is safe enough for exploration, whether they can trust their own judgment about where to go and what to do.

When this stage proceeds well—when caregivers provide a secure base from which to explore, when they support autonomous movement while maintaining appropriate safety, when they allow the child to venture out and return without punishment—the child’s system learns that exploration is safe, that autonomous action leads to competence, that the world can be navigated successfully.

But when this stage is disrupted, when the environment does not support autonomous exploration, the child faces an impossible situation. Their developmental drive toward autonomy is powerful—it’s biological, unavoidable. But the environment punishes or prevents autonomous action. The nervous system must solve this dilemma, and the solution is hypervigilance: never fully commit to any action, always scan for threat, move quickly and be ready to adjust, don’t settle anywhere.

Consider the developmental experiences that create this vulnerability:

Overcontrol and restriction create one common pattern. Parents who cannot tolerate the child’s autonomous exploration, who say no! constantly, who prevent the child from trying things independently, who hover anxiously and intervene too quickly. The child learns: my impulses are wrong, movement is dangerous, I cannot trust myself. But the drive to move remains, creating internal conflict that manifests as anxiety.

Inconsistent boundaries create a different wound. When rules change unpredictably, when what was allowed yesterday is punished today, when the child cannot predict what will be safe, the child learns: I must stay constantly alert because I cannot predict when my behavior will be acceptable. Hypervigilance becomes necessary.

Dangerous environments leave their mark as well. Homes with domestic violence, substance use, unstable housing, or other genuine threats. The toddler wants to explore but the environment is actually dangerous. The child learns: movement invites real threat, I must scan constantly, nowhere is truly safe.

Punishment for autonomous action teaches a particular lesson. Parents who respond to exploration with harsh discipline, shaming, or rejection. The child climbs on furniture and is spanked. The child makes a mess and is called bad. The child asserts preference and is told they’re selfish. The child learns: my autonomy threatens my connection, I must suppress my impulses—but the impulses don’t stop, creating constant internal pressure.

Parental anxiety shapes the child’s developing nervous system. When caregivers are themselves anxious, hypervigilant, unable to tolerate their child’s exploration without catastrophizing. The toddler climbs and the parent gasps in fear. The child reaches for something and the parent rushes over anxiously. The child internalizes the parent’s anxiety, learning: the world is dangerous, exploration threatens survival, constant vigilance is necessary.

Role reversal requires the toddler to attune to the parent’s needs rather than the parent attuning to theirs. Parents with mental illness, substance use, or overwhelming stress who need the child to be “easy,” to not make demands, to suppress autonomous impulses. The child learns: my autonomy burdens others, I must stay alert to others’ needs and suppress my own.

These early experiences don’t cause addiction directly. But they create a profound developmental vulnerability—a nervous system that organized around constant vigilance, learned the world is too dangerous for relaxed exploration, and developed a stance of perpetual scanning and readiness to adjust.

Trench’s Story

Trench (not his real name)—the man from the opening vignette, the one who shot his brother, the one whose pursuers have found him even here—is massive. Close to seven feet tall and heavyset. He often moves gingerly, as though trying to be smaller, to disappear. But Trench will almost always be the largest man in any room, the tallest as well as the heaviest, the one to whom unwelcome attention will inevitably be drawn. This detail is essential for understanding his pattern: from toddlerhood onward, Trench could not explore the world without drawing attention. His size made autonomous, unnoticed exploration impossible.

His history reveals the developmental foundation. Trench’s mother struggled with severe anxiety following a traumatic event when Trench was ten months old—his father was arrested and imprisoned for violence, a pattern Trench has continued. Suddenly, Trench’s mother was a single parent, terrified, hypervigilant, unable to tolerate her son’s normal toddler exploration without catastrophizing about all the ways he could be hurt.

When Trench began to crawl and pull himself up, his mother would gasp and rush over. When he climbed, she would pull him down frantically. When he reached for things, she would snatch them away, warning about dangers. Her anxiety was genuine—she was traumatized, alone, terrified—but the impact on Trench’s developing autonomy was profound. He learned that movement activates others’ fear, that his exploratory impulses frighten the person he depends on, that the world is full of dangers he cannot see but must somehow avoid.

Making this worse, Trench was unusually large even as a toddler. His size meant that normal toddler behavior—knocking things over, bumping into furniture, the general chaos of learning to navigate space—had bigger consequences. His mother’s anxiety intensified. By the time Trench was eighteen months old, his mother was exhausted and increasingly angry. She would oscillate between anxious overprotection and harsh punishment. Trench couldn’t predict which response his autonomous action would trigger.

The developmental impact was severe. Trench’s system learned that the world is dangerous (confirmed by his mother’s constant fear), that his impulses were not to be trusted (sometimes punished, sometimes prevented), that he must stay constantly alert, that he could never fully predict what’s needed. His nervous system organized around hypervigilance. He scanned his mother’s face constantly for cues. He learned to read micro-expressions, to detect mood shifts, to adjust behavior instantly.

Throughout childhood, this pattern deepened. His size continued to draw unwanted attention. Other children were afraid of him or challenged him. Adults expected more maturity because of his physical presence. He could never just be a child exploring normally. Every move was noticed, commented on, often misinterpreted. The hypervigilance that began in toddlerhood became his fundamental way of being.

By adolescence, Trench discovered stimulants—first prescribed Ritalin, later cocaine and methamphetamine. The drugs were a revelation. The constant, exhausting vigilance that had always felt like a burden suddenly felt like power. The racing thoughts became sharp focus. The restlessness became purposeful activity. The perpetual scanning for threats became a feeling of being ahead of everyone else, seeing dangers others missed, being the smartest person in the room.

What Trench cannot see—what the pattern prevents him from seeing—is that his constant movement creates the instability he fears. His hypervigilance damages relationships, as people grow exhausted by his intensity and suspicion. His inability to settle makes commitment impossible, ensuring he remains isolated. His stimulant use keeps his nervous system activated, preventing any possibility of discovering that stillness might be survivable.

This is the departure addiction in its essence: motion that never arrives anywhere, scanning that never finds safety, activity that never creates stability. Trench isn’t weak or broken; he’s brilliantly adapted to an early environment that genuinely required hypervigilance. But the adaptation that saved him as a toddler now imprisons him, and the stimulants that once made the pattern feel powerful now just keep it running endlessly.

For Parents: What This Means About You

If you’re a parent reading this, you may be experiencing something complicated. Perhaps recognition—I was so anxious when she was little, I was always worried about her getting hurt. Perhaps guilt—I couldn’t let him explore, everything felt dangerous. Perhaps defensiveness—The world WAS dangerous, I had to protect her.

Here’s what I want you to understand: the developmental perspective is not an accusation. Many of the factors that disrupt toddler autonomy—your own anxiety, genuine environmental dangers, the trauma you were carrying, the impossible circumstances you were navigating—are not choices you made. They’re conditions you lived through.

If you were anxious when your child was learning to walk and explore, you probably had reasons. Maybe you had experienced trauma yourself. Maybe the environment really was dangerous—domestic violence, unstable housing, a dangerous neighborhood. Maybe you were alone, overwhelmed, terrified. Your anxiety wasn’t a character flaw; it was often a reasonable response to circumstances.

At the same time, the impact on the child is real regardless of the cause. Your best might not have been enough for what your child’s developing nervous system needed during that 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 unpredictable or dangerous environments create vulnerability to anxiety and stimulant 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 stimulants or constant motion isn’t reckless or weak—they’re responding from a nervous system organized by early experience

And here’s something else: your own anxiety may have developmental roots. The pattern often runs through generations—anxious parents raising children who become anxious, who raise children who become anxious. Understanding this can help break the cycle, not through blame but through awareness.

If You Recognize Yourself

If you’re reading this and recognizing your own pattern—the mind that won’t quiet, the body that can’t settle, the constant scanning for what might go wrong—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 during toddlerhood, that the world required constant vigilance. That learning may have been accurate then—maybe the environment really was unpredictable or dangerous. The hypervigilance protected you when you had no other options.

Second: the stimulants aren’t just about getting high. They make the exhausting internal state feel purposeful and powerful rather than chaotic and overwhelming. The drugs align with what your nervous system is already doing. That’s not moral weakness. That’s a nervous system finding something that finally makes the constant activation feel like an asset rather than a burden.

Third: understanding this doesn’t mean you’re trapped. The same nervous system that learned hypervigilance can learn that some places and people are safe enough to settle with—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 stillness doesn’t lead to disaster, that trusting is sometimes warranted, that not every situation requires scanning.

Fourth: recovery doesn’t mean eliminating your capacity for alertness or quick thinking. These can be genuine strengths in appropriate contexts. The question is whether you can choose when to be vigilant rather than having vigilance choose for you—whether stillness becomes an option rather than a terror.

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

To understand why stimulant addiction and compulsive motion are so difficult to change, it helps to understand what they provide.

Stimulants create alignment with activation. When your nervous system is perpetually activated, stimulants don’t feel like adding anxiety—they feel like finally having external justification for internal state. The drugs match what’s already happening, making it feel purposeful rather than pathological.

They enhance hypervigilance. Stimulants improve attention, quick thinking, threat assessment—exactly the skills hypervigilant people already possess. The drugs make the adaptation feel like a superpower rather than a wound.

They provide control over restlessness. The internal restlessness that comes from chronic orienting feels chaotic and overwhelming. Stimulants create the illusion of control—the movement feels directed rather than compulsive.

They give energy for perpetual motion. Hypervigilant people are exhausted from constant scanning—but they cannot stop. Stimulants provide energy to maintain the pattern that the nervous system demands.

They protect from settling. The terror of settling—of being still enough that you might feel the original vulnerability—is avoided. Stimulants ensure you never have to find out if stopping is safe.

Each time the substance supports the hypervigilant state, it confirms the original learning: constant vigilance is necessary, settling is dangerous, you were right to never relax.

You can’t simply remove the addiction without addressing what it provides. If you take away someone’s only way of making the exhausting activation feel purposeful, you leave them worse off than before. Recovery must involve discovering that stillness can be survivable—a terrifying proposition for someone whose earliest experience taught that settling invites danger.

Why We Resist What Would Help

There is another layer families need to understand: people resist what would help them precisely because what would help requires them to feel differently than they’ve learned to feel.

The hypervigilant person doesn’t want to calm down because calm means surrendering control—and control is the only safety the anxious system knows. The anxious person doesn’t want to trust because trusting means vulnerability, and vulnerability is what got them hurt in the first place. The person in perpetual motion doesn’t want to stop because stopping means feeling the original terror of being still in a dangerous world.

This is why arguments don’t work. You cannot reason someone out of a nervous system state. The hypervigilant system doesn’t negotiate verbally. It responds to accumulated experience—to repeated encounters that contradict its predictions about danger. 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 activated. 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 vulnerability of settling.

The Coyote: Trickster of Boundaries

A small population of coyotes live in the downtown core. They follow rail lines in from the suburbs and smaller towns east of the city. They haunt alleys late at night, skittering away from people, thriving invisibly. They are too smart to be caught. In the wild, coyotes will overturn and urinate on traps set for their capture. Here in the city they elude animal control workers and avoid the urban jangle. They eat well.

In many mythological traditions, Coyote is not only an animal but a divine being, a traveler between worlds, a trickster who teaches by breaking the rules. He is led by appetite and impulse and playfulness. Often, coyote tales are defined by misadventure. In one such tale, Coyote grows inconsolable after his wife dies. He wanders aimless in his grief. But then an envoy comes, a ghost who informs Coyote that his wife is living as a spirit in the Land of Shadows.

The envoy leads Coyote into the barren lands and across five mountains. They emerge at a wide prairie. Coyote is instructed to wait. The ghost envoy vanishes. But at nightfall, Coyote begins to hear shuffling sounds. He smells a cooking fire and begins to glimpse the faint outline of a village. As the night deepens, the Land of Shadows comes alive. Coyote sees his friends who have died, he discovers the village to be a place of happiness and solace, he finds his wife at the fireside.

Coyote remains in the Land of Shadows for many nights. He feasts with his wife, his departed relatives, his lost friends. Every morning, as dawn spreads across the horizon, the Land of Shadows begins to fade. Coyote finds himself on the prairie, alone in the heat of the day. He grows parched, and is burned by the sun. Yet he waits, and night comes again.

Eventually, the envoy informs Coyote that he must return to the living lands. He may take his wife with him, but only if he refrains from touching her on each of the five nights required to cross the mountains. Only when they have returned to the living lands may he touch her. If he is successful in this task, Coyote and his wife may resume their lives as before, as though she had not died.

As this is a trickster story, we know that on the fifth night Coyote can resist no longer. For on each of the previous nights his wife has grown more visible, more tangible, more beautiful. And on the final night, when she is almost fully restored, he reaches for her. He can’t resist. His appetite trumps his judgment.

The envoy comes to escort Coyote’s wife back to the Land of Shadows. And the envoy berates Coyote for his impulsiveness, his recklessness, his accidental reshaping of the world’s boundaries. For, as a result of Coyote’s churlishness, the border between the living and the dead will now be closed. No further crossings will be possible. And so Coyote becomes responsible for the finality of death.

This story captures something essential about departure addictions. Coyote cannot wait. The impulse overwhelms judgment. The goal is in sight but reaching for it prematurely destroys everything. This is the hypervigilant stance: can’t trust the process, must act now. Waiting feels like death. And so the perpetual motion—reaching, grasping, moving—that prevents arrival.

The tragedy isn’t that Coyote tried. The tragedy is that he couldn’t trust that arrival was possible if he just waited. But he couldn’t tolerate the uncertainty, the stillness, the vulnerability of waiting. Better to move, to act, to control, even if it means losing everything.

What Actually Heals: Belonging, Not Programs

Research on recovery from addiction reveals something the treatment industry rarely emphasizes: the mechanism of change is not any particular program or technique. 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 departure pattern. Someone whose nervous system learned that the world is unpredictable, that autonomous action invites punishment, that they must stay constantly alert—this person doesn’t need a program telling them what to do. They need evidence that contradicts the original learning. They need experiences of being welcomed, being trusted, being able to contribute without constant monitoring. Of belonging to something larger than their own vigilance.

For people with departure addictions, this is particularly important. The hypervigilant stance is fundamentally relational—it formed in response to relational unpredictability. It reorganizes most reliably through relational experience. Programs, steps, techniques—these can provide structure, but they cannot provide the fundamental human experience of being trusted, welcomed, allowed to settle. Only people can do that.

The question for recovery is not “what program should I follow?” but “where might I belong?” Not just treatment communities, but any community where presence is welcomed without constant performance—spiritual communities, hobby groups, volunteer organizations, any gathering where the hypervigilant person can experience being accepted without having to scan for threat.

The Danger of Activities That Feel Right

There’s a seductive logic in recovery: choose activities that feel good. If running brings relief, run more. If climbing challenges you, climb harder. If high-intensity exercise makes the restlessness feel purposeful, do more of it.

But one of the reasons certain activities feel good is precisely that they’re familiar—they align with patterns the nervous system already knows. For someone whose system organized around hypervigilance, activities that require constant scanning, rapid assessment, and quick adjustment will feel intuitively right. Rock climbing demands hypervigilant attention to every handhold, every shift in balance, every change in conditions. Running allows the flight response to express itself with socially acceptable justification. High-intensity interval training matches the activation level the nervous system considers normal.

These activities may feel like recovery because they make the hypervigilance feel productive rather than pathological. The climber’s constant scanning finally has a legitimate purpose. The runner’s perpetual motion becomes training rather than escape. But the activity reinforces the very pattern it seems to address. The nervous system learns not to settle but to apply its habitual vigilance with even greater refinement.

This doesn’t mean all physical activity is harmful for hypervigilant people. Movement matters—the nervous system learns through doing, and embodied practices address trauma at levels talk therapy cannot reach. But the question is whether the activity explores what you do not already do well, or whether it simply makes the familiar pattern more comfortable.

For someone locked in hypervigilant scanning, what might help is not more scanning but activities that allow the nervous system to settle—that create conditions where vigilance becomes unnecessary. Swimming in calm water. Walking in safe and familiar environments. Practices that cultivate trust in the immediate surroundings rather than reinforcing the need to constantly assess them.

The person who feels anxious without constant challenge might benefit more from sitting quietly by a river than from attempting a harder climb. The runner who uses movement to escape might discover more through a slow walk than through adding mileage. The goal is not to find activities that feel good because they’re familiar, but to explore what happens when the hypervigilance isn’t required.

What Might Actually Help

Given everything we’ve explored about the departure 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 hypervigilance, not character flaws. When your loved one can’t sit still, can’t commit, can’t stop scanning for threat—they’re not choosing this. Their nervous system is in perpetual threat-assessment mode that was learned during toddlerhood. This reframing won’t eliminate your frustration, but it might help you respond with patience rather than judgment.

Understand why they resist what would help. Don’t take resistance personally. The hypervigilant person resists settling because settling means vulnerability, and their entire system organized around avoiding vulnerability. You cannot argue them into calm. You can only provide accumulated experiences that teach their system something new.

Don’t demand stillness before the person is ready. Telling someone with chronic hypervigilance to “just calm down” or “stop being so paranoid” often deepens the pattern. The system interprets your demand as another threat to scan for. Meet them where they are.

Provide consistency and predictability. The most powerful thing you can offer is reliability. Be where you say you’ll be. Do what you say you’ll do. Keep the same schedule. The hypervigilant person has learned that the world is unpredictable; every instance of reliability contradicts that learning.

Move at their pace. The temptation is to slow them down, to create calm. But matching their energy initially—then gradually introducing moments of stillness—often works better than demanding they match yours.

Acknowledge real threats when they exist. Unlike some patterns, departure addictions often persist in contexts where danger is real. If your loved one is actually being pursued, actually in danger, actually facing genuine threats, don’t invalidate that. “Your vigilance makes sense given what you’re facing” can be more helpful than “you’re overreacting.”

Create opportunities for belonging. Recovery happens through belonging, not programs. Can your loved one find communities where they can contribute, where their presence is valued, where they can experience being accepted without constant performance? Help them find places where the scanning isn’t required.

Take care of yourself. Living with someone who is constantly activated is exhausting. Their anxiety can become contagious. You need your own support—friends, therapy, practices that help you regulate your own nervous system.

For People Caught in the Pattern

Understand that stillness is a skill, not a switch. You can’t simply decide to be calm. Stillness must be developed incrementally. Start with very brief moments—seconds, not minutes. Practice in contexts where you’ve verified safety. Build tolerance gradually.

Understand why you resist what would help. If you find yourself avoiding calm, avoiding trust, avoiding settling—this makes sense. What would help requires you to feel vulnerable, and your system organized around never feeling vulnerable. The resistance isn’t weakness; it’s protection. But the protection that saved you as a toddler may be imprisoning you now.

Find one reliable person. Recovery from departure addiction requires the experience of trusting and having that trust validated—probably hundreds or thousands of times before the nervous system updates its learning. Find someone who is genuinely consistent: a therapist, a sponsor, a friend who shows up when they say they will.

Find belonging, not just treatment. Programs can help, but what actually heals is the experience of being welcomed, being trusted, being connected. Look for communities where you can belong—where your presence is valued, where you don’t have to constantly perform or scan. The recovery question is not “what should I do?” but “where might I belong?”

Choose physical activities that challenge hypervigilance, not reinforce it. This is counterintuitive, but important: activities that feel intuitively right—climbing, running, high-intensity training—may simply reinforce the hypervigilant pattern by giving it socially acceptable expression. The nervous system learns to scan better, not to settle. What actually helps hypervigilance is activities that allow the system to rest—swimming in calm water, walking in familiar safe environments, practices that cultivate trust rather than requiring constant assessment. The goal isn’t to find activities that match your activation level; it’s to explore what happens when the activation isn’t required.

Practice small experiments with settling. Notice a moment when you’re scanning and ask yourself: is there actual danger right now, in this room, in this moment? If not, try staying present for ten seconds without scanning. Notice what happens. Build from there.

Recognize what stimulants actually provide. They’re not just about getting high—they make the hypervigilance feel powerful rather than exhausting. Understanding this helps you find alternatives. What else might provide focus, energy, a sense of being ahead of threats? And can you imagine feeling okay without needing to be ahead?

Address the anxiety alongside the addiction. They’re not separate problems; they’re manifestations of the same pattern. Somatic approaches that help regulate the nervous system, practices that teach the body stillness is survivable, medication for anxiety when appropriate—these address the foundation.

Be patient with setbacks. Recovery from departure addiction rarely follows a straight line. The system has been organized around hypervigilance for decades; it will return to that configuration when stressed. Relapse isn’t failure—it’s the system reorganizing back to its familiar state when the repair work is incomplete.

Consider that some alertness is okay. Recovery doesn’t mean becoming a person who never scans, never anticipates, never stays alert. Your capacity for vigilance can be a genuine strength in appropriate contexts. The goal is choice—being able to settle when settling is safe, rather than having hypervigilance running constantly whether it’s needed or not.

The Two Tasks of Recovery

Two fundamental healing tasks lie before those recovering from addictions of departure. The first is to learn—often for the first time—that the world can be safe enough to settle into, that not every situation requires hypervigilance, that trust is sometimes warranted. This learning cannot happen through insight alone; it requires repeated experiences where settling does not lead to harm.

The second task is to discover that stillness is survivable. For someone whose nervous system learned during toddlerhood that constant vigilance is necessary for survival, choosing to be still is terrifying. What if the threat comes while you’re not scanning? What if relaxing means missing the danger? What if trusting is what gets you hurt? The work is to discover, gradually and in small doses, that moments of stillness are possible.

Sometimes I notice the moment when hypervigilance briefly releases. A person who has been scanning the room constantly suddenly maintains eye contact. Someone who has been shifting topics rapidly stays with one thought. Someone who always sits near the exit moves to a different chair. These moments are profound. They represent the system experimenting with states other than constant alert.

The Disappearance

One day Trench simply disappears. I wait for him in the office, I check my schedule to make sure I have not mistaken our meeting time, I call his voicemail and leave a message. But I suspect there is more to this than a scheduling error. After all, Trench is reliably punctual and consistent. He arranges his days around our meetings. He confirms and reconfirms appointments. His absence today is not a good omen.

I walk to the window and search up and down the street. A bus rumbles by but does not stop. I check the answering machine again. But a certainty has crept in: he’s not coming today. Perhaps not ever again.

This is common with departure addictions. The person cannot settle even into the therapeutic relationship. When the work begins to touch something real, when the possibility of actual change emerges, the hypervigilance activates: danger, threat, must move. Better to leave than risk the vulnerability of staying.

I settle into the chair and begin the small personal ritual that I enact when people vanish. It’s a simple matter, a deliberate farewell, a means of responding to the pervasive sense of futility that occasionally accompanies this work. I think of the time I have spent with Trench, of our conversations about music and psychology and pop culture. I focus on the core of goodwill that I feel (wrapped up though it has sometimes been with anxiety and resentment). I focus on his playfulness, his sparkling intelligence.

I imagine my goodwill extending outward, crossing the distance between us, finding its way to him. I trust that my thoughts, rising on the wind and carried, as a prayer is carried, will be transmitted by the invisible forces that shape the world. I hope that Trench will make his way back to himself, to the life he has long sought and repeatedly denied himself. I pray that he will be held aloft, out of his suffering, that his call will be met and made quiet by companionship, that he will find the still center of a whole and unfractured life.

Over the next few weeks I make several confidential inquiries in the community, asking for news of Trench. No one seems to know where he is or why he moved on. I watch for news reports of unidentified bridge jumpers floating offshore, or murder victims found in the trunks of abandoned cars. But nothing.

As the weeks pass, I accept that Trench has departed, once again, to the Land of Shadows—that realm where the hypervigilant go, where constant motion feels necessary, where settling is impossible, where coyotes run through urban alleys and never stop to rest.

When the Pattern Doesn’t Change

This is the nature of departure addictions. The person cannot arrive because arriving means vulnerability. Cannot settle because settling means trusting. Cannot stop scanning because the nervous system learned long ago, during those critical months when exploration should have been safe, that the world requires constant vigilance.

And for some people, the pattern doesn’t change. They do the work this chapter describes—find reliable people, practice moments of stillness, address the anxiety alongside the addiction—and the hypervigilance persists. The nervous system, organized so early and so deeply around constant threat-assessment, 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 settling requires more time, more resources, or more accumulated experiences of safety than one lifetime can provide. Some people will manage the hypervigilance rather than dissolve it—learning to function while activated, finding ways to rest without fully settling. Some will find moments of stillness that don’t last, returning to scanning, resting again, returning. This oscillation may be what recovery looks like for them.

The goal is not perfection but whatever stillness can be found and tolerated, in whatever increments the system can bear.

But sometimes—not often, but sometimes—people find their way back. The system reorganizes. The hypervigilance quiets. Trust becomes possible. The person discovers that there are places safe enough to rest, relationships trustworthy enough to risk, moments where scanning is not required.

For families, the work is to be one of those safe places—consistent, predictable, reliable. Not demanding settling, but modeling that settling is possible. Waiting with patience for the moment when the perpetual motion can cease and the person can finally arrive.

The one running perpetually can learn to pause. The work is to be the secure base that makes pausing survivable.

For Further Reflection

If You’re a Parent or Loved One

  • When you watch your loved one unable to settle—restless, scanning, always moving—what happens in you? Can you notice your own reactions without being consumed by them?
  • What was your loved one’s toddlerhood like? Was the environment safe for exploration? Were boundaries consistent or unpredictable? Was there genuine danger they had to navigate?
  • What was your own anxiety level during that period? Were you able to support their autonomous exploration, or were you overwhelmed, frightened, controlling? Understanding doesn’t mean blaming yourself—it means seeing the pattern more clearly.
  • What consistency and predictability can you offer? Not control, but reliability. Being where you say you’ll be. Doing what you say you’ll do.
  • Where might your loved one find belonging? Not just treatment, but community where they can be welcomed without constant performance?
  • Can you acknowledge when the danger they perceive is real? Can you help them distinguish between past threats and current safety without invalidating their experience?
  • How can you take care of yourself while continuing to care about someone whose anxiety may be contagious?

If You Recognize the Pattern in Yourself

  • When did the hypervigilance begin? Can you trace it back to your earliest experiences of exploration and autonomy?
  • What do stimulants or constant motion provide that stillness cannot? Focus? Energy? A sense of being ahead of threats? Understanding the function helps find alternatives.
  • Why do you resist what might help? If you find yourself avoiding calm, avoiding trust, avoiding settling—can you recognize this as protection rather than failure?
  • Where in your life has someone been genuinely 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 be welcomed, where your presence would matter?
  • What physical activities might actually help you settle rather than reinforcing your hypervigilance? What would it feel like to try something that doesn’t require constant scanning?
  • What would it feel like to stop scanning for ten seconds? Can you imagine that without terror? If not, that’s the hypervigilance talking—it learned long ago that settling invites danger.
  • What very small experiment with stillness might be safe to try? Not hours of meditation, but seconds of presence. Notice what happens.