Where Did You Go?

Some chapters don’t sit quietly on the page they insist on being read. Frozen on Love is one of those.

It’s from my upcoming book, Where Did You Go, which explores the places we vanish inside ourselves and how we find the way back. This chapter dives into the kind of love that keeps people circling the same door, even when they know it leads nowhere.

If you’ve ever wondered why logic doesn’t break certain attachments, why smart and capable people return to relationships that starve them, or why the pull can feel stronger than reason, you’ll see it here. More importantly, you’ll find practices to begin thawing the freeze that keeps love shackled to survival.

Here’s your first look.

Frozen In Love

Chapter: Frozen on Love

When I first met Clare (not her real name), she had the look of someone who had been waiting for years in an airport lounge where no flight was ever called. She was forty-one, successful on paper, intelligent, funny,  but she was anchored to a man who gave her almost nothing back. She’d spent seven years cycling through the same pattern: he disappeared, she collapsed, he returned with promises, and she opened her door again. Each time, she told herself it would be different. Each time it wasn’t.

“It’s not even that he’s cruel,” she told me, twisting a tissue in her hands. “It’s that he’s not really there. He doesn’t call. He doesn’t show up. And yet if he messages me at midnight, I’ll go. I don’t understand why I do this. I know it’s not enough, but I can’t stop.”

I’ve heard this story too many times to count. Sometimes the partner is abusive, sometimes just neglectful, sometimes simply incapable of intimacy,  but the common thread is this fixation that overrides reason. These aren’t weak women or foolish men. In fact, they’re often some of the most capable people I’ve met in other areas of their lives. And yet when it comes to this relationship, it’s like they’re frozen in place, orbiting around someone who can never give them what they want.

The Freeze Behind the Fixation

For years, I struggled to explain it. Was it attachment trauma? Was it low self-esteem? But over time, after listening to case after case, a deeper pattern emerged: this wasn’t just psychology. It was physiology. It was freeze.

Here’s how it works: when the nervous system collapses into freeze, it strips away options. Fight and flight go offline. What remains is attachment,  the most primitive survival reflex we have. If you can’t fight and you can’t run, the only move left is to cling. To stay close, even if “close” means diminished, neglected, or hurt.

From the outside, it looks like madness. Why return to a person who gives so little? But inside, the body has made its calculation: attachment at any cost is safer than abandonment. The compulsion isn’t weakness, it’s simple survival logic.

Rumination as Love’s Handcuffs

Freeze doesn’t just keep the body stuck. It traps the mind in loops. Psychologists call it rumination,  the endless replay of thoughts without resolution. In love-fixation, this means hours of circling: Why didn’t he call? What if I say this? Maybe if I do that, she’ll come back.

Clare described lying awake at night composing texts she never sent, her brain running like a hamster wheel while her body lay paralysed. This wasn’t romance. It was cognitive freeze,  the mind gnawing the bone of a relationship it couldn’t release.

The Dissociation of Self

Another cruel twist: freeze numbs you to your own inner signals. You can’t feel clearly how unsafe or unfulfilling the situation is. What you can feel is the pull of attachment. So you chase the only sensation left, even if it drags you back into pain.

Clients often say, “I don’t even know who I am anymore outside this relationship.” That’s the disappearing self at work. When feeling shuts down, the attachment becomes the only live wire left in the system. It’s not love they’re addicted to,  it’s the one thread of feeling that hasn’t been numbed out.

The Science of Trauma Bonds

Psychologists have a name for this in abusive contexts: trauma bonding. It’s the same phenomenon that made hostages in Stockholm cling to their captors. The nervous system fuses attachment and survival so tightly that leaving feels like death.

But what I’ve seen is that it doesn’t always require obvious abuse. Neglect, emotional unavailability, and inconsistency can also be enough to create a freeze-bond. It’s not the intensity of the harm, it’s the persistence of the need. When your system has learned that love is scarce, unreliable, or conditional, it will freeze around whoever offers the tiniest scraps.

Why Logic Doesn’t Break It

Friends will often say,  “Just leave him” or “You deserve better.” But logic can’t override a nervous system in freeze. The person already knows the relationship isn’t working. What they don’t have is the physiological capacity to act differently. Until the freeze shifts, the compulsion will keep pulling them back.

The Way Back

The path out of love-fixation isn’t found in shaming, blaming, or dissecting childhood wounds for years. It begins in the same way all thaw does: tiny cracks in the ice.

For Clare, it started with the smallest practice: noticing her feet on the ground when the urge to text him felt overwhelming. One breath where she could feel her chest rise and fall without collapsing into the loop. Over time, those cracks widened. She began to sense herself again,  her wants, her anger, her longing for more than scraps. The fixation didn’t vanish overnight. But gradually, the pull of self grew stronger than the pull of the man who couldn’t show up.

And that’s the truth about these frozen attachments. They’re not really about the other person. They’re about the nervous system trying to keep you alive, the only way it knows how. Once you begin to thaw, you don’t just leave the relationship, you return to yourself.

The Disappearing Self in Love

We often think of freeze as collapse into exhaustion or chronic illness. But it can also appear in love. In the way you keep going back to someone who doesn’t see you. In the way you confuse scraps for a feast because numbness has dulled your sense of hunger. In the way you can’t imagine life without the person who gives you the least.

The loss isn’t only about energy or vitality. What goes missing is the self. That’s why the way back matters. Because the opposite of frozen love isn’t another partner, another fixation, or another cycle. It’s the return of feeling and the moment you can stand in your own life and say: I am here. I am mine. I am enough.

Practice Box: Thawing the Freeze in Love

1. The Urge and the Ground When the urge to reach out feels overwhelming:

• Pause before you act. Even five seconds counts.

• Drop your attention to your feet. Press them into the ground, feel their weight.

• Exhale longer than you inhale. Let the breath remind you that you’re here.

• Say your own name quietly. A reminder that you exist outside of them.

You don’t need to “win” against the compulsion. You just need to remind your body that there is something steadier to stand on than a midnight message. Over time, these moments of grounding grow into the capacity to choose.

2. Values on Paper Write down your core values: freedom, honesty, creativity, loyalty, whatever lights you up. Then hold them against the relationship. Does this person even remotely align with them? Or have you been bending, shrinking, and shape-shifting just to get scraps of connection? Often, the mismatch is brutal and clarifying. When you see it written down, it becomes harder for freeze to convince you that crumbs are enough.

3. The Letter You’ll Never Send Pour everything out: rage, longing, grief, confusion. Don’t filter and don’t pretty it up. Say what your body wants to scream at 2 am. Then rip it up or burn it. The release is in the writing, not the sending.

4. Mirror Return Stand in front of a mirror and look into your own eyes. Say your name three times, then: “I see you. I choose you.” It might feel awkward, but the nervous system responds to recognition. It’s a way of reminding yourself that you belong to you.

These practices aren’t about fighting yourself or forcing detachment. They’re about creating tiny cracks in the ice,  places where the self can re-enter. Choice grows there, and once choice arrives, thaw is already underway.

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This is just one chapter in a much larger journey. Where Did You Go isn’t a book of theories, it’s a map through the hidden terrain of freeze, fixation, and the places we disappear to without realising it. Each chapter pulls back another layer and offers practices to help you thaw, return, and take your life back piece by piece.

If this chapter stirred something in you, know that it’s only a beginning. The full book will be available soon, along with my first offering Claim the Throne, and if you’d like to be the first to read it, leave your email. Contact Me Here

The journey out of disappearance doesn’t happen alone, and you don’t have to take the first steps without support.