People can fear happiness and retreat to familiar grief-filled places

Evidence

Everything was working for her now, but for some reason she grew scared of her happiness. She called her dad frequently and began pushing him to get a transfer back to the East Coast, telling him she would go with him. She felt she wanted to go back to where her mother had raised her, believing she would feel more connected to her mother if they moved back to Maryland. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 646

Categorization

• SEED: A psychology essay/angle could explore why achieved stability can paradoxically trigger retreat to geographic anchors of past loss.
• XREF: connects to: Those who serve power fear the trusting gaze that recalls their lost spirit; An untouched primeval forest produces an eerie sadness in human observers — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 107; Sadness is usually engagement with frozen self-images rather than the world — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2336