The Emptiness Cycle: Why Life Becomes Running, Crashing, and Recovering

Maybe your child is always moving, searching, pacing, fixating, or planning the next thing. Maybe they cycle from one intense want to the next - a sudden need for a specific item, an outing they have to go on, a person they can’t stop thinking about, or a plan that absolutely must happen right now.

You can see that they’re struggling to regulate. You can feel that they’re not okay, even when nothing “big” is happening. They seem endlessly preoccupied, always chasing something that might finally make them feel settled - and you’re left trying to keep up, trying to stabilize the environment, trying to make sense of why your child feels so perpetually on edge and in pain.

What’s Underneath the Behavior

This is the pattern I’ve seen again and again in the teens and young adults I work with - and it’s one I know intimately, because I lived it. I call it the Emptiness Cycle.

For many struggling young people, underneath the surface behaviors is a deep internal emptiness - a hollow, aching feeling so powerful and so painful that being alone with themselves feels unbearable. It creates a sense of urgency that feels like survival.

For years, I felt that emptiness constantly. It created an intense pressure to find relief by always moving, doing, and searching for something that might finally make the pain stop.

I never consciously thought, “I feel empty, and that’s why I’m running from myself.”
I just felt desperate and consumed. I felt a constant sense of “not-okay-ness,” and compulsions would develop and shift constantly. Sometimes it was an object, sometimes a place, sometimes a person - but always something.

How the Emptiness Cycle Shows Up in Real Life

A few examples that illustrate the compulsion, urgency, and magical-relief thinking that define the Emptiness Cycle:

Object

I remember taking two buses across San Francisco to a store because I was convinced I needed a certain jacket they sold. I had been invited to a basketball game at school that night, and I believed that if I showed up wearing the “right” jacket - the one everyone had - then I’d feel confident enough to go. It was an unnecessary, inconvenient trip for something trivial. But I couldn’t let it go.

Place

Another time, I became fixated on going for a drive to the Marin Headlands because I believed that if I could just sit and stare at the water, everything inside me would stop hurting. I didn’t have driving privileges, and when my mom said no, I begged, pushed, escalated, and eventually screamed.

Person

I became intensely attached to relationships - convinced that if I could just hold onto a particular person, then I would feel okay. I would go to great lengths to sustain those connections, even when they were unstable or actively harmful. 

The common thread was always the same: a hunger, a searching, an obsessiveness that clouded my thinking and hijacked my judgment. An inability to think calmly or logically. A deep disconnection from any inner well of steadiness or self-worth that could have guided me.

The Crash That Always Comes

And I couldn’t see the pattern. I couldn’t see the common thread. Every crisis and every crash felt separate and isolated, disconnected from everything before it. Life shrank down to the moment I was in, and I couldn’t see the bigger picture, only feel the desperation and pain I was in. I didn’t track the chaos or recognize the undercurrent of urgency.

Life felt like a project of constantly trying to fix something I didn’t have language for.

And here’s the thing: when we’re operating at that frantic pace - constantly chasing relief - we inevitably crash.

Life became a cycle of intensity and collapse, followed by scrambling to recover just enough to start again. I was constantly trying to keep everything from falling apart - lying to my family, clinging to relationships I was terrified to lose, trying to be everywhere at once, maintaining a life that felt miserable but impossible to step out of.

Eventually everything would catch up with me and I’d crash. I’d try to clean up the mess, hide the evidence, patch things together, and promise myself I’d get it together - but I couldn’t. I’d hit a wall emotionally - overwhelmed, hopeless, suicidal - and end up in the ER. 

No Time to Heal

I never had a chance to recover — because recovery requires stillness.
It requires slowing down, being with ourselves, and feeling what demands to be felt.
But stillness was unbearable for me.

So I coped by doing more:
Let me fix this. Let me distract myself. Let me escape.
Let me keep moving at all costs - because if I slowed down, even for a moment, I would have to face how much pain I was really in.

Every crash, every hospital visit, every fight with my parents, every plan to run away became evidence that I was broken, not enough, not okay - which only deepened the emptiness and restarted the cycle.

Emotional Starvation

The experience of starvation describes this internal reality perfectly. When someone is starving for food, they don’t have discernment. They’re not asking:

Is this nourishing? Is this healthy? Will this make me sick later?

They’ll eat anything, because they’re starving. Emotional emptiness works the same way. When we are starving internally, we chase anything that resembles relief.

The cycle looks something like this: emptiness → desperation → escape/consumption → crash → repeat. The escape brings momentary relief, but then comes the regret, shame, and collapse, which deepen the emptiness and restart the loop. And the more it continues the more panic rises - because you can’t live like this forever. It is unbearable.

Why Help Can Feel Threatening

Parents often ask, “Why won’t they accept help when they clearly need it?”

From the outside, it can be confusing - even infuriating - when a young person pushes away support or resources that seem obviously helpful. But when someone is drowning emotionally, help doesn’t feel like help.

It can feel like:

• Exposure (being seen in shame or pain)

• Loss of control (losing the coping strategies keeping them afloat)

• A threat to the only relief they know

To accept help requires slowing down and feeling - and that is the very thing they’re desperately trying to avoid.

For me, it felt like someone trying to rip an IV drip out of my arm. They thought it was poison and were trying to save me, but I wanted to scream: “What are you doing? That’s the only thing keeping me alive.”

That image is accurate because it was an IV drip - just keeping me alive.  But when you’re inside this cycle, the standards for life change. You’re not thinking about the future, your potential, or who you want to become. You’re not planning a 10-year path or even a 10-day one. You’re thinking: 

How do I not drown right now?
What will stop this pain today?

Accepting help means letting go of what feels like the only thing keeping you alive - even if it’s hurting you.

You Have the Tools — Now We Use Them Differently

One thing I always tell young people who struggle with this cycle is this:

You already have the skills you need.

The energy, creativity, adaptability, and resilience required to survive this cycle - to get back up after every crash, to rebuild after every collapse, to hold onto even a fragmented sliver of hope - that’s strength.

If you’ve survived this cycle, you are unbelievably strong.

The question becomes: What if we applied that same determination, intensity, and resourcefulness toward healing?

Because you’ve already developed a fierce will to keep going - even when everything inside you feels impossible. Despite the pain you wake up with, despite the emptiness you’ve carried for so long, you are still here. You are breathing.

And there is no such thing as being too far gone.

So what would it look like to redirect that same grit toward something new?
What if you applied that same determination to sit with your pain - even when it’s uncomfortable - to bear the silence and the quiet truth of your own soul?

What if the same adaptability and creativity you’ve used to survive a life of constant motion - always seeking, always searching - could now be used to meet yourself? To turn inward with curiosity instead of fear?

What if that same resourcefulness could be redirected toward building the capacity to be with your own mind, your own emotions, your own inner world?

Because those qualities aren’t going anywhere. And they can become the very tools that help you heal.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Healing from the Emptiness Cycle is a brave undertaking - emotional, mental, and spiritual in its essence and quality. It will feel counterintuitive at first, because it asks you to loosen your grip on the compulsions and comforts that have given you temporary solace for so long. It asks you to have faith that something better exists, if you can bravely release what has (in truth) had its grip on you.

And it is absolutely worth it.

Healing begins with a few simple - but profound - shifts:

Working with someone safe and consistent.

We learn regulation through relationship.
We co-regulate with a grounded, steady, trustworthy other.

Find a therapist, mentor, or coach who can help you map the cycle, track patterns, and slowly understand the internal logic of your own mind. Someone who is steady, insightful, wise - someone who can bring light and clarity to the web when you’re too close to see it. Who can help you learn how to do so for yourself.

Developing language and awareness.

You begin learning the early markers of dysregulation: the rising urgency, the panic in your chest, the deep loneliness.

With language comes recognition.
With recognition comes choice.

This is how you start shifting out of the cycle before collapse - by noticing your state and gently redirecting yourself while you still have access to your thinking, your breath, your body.

Slowing the pace — even slightly

The pace of trauma is urgency.
The pace of healing is slow, gentle, spacious.

Simplify your life.
Slow down wherever you can.
Give yourself the time and quiet that makes recovery possible.

Because when the pace slows, something profound begins to shift: stillness changes shape. This is the difference between loneliness and solitude.

The great theologian and author Richard Foster wrote,
“Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.”

In the beginning, stillness feels like loneliness, hollow, frightening, loud. But over time, as safety grows and clarity begins to illuminate what once felt dark, that stillness becomes solitude: a place of presence, groundedness, and inner nourishment.

A Final Word

Healing from the Emptiness Cycle isn’t a straight line. It’s not fast, and it’s not tidy. It’s a slow, brave unfolding - a gradual reunion with yourself after years of running from your own inner world.

For parents: Your child isn’t resisting you because they don’t care. They’re resisting because help feels like exposure, like losing control, like letting go of the only strategies that have ever quieted their pain. What looks like defiance is often fear.

And for young people: You are not broken. Your pain makes sense. Your patterns make sense. The urgency, the searching, the fixation, the collapse - all of it came from a desperate attempt to not drown.

But here is the truth you may not yet believe:

You are capable of healing.
Not because you’ve never struggled, but because you’ve already survived so much.
The same qualities that have kept you alive - your determination, your creativity, your grit - are the qualities that can bring you home to yourself.

You don’t heal by becoming a different person.
You heal by turning toward who you are - with love, acceptance, and courage.

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I also explain this in a video you can watch here. And if you found this helpful, share it with someone who might appreciate it too 💛

If you’re seeking support in navigating this cycle and building a path forward, you’re welcome to schedule a call with me here.