Most of the men I work with have spent years perfecting the art of never getting lost. They arrive early. They confirm plans twice. They read the room before they enter it. This is not a personality quirk. It is a survival skill, built inside relationships where the wrong turn, literal or otherwise, carried a cost. When someone has learned that unpredictability gets punished, certainty stops being a preference and becomes armor.

In the previous article, I wrote about solo travel as a way for men to rebuild trust in their own judgment after trauma. This piece goes a step further. It is about what happens when you deliberately remove the map. Not recklessly, and not without preparation, but on purpose, as a clinical tool rather than an accident. Getting lost, it turns out, is not the failure of a trip. For a lot of men in recovery, it is the point.

Why Uncertainty Feels Like Danger

Clinical psychology has a name for the discomfort some people feel when they cannot predict what happens next: intolerance of uncertainty. Researchers Kristin Buhr and Michel Dugas describe it as a set of beliefs that uncertain situations are inherently stressful, that they demand immediate resolution, and that not knowing is itself a kind of unfairness (Buhr & Dugas, 2002). Their work grew out of research on generalized anxiety, but the pattern shows up constantly in men recovering from controlling relationships. When your partner’s mood could shift without warning, or when a wrong guess about what they wanted led to hours of fallout, your nervous system learns to treat ambiguity as an emergency.

The problem is that this protective response does not turn off once the relationship ends. It keeps running in situations that pose no real threat at all, including the completely ordinary uncertainty of exploring an unfamiliar place. A man who could not tolerate not knowing what his partner wanted often cannot tolerate not knowing which street to take, either. Both feel like the same emergency, even though only one of them ever was.

The Case for Not Knowing Where You’re Going

There is a growing body of tourism research on what happens when travelers deliberately step outside their itinerary. A 2020 study interviewing tourists who visited attractions they had not planned to see found that the appeal was not chaos for its own sake. People described a specific pull toward surprise and excitement, a break from the routines that structured the rest of their lives, and an unexpected sense of learning something they would not have looked up in advance (Madani et al., 2020). The unplanned stop worked because it was unscripted. Nobody had told them what to feel about it ahead of time.

That last point matters more than it might seem. Men recovering from narcissistic or coercive relationships often spent years being told, directly or through implication, how they were supposed to feel about everything: where to go, what to enjoy, how to react. An unplanned turn down an unfamiliar street offers something rare by comparison. Nobody has scripted the response in advance. Whatever you feel when you find yourself somewhere you did not intend to be is entirely, uncomplicatedly your own.

What Happens When the World Gets Bigger Than You

Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt built one of the field’s foundational models around a specific emotion they call awe, which they define through two features: a sense of vastness, something larger or more complex than your existing frame of reference, and a need to mentally accommodate it (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). A canyon you did not expect to find. A city block that looks nothing like home. A language you cannot read on a sign you are relying on. These moments force the mind to stretch.

More recent research from Keltner’s lab has connected awe to measurable shifts in wellbeing: changes in neurophysiology, a temporary quieting of self-focus, and an increased sense of connection and meaning (Monroy & Keltner, 2022). None of that requires a dramatic landscape. It requires only that you encounter something you did not plan for and could not have predicted. Getting lost, in other words, is one of the more reliable ways to manufacture the exact conditions awe needs to occur. You cannot schedule wonder. You can only put yourself somewhere it has room to happen.

For men whose sense of self shrank inside a controlling relationship, that stretching is not incidental. A mind that has spent years narrowing itself to accommodate someone else’s moods gets a rare, concrete experience of expanding again, for its own reasons, on its own terms.

Reclaiming a Say in Your Own Life

Self-determination theory, developed by psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, identifies autonomy as one of three basic psychological needs required for wellbeing, alongside competence and relatedness. Autonomy in their framework does not mean independence from other people. It means that your actions feel self-endorsed rather than imposed, that you are the author of your own choices rather than a character responding to someone else’s script (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Coercive relationships attack this need directly. Decisions, large and small, get taken over, questioned, or quietly punished until a man stops making them at all.

An unplanned wrong turn is a small thing to most travelers. For a man rebuilding his sense of agency, it can function as evidence. You decided to turn left. Nobody vetoed it. You handled what came next, and the ability to handle it was entirely yours. Repeated enough times, in low-stakes settings, that evidence accumulates into something sturdier: a working sense that your own judgment is trustworthy again.

Practicing Getting Lost, Safely

This is not a suggestion to travel recklessly or ignore basic safety planning. Getting lost as a clinical practice works best inside a container, not outside of one. A few ways I coach clients to build that container:

Choose the boundary before you go. Pick a neighborhood, a city, or a single afternoon where you will put the map away, rather than an open-ended commitment. A defined edge makes the uncertainty tolerable instead of overwhelming.

Keep one thread of safety intact. A charged phone, a hotel address written down, enough local currency to get back. The goal is unstructured exploration, not unmanaged risk.

Notice the urge to control before you act on it. When the anxiety spikes and the instinct is to pull out the phone and re-orient immediately, pause for thirty seconds first. That pause is where the tolerance actually builds.

Let the destination be beside the point. If you arrive somewhere unremarkable, the exercise still worked. The value was never really about what you found. It was about proving to yourself that not knowing did not undo you.

Closing the Loop

This is the third and closing piece in this series on travel as a clinical intervention. The first article laid out the broader science behind why therapists are prescribing travel at all. The second looked at solo travel specifically, as a way of rebuilding trust in your own judgment after trauma. This one is about what happens when you stop needing to know exactly where that judgment is taking you.

Men who have lived under someone else’s control often equate not knowing with not being safe. Travel, deliberately unplanned and thoughtfully bounded, offers a low-stakes way to test that equation and find out it is not always true. Getting lost, it turns out, is one of the more efficient ways to find yourself again.

About the Author

Gregory Harmeling, Psy.D., LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in men’s sexual health, narcissistic abuse recovery, and travel therapy. He works with men who are done being confused about why they feel the way they do — and are ready to do something about it. Learn more at fenixtherapeuticservices.com.

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References

Buhr, K., & Dugas, M. J. (2002). The Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale: Psychometric properties of the English version. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40(8), 931–945. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(01)00092-4

Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297

Madani, F., Gohary, A., & Chan, E. Y. (2020). Motivations behind visiting unplanned tourist attractions: An Iranian context. Current Issues in Tourism, 23(8), 947–951. https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2019.1586845

Monroy, M., & Keltner, D. (2022). Awe as a pathway to mental and physical health. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(2), 309–320. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221094856

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

Text © Gregory Harmeling