There’s a road in Tennessee I haven’t driven in years — past the gas station, past the church with the white sign, past the tree line that always told me I was almost home. My parents have since moved away. The road is still there. The house is someone else’s. And the last time I went back, I didn’t feel what I expected to feel.
In this episode of The Places We Become, travel psychologist Dr. Katie Blake explores the psychology of place attachment — why some places become part of our identity, what may happen in the brain and body when we lose access to them, and why that grief is real even when the place itself hasn’t changed.
Drawing on Scannell and Gifford’s tripartite model of place attachment, this episode unpacks the three dimensions a place attachment is built from — and what’s actually lost when the people who made a place home are gone, even if the landscape remains exactly as it was.
In today’s episode of The Places We Become, I share:
Scannell and Gifford’s three-part model of place attachment — person, psychological process, and place — and how these combine to make somewhere feel like home
The difference between solastalgia (grief for a place that’s changed) and place loss (grief for a place that hasn’t — but no longer holds what made it yours)
What neuroscience suggests about why losing a meaningful place can feel like grieving a person
A personal story about a childhood home in Tennessee, and what it means to return to a place that knows you but no longer holds you
Why protecting yourself from place attachment isn’t the answer — and what researchers call “rootedness”
If you’ve ever gone back somewhere that shaped you and felt the strange ache for a place that’s exactly the same — except for the one thing that made it home — this episode is for you.
Research discussed: Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford’s tripartite model of place attachment (Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2010). Glenn Albrecht’s concept of solastalgia. Attachment neuroscience research on the amygdala’s possible role in grief and separation distress.
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Is there a place that’s exactly as it was, except for the thing that made it home? I’d love to hear your story. Share it for a chance to be featured on a future episode of The Places We Become.
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