Default settings

Default settings names the pull of familiar habits when life becomes difficult. Masha uses the idea to explain why the improvements guests make at Tranquillum House often fail to last: a retreat can reset someone temporarily, but crisis sends them back to old patterns. The concept also resonates beyond her wellness program, especially in the Marconi family, where grief and regret repeatedly take the form of silence, blame, and efforts to keep functioning.

Masha’s Diagnosis of Relapse

Masha has seen guests leave Tranquillum House rested and energized, only to return two, three, or four years later in poor condition again. Some describe stopping their morning meditation and then drinking every day; others have lost a job, divorced, or had a car accident. To Masha, these varied setbacks point to the same problem: in a crisis, people return to their default settings. Their earlier transformation has been a temporary reset, not a durable change.

She concludes that this is not good enough, and treats it as the reason the new protocol is essential. Her concern is not merely that guests relapse, but that the retreat’s familiar methods have not changed what happens when ordinary life becomes difficult. She sees herself as someone prepared to take risks and think laterally, as she had in her corporate career, and applies that self-image to the resort’s approach.

The Retreat as an Attempt to Interrupt Habit

Masha’s new approach begins with a five-day period of silence. She believes silence will give guests clarity and establish the right tone for the retreat, even if it frightens some people or is broken accidentally or deliberately. Her expectation that guests will resist is part of the plan: the retreat is meant to interrupt the easy chatter and familiar conduct she associates with treating the resort like summer camp.

That program sits within a tightly managed routine. A warning bell announces meals and smoothies, and guests are expected to come promptly to the dining room; there is no room service, though morning and late-evening smoothies are brought to their rooms. These rules make the retreat’s structure concrete: it organizes when guests eat, gather, and speak, rather than leaving change to individual intention alone.

Masha’s reasoning also shapes how she reads guests. Reviewing Frances Welty’s goals for the ten days, she notices that Frances selected stress relief, spiritual nourishment, and relaxation, but not weight loss. Masha decides the omission must be an oversight and concludes that Frances needs a spiritually transformative experience. Her confidence in diagnosing what others need shows the force, and the risk, of her response to relapse: she wants not just to support change but to direct it.

The Marconi Family’s Defaults Under Grief

The concept extends beyond Masha’s theory of wellness. After Zach’s death, Napoleon decides that he must not break and that his job is to heal, support Heather and Zoe, and get through the loss. He studies research, attends a Survivors of Suicide group, later runs it, and takes on speeches, interviews, a newsletter, and fundraising. His sustained work becomes a way to keep functioning, but Heather’s description of it as his new hobby wounds him because he recognizes both its unfairness and its partial truth. He knows resentment is possible in their marriage, yet regards not searching for hatred as part of how they remain together.

Heather and Napoleon’s closeness is constrained by the family’s established effort to carry on. On the first evening of the retreat, they sit beside one another without touching, waiting for Zoe so the three can go silently to meditation. Heather tells herself Zoe is fine and will do what she promised, while recognizing that Zoe has tried hard to be everything for her parents as they have tried to pretend she is not their only reason for living. Her grief remains difficult to conceal even when she can hide her anger. In this family, reassurance and endurance coexist with pain that has not gone away.

Zoe later identifies another familiar pattern: after noticing that Zach seemed unlike himself, she was angry with him, but they were not speaking and she did not want to be the first to reach out. She describes their silence as a competition over who would talk first. She had planned to wish him happy birthday, jokingly, on their shared birthday. Her account shows how a habit of waiting and withholding communication became inseparable from her regret about what could not be repaired.

When Familiar Explanations Are Challenged

The retreat’s psychedelic sessions briefly unsettle the Marconis’ ordinary sense of family loss. Zoe says that, during an experience, she felt as though she and Zach had talked again. Napoleon experiences Zach as present with the family, and the temporary sense of togetherness makes their old family life feel restored. These experiences do not erase the death or prove that the family has changed its habits; instead, they make visible how strongly the family longs for the closeness it lost.

The same sessions expose how quickly blame can reassert itself. When Masha asks whether Napoleon means Zach when he says something is his fault, Heather reacts angrily, interpreting Masha as someone who has poisoned the family and has no right to speak about their son. Napoleon repeats his self-blame and risks injuring himself; Heather then turns her attention to him and tries to help. The exchange moves from accusation to care without resolving the underlying conflict, showing grief’s ability to return the family to familiar roles even in a setting designed to disrupt them.

After the drugs have worn off, Napoleon distinguishes his dream of Zach from Heather’s disclosure about the possible side effects of Zach’s asthma medication: he is sure that the disclosure was not part of the dream. His anger at what Heather concealed is complicated by their established division of responsibility—she handled health decisions, while he handled schoolwork—and by his recognition that he had not questioned that arrangement. Their household defaults had made care efficient, but had also narrowed the space for discussion. Across the family and the retreat, the concept describes both a genuine obstacle to lasting change and the human patterns that persist when grief makes change hardest.