The Return of Desire
Definition
She does not know what she wants. Not because she is indecisive. Because she learned very early that wanting was complicated. That her desire either went unmet and became a source of grief, or was met in ways that cost something, or was suppressed in service of someone else's needs, or was simply never asked about. She learned to route around her own wanting and to organize around the wanting of others, because that was the relational landscape she was born into. The return of desire is not an event. It is a slow reorientation toward an internal compass that was never developed, or was developed and then dismantled. Learning what you want is not the same as being greedy. It is the beginning of being alive.
Origins & Context
Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves centers desire as the animating force of the wild woman: the instinctual knowing of what is life-giving and what is not, of what the self is drawn toward, of what nourishes and what depletes. The woman who has lost desire has lost her primary orientation system.
Miriam Greenspan in Healing Through the Dark Emotions traces the suppression of desire in women to the cultural and relational training that rewards selflessness and punishes self-directedness. The woman who learns that her desire is inconvenient, excessive, or dangerous learns to suppress it so thoroughly that she eventually cannot locate it.
Christiane Northrup in Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom connects desire, particularly erotic desire, to the broader question of what the body knows and is allowed to express. The woman who has been shamed around her physical desire has often been shamed around all desire: the desire for pleasure, for recognition, for creative expression, for a life that is her own.
She did not know what she wanted. She had learned not to. Learning desire again is not becoming selfish. It is recovering the navigation system that was dismantled before she could use it.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
The return of desire shows up first as small things. A preference. A pull toward something without knowing why. Something that is just for you, with no utility for anyone else.
It shows up as the discomfort of that pull. The guilt of wanting something. The reflexive check: is this okay? Does someone else need this? Can I justify it? The old training before the new knowing.
It shows up in the body: a warmth, a quickening, an aliveness that arrives when the desire is allowed rather than suppressed. The body knows desire before the mind names it.
It shows up as the reorganization of time and attention. The woman whose desire is returning makes different choices. She says no to things that deplete her. She says yes to things that are hers. This is not selfishness. It is the beginning of a life that includes her.
Generational Transmission
Through the maternal line: The mother's relationship to desire is the first model. The mother who did not allow herself to want, who organized entirely around the needs of children and husband, demonstrated through her daily life that female desire was something to be managed rather than followed. The daughter who watched her mother disappear into function and obligation without apparent want learns that this is what women do. The mother who had visible desires, who pursued things that were hers, who expressed preferences and followed them, gave her daughter a different model of what female life can be.
Through the paternal line: The father's response to the daughter's desires shapes how safe desire feels. The father who received his daughter's wanting warmly, who helped her figure out what she wanted and supported her in getting it, gave her a relational template in which desire is welcomed. The father who dismissed, criticized, or ignored her desires taught her that her wanting was not worth attending to. The father who wanted her to be a specific thing, and whose approval required she organize toward his vision, trained her to route her desire through his permission.
Nikita's Note
The return of desire is not dramatic, in my experience. It does not arrive as a single awakening.
It arrives as: a preference for the red one instead of the blue one. A pull toward a particular book. A wish, small enough to be almost embarrassing. A body that leans toward something without being asked to.
The practice is following the small things. Before you can follow the large desires, you have to practice allowing the small ones to count. To notice them. To take them seriously. The large life that is genuinely yours grows from the small daily practice of being honest about what you want.
From the work
She did not know what she wanted. She had learned not to. Learning desire again is not becoming selfish. It is recovering the navigation system that was dismantled before she could use it.From Healing the Mother Wound by Nikita DatarAbout this book
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See all in The Daughter's Lexicon →I wrote about this in Healing the Mother Wound — available on Amazon.