Why Can't I Name What I Actually Want?
The Pattern
Someone asks what you want and you produce a competent answer about what would be reasonable, what would be sensible, what would make sense given the circumstances. The competent answer is not what you want. You know this. You also cannot, in the moment, locate what you do want. The channel is not broken. The channel has been quiet so long it has forgotten the sound of its own voice.
Origins & Context
Donald Winnicott's true self holds spontaneous desire. When the holding environment cannot receive the true self's wants, the wants do not disappear. They go underground. The adult inherits a self that can perform preference but cannot easily access desire.
Gabor Mate has written about the suppression of authentic need in childhood as a survival strategy. The child who learned that wanting was inconvenient or dangerous learned to stop registering wanting at the level of the body. The adult does not have access to her wants because she trained herself, for good reason, not to feel them in the first place.
The channel is not broken. The channel has been quiet so long it has forgotten the sound of its own voice.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
Someone asks where you want to eat and you cannot answer. Someone asks what you want for your birthday and you produce a polite list of things you do not actually want. Someone asks what your dream life looks like and you describe a life you have read about, not lived from.
It shows up most in the moments of being asked to choose. The menu, the apartment, the partner, the city, the career. You stall, you defer, you let the other person choose, you choose what is reasonable. Later, in the quiet, a tiny signal of what you wanted floats up, too late to act on, just in time to remind you that the channel still exists and is waiting for permission to speak again.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the suppression of Authentic Desire (Gabor Mate, contemporary trauma work). It is also named through Winnicott's framework as the False Self performing preference while the True Self holds the actual want. Therapists working with the somatic dimension describe it as a loss of Interoception, the felt sense of what is happening inside the body, including the body's desires.
Related entries in this library include Self-Abandonment, the Adaptive Self versus Original Self, and the Reflexive Yes that often answers instead of the real want.
Nikita's Note
I went years without being able to answer the question of what I wanted. I would feel embarrassed in restaurants. I would hate ordering coffee. The shame was not about coffee. It was about the silence where the answer should have been.
The practice that opened the channel was small. I would ask myself, in the quietest moment of the day, what would you want right now if the answer cost nothing and pleased no one. The first answers were tiny. Cold water. A different chair. A nap. The tiny answers, accumulated, taught the channel to speak again. The bigger answers came later, once she trusted me to listen.
From the work
The channel is not broken. The channel has been quiet so long it has forgotten the sound of its own voice.From When You're Ready by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready — available on Amazon.