Why Can't I Tell the Difference Between What I Want and What I Am Supposed to Want?
The Pattern
You are at the menu, the apartment, the job offer, the question of what to do with your life. Two voices speak at the same volume. One sounds like wanting. The other sounds like wanting and is actually obedience wearing the costume of wanting. You cannot, in the moment, reliably tell them apart. You choose, and only later, sometimes years later, can you say which voice that was.
Origins & Context
Carl Jung wrote about the persona as the social mask that becomes confused with the self. When the persona is rewarded early and consistently, the original wanting goes underground. The adult cannot easily distinguish the persona's preferences from her own because the persona has been doing the wanting for so long.
Donald Winnicott's true self and false self give us the same structure in developmental language. The true self holds spontaneous desire. The false self holds compliant desire dressed up as preference. When the false self has been your interface with the world for thirty years, telling the two apart requires slowing the moment of wanting down to a speed it has never moved at before.
The certainty is the supposed-to-want voice. The hollowness is the original wanting, signaling its absence the only way it knows how.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You order the salad and feel mildly betrayed by your own mouth. You take the job and a part of you that did not get to speak in the interview goes quiet for a year. You date the person and only on the third anniversary realize that you wanted to want them more than you ever wanted them.
It shows up in the way decisions feel both certain and hollow. The certainty is the supposed-to-want voice, which is loud and well-rehearsed. The hollowness is the original wanting voice, which never got picked, signaling its absence the only way it knows how.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the False Self (Donald Winnicott) wanting on behalf of the True Self. It is also named in Jungian work as the Persona overriding the original Self. Contemporary therapists describe it through the language of Authentic Desire and the work of distinguishing it from inherited or performed desire.
Related entries in this library include the Adaptive Self versus Original Self, Self-Abandonment, and the Reflexive Yes that often answers before you have asked yourself.
Nikita's Note
I made several large life decisions out of the supposed-to-want voice and I do not regret them the way you might think. They taught me what the voice sounded like. I now recognize her cadence in my own mouth within about half a sentence, and I can pause.
The practice is not getting it right every time. The practice is the pause. The pause is where the original wanting, who has been quiet for a long time, gets her first chance in years to lean toward the question.
From the work
The certainty is the supposed-to-want voice. The hollowness is the original wanting, signaling its absence the only way it knows how.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.