Many self-reliant people genuinely can’t name what they want, even though they take wanting-driven action all day long. Joe explains that for a parentified child, expressing a want felt hostile — it threatened the parent who needed to be taken care of — so the child learned to sublimate their wants entirely, sometimes to the point of not believing they have any.
“Feeling that want would be feeling the fact that it wasn’t provided for you. And that’s a lot of grief to feel. And so you just push that wanting down.”
The suppression isn’t really about the wants themselves; it’s about avoiding grief. To feel a want is to feel that it went unmet in childhood, and that loss is too much to touch, so the whole channel gets shut off.
The practice is simple and somatic: write down ten things you want today, say each out loud several times, and feel whatever emotion arises just from announcing the want. Letting the grief move makes wanting safe again.
“Just write down here are 10 things that I want today and then say them out loud… and then feel any emotion that comes up by just announcing that you want it.”
Related Concepts
- Owning your wants means being okay with having them
- Self-reliance comes from a childhood where you took care of your parents
- Asking for what you want dissolves resentment
- Wanting is aliveness
- Love the part in pain the way you wanted your parents to love you
- The resistance to asking protects an unfelt sadness
- Suppressing one emotion suppresses them all
- Trauma controls you until you feel the hurt underneath it