Connecting to what we want: Part 1 – Desire

Gabriel M
Jul 10
7 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

The illusion of the "good life"

At any point in my life pre-recovery, if you asked me the question, ‘What do you want for yourself?’, I would pause, look into the middle distance for a while, and then give an answer that nobody would question.

‘I want kids.’ and/or,
‘I want to do creative, fulfilling work.’ and/or,
‘I want a stable and loving partnership.’ and/or,
‘I want to be a part of a supportive community.’

In other words, I wanted a good life. The life you’re meant to want, and the life most people want.

However, for me at least, there was a terrible sadness lurking behind that answer. If I looked at my inner world and the pull of my desires, it was abstract and very general. I felt on some level like, although I wanted these things, they didn’t seem like they were for me – and I struggled to progress towards realising them in my life.

The missing blueprint: Why healthy desires feel out of reach

And there were reasons for this. I had the desire for this ‘good life’, but I hadn’t seen in my own childhood how a life like that is built. That made it difficult to make the connection between these healthy desires and reality – how was I supposed to get there? It left me feeling like I was very different from other people, and destined to be lonely and unfulfilled, but I wasn’t sure why.

I didn’t know how to make the connection between what I wanted deep down inside and the life choices that would lead me there. Nor did I have any idea how much support a person needs to build a good-enough life, because, growing up, support was impossible to come by. As a result, I slowly began to lose hope over the years that I could do well at life.

Mentorship vs winging it

There’s a big difference between somebody who has only ever seen cars driving on the road and who says to themselves, ‘One day I want to build my own car, and somebody who has been to university for mechanical engineering and apprenticed in the field, saying the same thing.

A healthy childhood, with parental modeling of how human desires are basically good, and with help and mentorship on how to work towards fulfilling them, is the equivalent of a university and an apprenticeship in this case. Having a childhood like this helps us connect what we want to our sense of self and our self-efficacy (our belief that we can achieve it). Without this connection, we risk losing our sense of possibility.

If the first person (in the car scenario) doesn’t know what they’re missing (training, mentorship, and support), they are going to struggle to actualize what they want. They may indeed build something, and it may even look like what they want superficially, but it is unlikely to function like what they have seen driving about. Not knowing what they are missing, not being able to make that connection, can lead them to a lot of self-blame or frustration with the world.

I was such a person, and it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know that I needed to learn what I needed to learn! There’s so much intricacy, and the process is so complex and varied. That first person may struggle to realize, for example, that you can’t do something as complex as building a car from scratch on your own, and not having a helpful blueprint to go on is extremely difficult; in fact, it's nearly impossible!

Human knowledge is built, generation upon generation.

What was modeled: Absorbing family dysfunction

Human actualization is complex, and complex behaviors require modeling to learn, and the knowledge of those who have come before us. Not only that, but if we never had the stability of a good-enough childhood ourselves, if we never experienced that safety and stability, we may never have gotten the opportunity to know what a ‘want’ really is, as distinct from a need. The ‘wants’ listed above are really normal things that many people have, but if we grow up in a home where these things are wrecked in various ways, we may be left feeling like the ‘normal’ life is not for us, without knowing what kind of life is for us.

This might make better sense in the following examples of what was modeled by our parents about not living a good enough, actualized life. You can also think of these as unmet or disregarded needs.

Witnessing a parent having contempt for their spouse or partner, or settling for an unfulfilling relationship out of codependency.
Watching a parent hate their work or role in life, yet not seeing them seek out or take action to better their situation or relationship to work and purpose.
Witnessing a parent act like their children or connections are a burden and are draining them.
Witnessing a parent model that dissatisfaction with life is normal. Why want more? Life sucks, and then you die.
Witnessing a parent not have friends or community connections due to their stuckness, superiority, or shame.

Children are like sponges, and we can unconsciously adopt behaviors and worldviews from a parent. What might you have absorbed from a parent about community, relationships, work, purpose, or fulfillment needs?

Healing the blueprint first

A lot of childhood trauma recovery work hopefully results in getting our long-term unmet needs met in a good enough way. For example, if we can heal the abuse around the belief that ‘one shouldn’t expect to have a healthy relationship’, we are in a much better position to believe in healthy intimacy and allow abusive people in our lives.

However, it is crucial to mention this: focusing on what we want as a long-term, abstract idea is seldom helpful. In fact, it is likely to induce a sense of anxiety and cause us to focus on the distance between us and what we want. What is helpful to focus on instead is how we learned to treat universal needs growing up, and to begin to look at how those patterns became the core of how we approach them in our lives. Finishing business with what our parents modeled and how they lived their lives, or taught us about our needs, comes first. Otherwise, we are still somewhat attempting to build a car with blindfolds on or winging it.

How parents can wreck a child's desires

Here are some ways a parent might wreck a child’s normal needs and desires:

Being gluttonous, hedonistic, self-serving, or selfish in pursuing their own (often unhealthy) needs and desires. This is terrible modeling, likely to make a child feel like wants are bad because their parent pursued unhealthy desires in a harmful way.
Making fun of a child’s wants, or maliciously mocking them when they are shared and/or making it seem like a burden on the parent that the child wants to do something (making fun of a child who wants to play music while they are still learning, complaining about the noise, acting put-upon whenever the child needs to go to practice or complaining when they play in the house).
Responding inappropriately to a child’s desires (e.g., a child has a talent and desire to perform, and the parent enrolls them in something beyond their interest or skill set). The child likes dancing, but they end up in advanced ballet classes that aren’t fun or interesting and are extremely rigid, but the classes serve the parent.
Overshadowing a child’s desires with their own negativity (‘You don’t get what you want in life, kid, better learn that now. I wanted to go to college but never got my shot, and you don’t see me complaining.’).

Trapped in the fantasy: The Jungian shadow self

I knew growing up that I couldn’t talk about many things that were interesting to me or question many things because my parents had a lot of trigger topics that they would easily feel offended around – then a simple conversation would become about soothing them so that they wouldn’t fume for days and act out passive-aggressively.

Thus, it felt safer for me to keep my desires in the realm of my fantasies, and they became a part of my ‘shadow self’. Carl Jung talked about the ‘shadow self’ as those aspects of ourselves that we push out of conscious awareness, or that are never given a chance to emerge into awareness. They try to make themselves known through various means, including depression, anxiety, dreams (or nightmares), and even addictions.

If our shadow self is filled with our explored and unfulfilled desires or needs, we may find ourselves absorbed in fantasy and dissociation much of the time, and thus feel like our life runs away from us and we never seem to get to the things that are meaningful. Here, once again, we lose the connection between an internal desire and a set of actions or principles that will move us in that direction.

That kind of life feels out of reach, and yet the thing that is out of reach is the experience of meeting ourselves as we were meant to be – grounded and in alignment with our desires.

Desire as a compass

When our upbringing taught us that what we want is not important, or that it’s impossible to pursue what we want in a healthy, positive way, we can lose hope in the goodness of the world. This is a devastating and unfair loss to a child because it whittles away at that child’s desire to live. After all, desire is strongly linked to our sense of purpose, sense of meaning, and our sense of self.

It’s difficult to feel beyond the basic need to survive if we aren’t incorporating our wants into our sense of self: the truth is that they are not an ‘optional luxury’ in life, but rather they are our compass, the sense that drives us and pulls us forward. When we find a connection to our desire, we can begin to feel that life can be about being pulled towards something in our future, and that is a more sustainable and positive drive than being driven solely by survival needs.