Don't know what you want? This is for you.

Why we struggle to know our wants, and what we can do about it.

Housekeeping: Rick and I were joined by the creator of Internal Family Systems therapy, Dr. Richard Schwartz, on this week’s episode of Being Well. Rick and Dr. Schwartz went deep on the the practice of therapy, the nature of the self, and how we can integrate all the aspects of who we are.

Last week I argued that the secret to reliable happiness was learning how to want the things that are good for you. There are four common issues people tend to have with their wants:

1. Difficulties with accepting limitations.

2. Blocks to identifying our wants, or wanting at all.

3. Wanting things we have limited influence over (e.g., praise).

4. Fears (i.e., avoidance wants) that prevent us from accessing our wants.

Today we’re going to be focusing on the second of those: dealing with blocks to wanting, and learning how to figure out what we want.

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If I could highlight one area of growth that would immediately transform most people’s lives and relationships, it would be becoming more comfortable with our wants and needs. This includes:

1. Accepting the presence of wants and needs.

2. Identifying your important wants and needs.

3. Coming to terms with them inside of yourself.

4. Creating a plan for meeting them more regularly.

We’re born wanting. From our first breath we want comfort, food, and the sense that others care for us. We have psychological needs for belonging, connection, competence, mastery, and autonomy. Despite this, we’ve managed to turn “needy” into a bad word.

The practice that’s had the greatest impact on my life is the acceptance of my own wants and needs, and alongside that becoming more competent dealing with the needs of others. Our wants are many, but it's common for people to struggle with identifying them - and especially with communicating them to other people. There are a variety of common reasons for this:

• They’re broadly out of touch with their interior. This could be because a person was never taught the skill of interoception: the sense of internal body sensations and “gut feelings.”

• Neurology and temperament. Some people have differences in brain structure that influence their ability to apply interoception. Similarly, differences in temperament can influence how people orient toward the now vs. the future or the negative vs. the positive.

• They were punished for those needs when they were young. People who were punished by their parents for expressing a normal need in childhood (e.g., the need for affection and nurturance without expectation) are more likely to repress that need in adulthood.

• The influence of culture. America was built on a cultural myth of “rugged individualism” that glorifies self-reliance and personal autonomy. In this myth, dependence is weakness…even though dependence is baked into our nature. Culture influences the internalized rules we carry around, and if you come from a cultural background that frames needs as a vulnerability getting in touch with them is going to be a complex process.

• Everyday influences and life pressures. In the course of a busy and often stressful life it’s normal for our needs to get put on the back burner.

There are a few steps I’ve found that tend to help people work through these issues and get in touch with their deeper wants and needs.

What’s There to Want?

A great place to start is by identifying the many things a person might want based on our underlying needs. There are two frameworks for understanding and categorizing our needs that we use regularly on Being Well. The first comes from Rick’s work. He argues that humans have three big needs grounded in our ancient evolutionary history:

1. We need safety, from raw survival to knowing we won’t be attacked if we speak up. We fulfill this need by avoiding harms, like not touching a hot stove or steering clear of certain people.

2. We need satisfaction, from having enough to eat to feeling that life is worth living. We handle this by approaching rewards, like smelling the roses, finishing the laundry, or building a business.

3. We need connection, from expressing sexuality to feeling worthy and loved. We take care of this need by attaching to others, like by texting a friend, feeling understood, or giving compassion.

Depending on how broadly you define them, most animal species need their version of safety, satisfaction, and connection. These basic needs are grounded in life itself, and how we manage them today is based on the evolution of the nervous system over the past 600 million years. While we all need safety, satisfaction, and connection, different needs might be of particular importance at different points in time, which takes us to a second commonly used framework from Abraham Maslow.

In 1943 Maslow wrote A Theory of Human Motivation, which laid out five families of needs: physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. These needs are often organized in a pyramid structure, and people typically frame our movement from one need to another as being a linear process like climbing a ladder. We meet our needs one at a time, and once you’ve satisfied a need, you’re able to “progress” to the next rung:¹

This is a very tidy little image, and you can see why such a convenient visual representation became popular in management textbooks in the Western world…but Maslow never created this pyramid, and it significantly misrepresents some of his views. Human development isn’t such simple, linear process. It’s normal for us to take a few steps forward and a few steps back, or to vacillate from focusing on one need to focusing on another. As Maslow wrote, “most members of our society who are normal are partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time.”²

Learning these different frameworks can help us ask useful questions about our interior. For example, think about what’s going on for you these days in terms of Rick’s three needs for safety, satisfaction, and connection. What are the emotions or issues that you’re currently wrestling with? Anxiety, anger, or feelings of powerlessness are clues that safety is at risk. Feelings of disappointment, frustration, boredom, or the general sense that life just isn’t that enjoyable suggest that satisfaction needs some attention. Loneliness, resentment, envy, or shame all flag the need for connection. If just reading one of those needs makes you cringe or squirm, well, that’s often a pretty good indicator.

Each of these needs is best addressed by inner strengths that are matched to it. If your car is running on fumes, it needs more gas - not a spare tire. We support our need for safety by developing a sense of agency and autonomy, and learning how to deal with real threats while relaxing around imagined ones. We feel more satisfied when we’re able to identify key values, pursue them consistently, and experience more enjoyment along the way. We connect with others more effectively by working with feelings of shame and low self-worth, and improving our communication and empathy skills.

Here are a few helpful questions to ask yourself:

• What issues tend to come up in my life (and particularly my relationships) over and over again?

• If I could wave a magic wand and wake up tomorrow with a new inner strength, what would it be?

• Deep down, what experiences do I still long for?

• What did I know when I was young?

Before the World Got in the Way

One of the best ways to identify our important wants and needs is by trying to get “under” all the layers of learning we had to do in order to become a functional adult. The messages we’ve internalized, patterns of thought and action we’ve developed, and assumptions we’ve started taking as facts helped us get to a place where we could survive our environments and participate in the world. It was necessary learning, but it can have the unfortunate side effect of obscuring what we truly care about. A way around this is by rediscovering who we were when we were young, before the world got in the way.

The process of personal growth extends in two directions. It pushes into the future, integrating our experiences and learning into a more complete version of ourselves. And it returns to the past, connecting with who we were all along.

Making this a bit more real, let’s look at a pattern in parent-child relationships where the parent is somewhat emotionally vulnerable, and the child is particularly emotionally intelligent. In these cases there can be a kind of inversion, where the child devotes themselves to meeting the parent’s emotional needs rather than the other way around. Clinically significant forms of this are known as parentification, which occurs when a child effectively serves as a parent to either their parent or younger siblings. Even in situations where a child wasn’t fully parentified, kids are entirely dependent on their parents. In unstable families where one or both parents are absent, emotionally unaware, chaotic, or overtly abusive, a child might realize that the best way to stay in relationship with their parent (and therefore, survive) is by devoting themselves to meeting the parent’s needs. The child’s gift – one of unusually high emotional sensitivity – is applied to becoming an ideal in the eyes of their parent.

The consequences of this are the child losing contact with their their own wants and needs, with their true self, and creating a false self where their authentic emotional experiences, desires, wants, and needs are repressed in order to benefit their parents. This often includes defining themselves based on what they can do to keep their parents happy rather than who they are. This then shows up in adulthood as underlying feelings of worthlessness, uncertainty, and self-alienation.

I had a pretty normal childhood, which thankfully included a very secure and stable family unit, and even so getting in touch with my needs was a complicated process. So if you come from a much less supportive environment, it’s no wonder you might struggle to identify your wants and needs as an adult. But there’s still a lot you can do to reconnect with your authentic desires.

My parents took a lot of home videos, and one of the most useful things I’ve ever done was going back and watching myself with the eyes of an adult. Pictures and videos are helpful because they’re full of information, but you can do similar exercises without them. For example, think of yourself as a younger person. Bring an image of yourself to mind, maybe wearing something you used to really like. Do what you can to see that person from the outside. Then, if you can, think about what it was like to be that person on the inside.

• Were you more somatic (“in the body”) or cognitive (“in the brain?”)

• Where you more emotionally open or reserved?

• Were you more relational or more independent?

• Did you enjoy playing with other kids, or would you rather do your own thing? Why?

• Did you warm up to other people quickly or slowly?

• Were you a bit more sensitive or a bit more stoic?

• Did you prefer to be inside or outside?

• What were the kinds of things that really bothered you, and what were the kinds of things you found easy to endure?

Questions like these about our tendencies and temperament are both revealing in their own right and start pointing us toward the circumstances, people, and even pursuits that could be good fits for us. We can go down a layer with another set of questions:

• What would it have been like to be around me when I was young?

• What were some of the things I was taught about the world? Do I still believe those things? Why or why not?

• Were there any values that felt particularly important to me?

Learning from Childhood Dreams

It’s normal for us to have dreams for ourselves when we’re young, and equally normal for those dreams to fall by the wayside as we grow and change. The dreams of a child aren’t always entirely rational – after all, most people aren’t going to grow up to be an astronaut, firefighter, or rock star - but there’s still a lot we can learn from even the most unrealistic dreams.

Let’s take the rock star example. Being a rock star is a model of a way of being: it’s a means to various ends. Those ends might include fame, making other people happy, playing music, and financial success. Then, those ends are themselves ways to meet various psychological needs, such as feeling liked and valued, safe and secure, and like you’re a master of your craft.

It’s easy to get caught up in specific means to the true ends our dreams seek to achieve; in essence to value the form of something over its function. Doing this distracts from the emotional and psychological wants that tend to lie beneath our dreams. Ultimately those wants are what we really care about, so don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Try it out. Pick an aspiration you had as a kid, it can be as ridiculous as you like. If you have a hard time thinking of a particular dream, think about something else that mattered to you. A story you particularly liked. A character that really caught your attention. A picture you still think about sometimes. See if you can take a step back from it, and ask yourself:

• What’s the function beneath this particular form?

• What are key aspects of this dream, particularly in terms of different psychological desires or emotional needs it might meet?

• Is there some essence here, some end the dream aspires to, that you could still bring aspects of into your life?

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Thanks again for taking the time to read this. I keep entering the writing process with the intention of being succinct…but then it always feels like there’s more to say. Leave a comment down below to let me know how you feel about the length, if you’d be interested in posts that are a bit more summary, and any specific topics you’d like to see me explore in this space.

Again, I truly appreciate your support.

1. This image comes from Simply Psychology.

2. Maslow did break our needs into different categories, and he made an important distinction between deficiency needs (D-needs) and being needs (B-needs). The bottom four categories are all D-needs, while needs that fall into the top category of self-actualization are B-needs. The longer a D-need has gone without being met the stronger it becomes, and when a D-need has been more or less satisfied our desire for it goes away.