What does your desire know that you don't?

Wanting as data and the intuitive pull of the red-flag-lined path

Photo by Roseanna Smith on Unsplash

“You find yourself in your desire, so do not say that desire is vain.”
— Carl Jung

If five years of coaching has taught me anything, it’s that people don’t trust their desires. Which is also to say that people don’t trust themselves.

Most of my coaching has been with people trying to rebuild their lives after leaving Mormonism, a high-control group that they recently (or not so recently) realized wasn’t, in fact, God’s One True Carpet-Walled Church On The Earth Today. This is a uniquely demanding journey when you’ve just had the psychic rug pulled out from under you. Going from being certain about life and what the deal is to having no fucking clue about anything is unbelievably destabilizing and often presents challenges for years to come, sometimes a lifetime.

The most pressing of these challenges is usually figuring out how to make decisions for yourself, without the help of an all-knowing external authority who’s male and polygamist and annoying and has horrible taste in human mouthpieces.

When we’re used to outsourcing our decision-making and having things like our ethics, goals, opinions, and priorities handed to us on a silver-haired platter (at conferences that beat Ambien in clinical trials), we often don’t know how to navigate life on our own. We became accustomed to clearly-defined rules, however arbitrary, and now there are none. How can we ensure we’re on the right path? How should we think? How should we act? How should we dream? Is it even OK to dream? What if we’re wrong and grooming children is actually good if you’re God’s favorite guy, and we’re evil for thinking otherwise?

The confusion and overwhelm makes a lot of people vulnerable to cult hopping, or seeking new authorities in an attempt to avoid the terrifying feelings true freedom can bring up in them. Seeking new authorities isn’t necessarily bad—it’s good to gain wisdom from reliable sources—but if we don’t also work to understand and trust ourselves, we’re only addressing the symptoms of the problem and risk its continuation in another form.

Getting to know ourselves—really becoming acquainted with all the different parts of us, even the ones we wish didn’t exist—can help us identify and apply our own and others’ wisdom more healthily, without falling back into rigid, limited ways of thinking about life. Our life.

Desire as a portal to wisdom

Desire is the perfect place to start. I’m not talking about sexual desires necessarily, though they’re often a big deal for people leaving purity cultures like Mormonism, perhaps even the main deal for a time. I’m talking about what we want generally—the things we find ourselves being drawn to, big and small, especially the things that have called to us for many seasons.

You’d be surprised how disconnected a lot of people are from their desires. We tend to think of humans as quite selfish. We can be, but the situation is a lot more complex than simply “People have desires and generally pursue those desires.”

So much goes into whether or not we’re responsive to a desire and in what way, like if we can even name it, what stories we have about it, and what feelings it brings up in us. Often, the most selfish behavior stems from people repressing their desires rather than unashamedly pursuing them. (More on healthy vs. unhealthy selfishness later.)

Religion has mastered the art of co-opting people’s psyches by conditioning them to shame desire. If we believe we’re inherently bad it’s easy to control us, because we become desperate for redemption and guidance and we lose access to our own wisdom. In groups like Mormonism, shame is so fundamental that people often become suspicious of desire itself, and come to subconsciously believe that them wanting something is the clearest indication that it’s wrong. Diet culture is another great example of this phenomenon, but it’s everywhere, really.

Fear of desire → estrangement from ourselves → dysfunction

This is what’s critical to understand about desire. When we repress it, we send it to darker, less conscious parts of our psyches, making it almost inevitable that it’ll come out in more dysfunctional ways. We don’t gain self-control by repressing our desires; we gain self-control by understanding them.

Whatever we run from controls us. That’s why it’s essential to take inventory of our desires without shame steamrolling our ability to be honest with ourselves. Most dysfunctions in our world are the result of people not being able to be honest with themselves. We tell ourselves all kinds of stories to justify what we can’t face within ourselves, and we pay a steep price for it.

Trusting the arc of our own desires

There can sometimes be more value in following a red-flag-lined path than in repressing our desires and stagnating. When I was 16 I joined the Mormon church. At 22 I got married to a man I hadn’t known for long enough. Both of those choices were, by the world’s standards, bad ideas, in that they weren’t grounded in certain kinds of wisdom. But they were grounded in another kind of wisdom—the wisdom of my own desire, and my psyche’s need to test out various beliefs I had about life.

You know those times in your life where you just know, without a shadow of a doubt (to use a popular Mormon phrase) that something is for you? Like, there’s no stopping you from doing it, regardless of how much people tell you it’s stupid? And sometimes you even know that it’s probably stupid?

“Sometimes people will follow a path lit with red flags fully knowing that the flags are red, because there’s a deeper intuitive pull. There’s something profound in recognizing that we know, at a deep level, what is for our evolution. We don’t necessarily know why we’re drawn to things at the time, but you know when something is for you.” — lovesophieburns on TikTok (she’s brilliant and so pretty it hurts)

Understanding this can help us have a growth mindset no matter what. I didn’t end up wanting to stay in the Mormon Church or my marriage, but they both served valuable purposes in my psyche. I needed to experience the kind of belonging, safety, and love that both offered me for a time in order to psychologically develop. There was a “secret order” in my “disorder,” to borrow a sentiment from Carl Jung. I’ve seen this time and time again in my life, regardless of how spiritually mature I’ve become. We don’t control as much as we like to think.

There was no perfect world where I “broke free” from my trauma and conditioning without having the kind of real-world experiences that facilitated learning. We often need to see the results of our played-out desires to understand what they can and can’t give us. This is important because we often put specific desires on a pedestal, giving them enormous power over us, and we can’t always take them off the pedestal through thinking alone.

As I wrote in this post, “We have theories about what we’d most like to experience and how we might make it happen, and life proves us wrong time and time again, moving us toward truer ideas and circumstances and people if we’re lucky.”

Life demands forward motion, and objects in motion stay in motion. Trying to keep our eyes open while we roll is sometimes the only thing we can do, realistically. We have to experiment to learn and grow, which includes experimenting with desires, ideally learning what’s contained within them in the process. (This is why so many people find value in kink, though they may not remain interested in the same kinks forever.)

Sade Jackson

Shame and self-control

Shame also tends to limit our self-control, and we all need access to self-control to not give into every whim of desire our brains might produce for us. (I don’t want to eat a second bag of chips after dinner because I know it’ll hurt my body, but shaming myself for having the desire isn’t necessary or helpful. Understanding that it’s normal to want to eat excessive amounts of hyperpalatable junk foods is pretty helpful, though.)

If we’ve come from a culture that heavily emphasized self-control, it can be necessary that we experience what it feels like to release it. I’m obviously not talking about doing fundamentally dangerous things (like driving drunk or getting into stupid debt), but I’m not a fan of remaining so afraid that you never do anything “unwise.” (Getting drunk and dancing like an insane person and kissing a stranger might be a net positive for you, for example, as might investing in a course you can’t quite afford because it’ll help you step into a new career you actually like.)

If we think we can learn the language of our desires fluently without breaking any of the grammar rules of our previous language . . . well, we’ll see what happens.

Unlearning diet culture is a pretty good example of how unshaming can help us tap back into our innate wisdom. Intuitive eating (which I’m not endorsing wholesale but I see a lot of value in) encourages people to release all attempts at self-control for a while in order to reconnect with their body’s hunger and fullness signals, without the problematic mental concepts dieting has instilled in them getting in the way.

Many lifelong dieters believe that if they remove all restrictive food rules, they’ll become a monster, eating themselves to death. But they often learn that this isn’t true—when we remove restrictions, we can become more balanced naturally, even if there’s a recalibrating pendulum swing at first. (Don’t fear the pendulum swing, just stay aware!) It’s like how people will start missing work if they spend too much time on vacation. We can trust ourselves to do what’s good for us more than we’ve been conditioned us to believe.

“True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way.
It can’t be gained by interfering.”
— Lao Tzu

Honing our desire-response skills

As we become more comfortable asking ourselves what we want, in ways big and small, we also get better at knowing which desires are worth pursuing. At the beginning of our journey, we may learn that a desire with the strongest pull has the most easily disproven story attached to it. Experience can weaken desires like that a lot faster than mental analysis alone, which can be freeing. There are things we think we want for years that when the rubber meets the road, we don’t, at least not long term. But there was only one way to learn that, so playing it out was a net positive.

We may also learn that a desire with the strongest pull is extremely necessary for our wellbeing, and realize how much we were undervaluing it previously. David Archuleta is probably a great example of this—the way he’s come into himself artistically and personality-wise since allowing himself to be gay without shame has been wonderful to witness after a lifetime of him doing what his culture deemed “sensible.”

“To choose an erotic life is not simply to chase pleasure or gratification; that would be to mistake Eros for Hedone. Rather, it is to say “yes” to the kind of friction that transforms. It is the decision to let yourself be undone by what draws you in. Consider the artist who gives herself over to a vision she cannot explain, or the thinker who risks intellectual exile to defend an idea no one else yet believes. These are not logical paths. They are not chosen for stability or acclaim. They are chosen because something inexplicable stirs… a vibration, a recognition, a hunger that refuses to be ignored. The erotic decision is the one that defies linearity and invites metamorphosis.” - Tamara (from a brilliant post on desire, disobedience, and the art of becoming)

Safety is an illusion

Trying to really get to know yourself and create your most “aligned” life while keeping your humanity neatly contained in predetermined boxes is a fool’s errand. We can’t bypass the need for experience, and if we expect every choice we make to have a clearly defined ROI before we’ll consider making it, we’re going to fundamentally limit ourselves. We can’t always know why we feel called to certain things, only that we do.

“Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ”
― Carl Jung

Playfulness, curiosity, and a willingness to course-correct are all essential for stepping into our power, and they’re often the very qualities high-control groups like Mormonism constrict in people.

Sometimes we feel pulled toward a choice only to discover that the consequences for making it are quite different than we imagined. Perhaps we expected a payoff that didn’t come. Perhaps we have a lot more to learn than we thought, or what we thought we needed to learn wasn’t actually the lesson life wanted to teach us. Being able to roll with the unknown (eyes open, remember?) massively enhances our experience of life.

We don’t need shame to stay on the right path, we need discernment. And discernment takes time to develop, especially if our lives previously stunted that development. Sometimes the things we need most are the things we wish we didn’t need, because they’re disruptive to the current order we’ve been trying to maintain.

Healthy vs. unhealthy selfishness

A lot of people have a warped view of what’s selfish. They’ll over-extend themselves to try and please people (read: to avoid having to feel whatever difficult feelings they encounter when they say “no”) when it inevitably leads to them resenting those people time and time again. They’ll stay in a marriage that depends on them lying and shrinking because it’s too scary to say what’s true and do what’s painful. They’ll cite “the kids” as a justification while the kids are experiencing a hollowed-out version of their parents, their psyches already normalizing what will one day make them miserable, too. (And already is, in most cases.)

Anytime we’re having to lie to uphold a “selfless” version of ourselves, that’s worth looking at. People deserve the truth and the chance to navigate whatever challenges arise from them having to hear it. It’s arrogant to assume we know what’s best for others when our idea of “best” involves us being dishonest or exerting undue influence. What opportunities for growth are we withholding from people when we deem them unfit to know what’s true?

I’m speaking pretty broadly here, of course, and there are exceptions to most statements of this nature, but I hope my point hits whoever needs to hear it.

True selfishness is the result of an inflated sense of self-importance. Meaning, we think it’s OK to take what’s not ours to take, or control what (or who) isn’t ours to control, or demand what isn’t ours to demand because we matter more than others. It’s ignoring others’ boundaries because our feelings seem too hard to sit with, though they can be sat with. It’s having an outsized sense of what we’re owed vs. what others are owed, and arrogance about how much we can know, or how much it’s OK to impose our supposed knowledge on others.

It’s not selfish to take responsibility for your own experience of life, even if it disappoints or hurts others. It can be selfish to refuse to take that responsibility, because as we’ve discussed, it can create a lot of dysfunction.

What feels the most wrong to want?

This is a powerful question. As we’ve discussed, unshaming desire isn’t about acting on every desire we ever have—some desires are fleeting and insignificant or just objectively harmful—but it is about getting radically honest with ourselves so we’re not being unconsciously influenced by what we won’t face or limiting ourselves in ways that make us miserable.

Most of us have at least a couple of desires we’ve been conditioned to believe are wrong when they’re not. (Like my desire to dance like I’m in a production of Hairspray at the club. Embarrassing, but not wrong.) Whether consciously or subconsciously, we can have negative stories or emotions around the desires with the greatest potential to improve our lives, and that’s serious business. It is precisely because some desires have such great potential to change our lives that we reject them, because we know what accepting them might mean. Change can be terrifying.

As a wise TikToker on my feed said yesterday, “Whatever you’re afraid to feel? You’re already feeling it.”

Grace, non-judgment, and widening our circle of compassion

“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”
― Carl Jung again, sorry

Whatever we shame in ourselves, we shame in others. The more narrow our range of “acceptable” desires is, the more judgmental we’ll be and the less our hearts will be open to people who are different from us. The world is plagued by the bigotry this can create. Our ability to learn and connect and solve problems is severely hindered by judgment, sometimes into non-existence.

May we learn how to love other people without holding back, trusting ourselves to draw appropriate boundaries that allow us to live honestly. May we claim our own sovereignty and refuse to stay trapped in familiar dysfunctional patterns or shrink from freedom. May I figure out a way to quote Carl Jung less and stop leaning on this “may we” nonsense to end Substack posts—it’s getting out of hand.

Love you!