What Do You Actually Want? (And Why It’s Harder to Answer Than It Should Be)
It’s one of the most fundamental questions there is.
What do you want?
And yet, when I ask people this in therapy, it’s often the question that stops them in their tracks. Not because they’re avoiding it. But because they genuinely don’t know.
Or because they know but have learned not to trust it.
Or because what they want feels so far from what their life currently looks like that it’s easier not to look at it directly.
Knowing what you want sounds simple. It really isn’t.
When Did We Stop Knowing?
Children are usually very clear about what they want. They reach for things. They say no. They have strong, uncomplicated preferences.
But somewhere along the way, many of us learn to override that.
We learn to want what we’re supposed to want. To prioritise what others need. To keep our wants small and manageable and acceptable.
We get the message, sometimes explicitly, sometimes not, that our desires are inconvenient, or selfish, or unrealistic.
So we quieten them down.
And after a while, we can’t quite hear them any more.
This is something I see a lot in the therapy room. People arrive knowing something feels off, but unable to pinpoint what. Often, that “something” is the loss of contact with their own inner life, their real preferences, their genuine longings, the things they’ve spent years pushing aside.
The Difference Between What We Want and What We Think We Should Want
So much of what people tell me they want turns out, on closer inspection, to be what they think they should want.
The promotion. The bigger house. The relationship that looks right on paper. The life that other people would approve of.
These aren’t wrong things to want. But they’re worth examining.
Because when we spend our lives chasing what we think we should want, we can end up with everything we aimed for — and still feel strangely empty.
The psychologist and author Oliver James once described the modern pressure to pursue wealth, status and appearance as a kind of “affluenza” a cultural virus that keeps us running on a treadmill towards goals that never quite satisfy. His research, rooted in UK and European populations, found that people who base their self-worth on external measures tend to report higher levels of anxiety and lower life satisfaction.
The real question, what do I actually want, underneath all the noise?, is often much quieter. And much more personal.
Why It Feels Risky to Want Things
For some people, knowing what they want feels dangerous.
Because wanting something means being able to lose it. It means being disappointed. It means making a choice and being responsible for it.
Not wanting, or not knowing, can feel safer. If you don’t let yourself want things, you can’t be let down.
But it also means you can’t move towards anything. You can’t build a life that feels like yours.
Sometimes this pattern goes back a long way. If your wants were dismissed, ridiculed or simply ignored when you were young, it makes sense that you’d learn to protect yourself by not wanting too much. That was a smart adaptation at the time. It’s just that it can become a habit that outlives its usefulness.
Recognising that pattern, and starting to gently unpick it, is work that therapy can really help with.
What Your Values Have to Do With It
One of the approaches I use with clients is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. At the heart of ACT is the idea that a meaningful life isn’t built on achieving goals; it’s built on living in line with your values.
Values aren’t goals. Goals are things you tick off. Values are ongoing; they describe the kind of person you want to be and the way you want to move through the world.
When people start to reconnect with their values, something shifts. They get clearer. The noise quietens. The things they’ve been dimly aware of but have been too busy or too scared to look at start to come into focus.
It doesn’t happen overnight. But it starts.
A Place to Start
You don’t have to have the big answer.
Start smaller. Notice what makes you lean in. Pay attention to what you find yourself drawn to. What are you doing when time seems to disappear? What have you been quietly longing for but dismissing as impractical or indulgent?
Your wants are information. They’re pointing at something real about who you are and what you need.
They deserve to be listened to.
And if you’ve spent a long time not listening, or if you’ve had people in your life who taught you that your wants didn’t matter, it’s okay if this feels unfamiliar. You can learn. Slowly, gently, in your own time.
How Therapy Can Help
This is exactly the kind of exploration that therapy is for.
Not to tell you what you should want. Not to fix you. But to give you a space, unhurried, non-judgmental, entirely yours, to start listening to yourself again.
I work with clients online and face-to-face in Wilmslow, as well as out walking, if that feels more like your kind of space. There’s no obligation at a first session. Just a conversation.
If any of this has landed for you, I’d love to hear from you.
