Resurrect your desires...
Wanting – desiring – yearning… and facing the potential for rejection, or not getting those desires met, is excruciatingly vulnerable.
Harder in many ways, than convincing yourself that your desires don’t matter or don’t exist.
It’s enough to have many otherwise capable, smart women close down the shutters and abandon their heart’s desires (read: abandon themselves). 🥀
When I met Anastasia, she was on her second marriage and had a history of evidence for why her needs and desires didn’t matter to the world.
Her family of origin was difficult and complex, and her first marriage was the same.
Ana ran a successful dental practice, but spent a lot of her life – both personally and professionally – plagued with anxiety, self doubt and resentment.
Somewhere along the way, the parts of her that wanted – that needed – had been exiled. It was too hard to keep feeling that desire and have it unmet.
So a part of her that wanted to be seen, supported, held and loved was wandering around what I call The Forgotten Vale.
This survival strategy is more common than you might think in smart, successful women who have been hurt in the past and haven’t known how to be with that hurt.
Over time, this leaves these women feeling a bit like a vacant house. Fully furnished, windows open. Breeze gently swaying the curtains that no one is there to witness.
Going through the motions of caring for the family, the home, the career, but not really living.
Step by step, Anastasia was able to resurrect and reclaim her desires.
It wasn’t a big, flashy breakthrough or aha moment – it was a slow, deep and patient process of finally meeting the pain she’d been hiding from, learning to feel herself again and discovering in big and small ways what she truly wanted.
Then, to learn to be in approval of those desires!
To say yes to herself enough that she could vulnerably, imperfectly, bring those desires into her marriage and other relationships.
She stopped making herself small. She held her desires and needs as good, worthy and worth standing for.
The anxiety and self doubt that had been her constant companions faded.
Her exiled desires and needs had returned from The Forgotten Vale, and she blossomed!
If you’re a woman who has left some deep hard to describe part of yourself behind, have compassion for yourself – this is such a tender pattern, but one that arose out of a need to adapt and survive.
There is a way back.
The Forgotten Vale is one of six survival mode patterns I see driven women trapped in.
Discover your dominant survival pattern – and what to do about it – with my new free diagnostic, The Survival Mode Decoder for High-Functioning Women.
The decoder is a custom GPT trained in my material – you need to be signed into your chatGPT account to use it.
