Our Deepest Desires
An interview with Charlotte Fox Weber
In today’s edition, I interview Charlotte Fox Weber, psychotherapist and author of the new book, Tell me What You Want. Charlotte’s work looks at what we really, truly want — the stuff we don’t always feel the courage to say aloud, or may not even know we are pining for. Below are excerpts from our conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
What drew you to psychotherapy?
At first, I thought [becoming a therapist] was just about empathy and wanting to help people, but I’ve come to realize it’s also wanting to find out about the more difficult aspects of ourselves. Therapy is a place where radical candor is possible, where you can be uncensored, and there’s something really liberating about it. It took me a while to realize the ways that I was hiding through other people’s stories. It’s supposed to be about the client more than the therapist, but as therapists, it’s also easier to hide than we realize while asking people to reveal themselves.
There’s this idea that therapists tend to work on the areas that they themselves are most personally connected to, or even need to work on themselves. In your latest work, you’ve focused on exploring our deepest desires. Tell me about your own connection to this work.
I mean, the whole wounded healer thing is definitely at play. For me, I’ve been disappointed — but also relieved — to realize that desires are not entirely fulfilled. When I began training as a psychotherapist, I remember saying to a supervisor, who was a very strict, old-school psychoanalyst, that I found my work with someone very fulfilling. And he said, ‘this work is not fulfilling. Fulfillment is not what this is about.’ I disagreed with him for years. Now I’ve reconsidered his point. I don’t totally agree — I think it can be incredibly fulfilling — but I don’t think fulfillment is ever complete. One of the realizations from writing this book is that desire is never satisfied and satisfaction is very fleeting.
There’s something unsettling about the idea that satisfaction is fleeting — that even if we fulfill our desires, we won’t feel completely satisfied.
Totally. I think that a lot of us, even if there’s cynicism and despair, yearn for some utopia where desires come to fruition — our secret, grand plans of life becoming extraordinary. It’s disappointing. It’s also the realization of ordinary life — that it’s not all utterly spectacular and fantasy-based. It’s just what it is to be human.
You write that “understanding our desires gives us back to ourselves and is a springboard for growth.” What do you mean by that?
All of the desires have in common that there’s some kind of mark of what it means to be each one of us. Even if we have things in common with other people, it’s our way of interpreting experience. Life becomes more interesting, and also more personal, when we allow ourselves to think about [our] desires rather than just following a script.
It’s also energizing to feel desire. When you find yourself just obeying “shoulds” — when your choice for doing pretty much anything is about obligation and duty rather than want — it’s a half-life.
Some of us know exactly what’s on our list of ‘shoulds’ versus ‘wants.’ But some of us might have a harder time distinguishing obligation from actual desire. Maybe we’ve fallen into a routine and we’ve never stopped to think about it, or maybe it’s a self-protective measure — there’s a reason we’re not interrogating it in that way. How can we begin to uncover our desires?
We have been suspicious and ambivalent about desire since Adam and Eve, because it’s kind of the story of our survival, but also the story of what gets us in trouble. We are not used to talking about desire or even thinking about it. Paying attention to it really begins with curiosity — just asking yourself the question, what is it that you want from a situation? What is it that you want from your life? For some people, it’s really daunting and paralyzing to think about what they want from life — it’s too big and boundless a question. Playing with opposites [can help], like what is something that frustrates you immensely in your life? What is something that you’re deprived of? What is something that you’re frightened of? These are invitations to think about a hidden desire. Just being interested and allowing yourself to look and consider opens up awareness.
I’m picturing someone gently drawing back a curtain and slowly peeking around it to see what’s beyond. On the one hand, we could discover something magical. But what happens if we peel back that curtain and don’t like what we see, or are unsure what to do with it?
There’s going to be a really ghastly side in everyone’s personality and character. When you can allow that there’s a not-nice side, but you also make choices about how you behave and how you choose to respond, you can permit the darker sides and the difficult sides, and you can be interested rather than judgmental. There’s something deeply consoling and relaxing about leaning into the range of different shades of gray.
What is the connection between regret and desire?
We do a lot of pretending around regret. We’re supposed to learn a great deal from the wisdom of dying people about how to live a life to its fullest and have no regrets — as though that is possible. That is the utopia that simply doesn’t exist. Because if you’re living at all, you’re going to make mistakes, and you’re going to do something regrettable or you will lack something, or you will miss out on something. How could you not? When we lean into the flaws of life and the incompleteness of life, we don’t have to be intimidated by regret. We can be kinder to ourselves about the fact that it’s just part of life’s limitations. It’s not something we can overcome.
So maybe the flaws and all of the ups and downs are part of this process. Maybe there is not an end-all be-all ideal. Is that how we should think about our desires?
Yes, it’s not all or nothing. Very often we choose to believe in our fantasies at the expense of real experience. We often have this sense of ‘I will be powerful,’ or ‘I will be a creative genius.’ We have these precious longings and visions of what we want from life. But we put it off for some other time when we’ll get it right, especially for perfectionists, as though there will be a kind of “one day” moment when you can live properly. We come up with these very hyperbolic versions [of ourselves and of our lives], and then it’s so otherworldly that it’s really difficult to have life match fantasy. If we plan on getting stuff wrong and we experiment and we engage with fresh experience, then it’s less defined by one specific moment, and it’s less absolute.
It can be comforting to live in that fantasy because we’re protected from failure. Part of what I’m hearing you say is there’s a need for us to be bolder, to say ‘Well, let’s just go out and see what happens,’ and if it doesn’t work out we’ll try something else, and at least we’ve had that experience.
Yes. Experiment and get it wrong, but also know that you can’t get it absolutely right. There’s no such thing. Living in the past and being deeply nostalgic is another way of prioritizing fantasy over reality, because even if it’s torturous and depriving and obsessive, it’s still risk averse. Letting go and moving on can be a struggle because even if it’s misery, it’s the story you know.
One of the things I’ve found in my research for this book is that enjoyment is weirdly hard for a lot of us. It can actually feel more vulnerable than misery — especially an agitated, bothered type of misery — because it’s more predictable to be frustrated by an irritating colleague than to take the chance of actually immersing yourself in feeling pleasure. As much as we think we want to be happy and enjoy ourselves, we also fear it.
One of my areas of interest is rest, and another is listening. Many therapists suffer from compassion fatigue — you’re spending a lot of time hearing people’s deepest desires, what they’re grappling with, and witnessing potentially big aha moments, and it can be a lot to receive all of those stories, feelings, and emotions. How do you ensure that you’re getting the rest and care that you need?
Self-compassion is probably the best thing I’ve done for myself. When I truly am kind to myself, even in the internal dialogues that go on, and not feel the need to get everything right.
Have an expert or author you’d like to see featured? Drop a comment with suggestions.
💌 As always, if you’re enjoying my work, please share it with others who may enjoy it, too. Thanks for being here and for sharing the love. 💌
