How To Do What You Want (And Know What That Is)

By Laura K. Connell.

Did you know you’re allowed to do what you want? If you struggle with codependency, you may spend most of your time doing things that other people want (or that you think they want). 

Your focus is so external that considering what you want feels unnatural. If someone asks you where you want to go for dinner, your first thought is to figure out what they want so you can give it to them.

Since codependency can be passed down in families, you may have developed this focus on others early in life. While other children were encouraged to play, explore, and develop their sense of self, you may have been taught the opposite.

You learned to downplay your needs, suppress your emotions, and do whatever it took to make your caregivers happy. Now as an adult you try to make everyone happy. That fear of rejection that started as a fear of death when you were a dependent child, still feels life-threatening even though you’re self-sufficient now.

Why you struggle to do what you want

Losing the love of a parent or primary caregiver is devastating to a child. When faced with the decision whether to please themselves or please the parent, they will always pick the latter. 

That’s because the need for attachment to the parent trumps all other desires. So, if you believe when you do what you want, you experience rejection and loss of love, you’ll abandon your needs and desires to maintain the relationship instead.

As you get older, this self-abandonment expands to encompass other relationships, including friends, romantic partners, and work colleagues. But relationships where your needs go unmet will never fulfil you.

Sometimes these needs are not met because you’ve chosen someone who is not inclined to meet them. Other times, you don’t know how to express your needs, wants, and desires because you have no idea what they are!

The way you maintained the crucial bond with your parent or caregiver kept you safe as a child. In this way, your youthful self-abandonment served as wise self-protection, and your inner child deserves your thanks.

But, as an adult, your extreme people pleasing becomes maladaptive. You don’t do what you want because 1) you don’t know what you want; and 2) you’re scared to death (literally) to ask for it.

How to begin to know what you want

So, how do you begin to discover what you want when you never had the luxury of finding out? Since the fear of rejection that stopped you from doing what you wanted lives in the body, start there.

Begin to turn your gaze toward yourself instead of constantly focusing on others’ needs. This may mean setting a timer throughout the day to stop and ask yourself what you’re feeling in your body.

Do this before you start asking for what you want. Simply pay attention to how your body feels and the emotions it’s carrying without judgment and with full acceptance.

Allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling without talking yourself out of it. It’s possible this is the first time you’ve given yourself permission to simply feel.

Chances are you tell yourself how you “should” feel or give yourself a pep talk on how much harder other people have it. Now, you get to comfort yourself through whatever you’re experiencing as you would a child.

This is the reparenting process: soothing the child inside you that never got the chance to be who it wanted to be and do what it wanted to do.

Learning to love the child inside you instead of rejecting it and pushing it away is the first step on the road to self-acceptance. And accepting yourself regardless of how you’re feeling will help you discover your needs and desires and how to do what you want without shame.

For help healing the inner child and reparenting yourself, get Laura’s course at a special discount: https://www.laurakconnell.com/c2c