The Cost of Self Abandonment

On self-abandonment, authentic desire, and the radical act of knowing what you want

If you were taught not to want, I understand why. Not wanting feels safe. It keeps rejection at arm’s length. It keeps us from needing anyone. That sounds like freedom, until I remembered that we are all woven together. That the world quite literally hums on interbeing. But here is what my teacher Robyn Dalzen taught me: the suffering doesn’t live in the wanting. It lives in the expectation that every want must be met. Desire itself is innocent. Desire is just you, alive.

And yet so many of us were taught that our wants were dangerous. Too much. Unwelcome. Selfish.

This is a message the world delivers to all of us: wanting more is a luxury, be quiet, be grateful for what you have. It lands even louder for parents, caregivers, and people from marginalized backgrounds, for whom wanting has often been framed as selfishness, as ingratitude, as unrealistic. And I want to be clear: I believe we can hold both. We can be deeply, genuinely appreciative of what we have and still allow our wanting to exist. Gratitude and desire are not opposites. They can live in the same body at the same time. But when we use gratitude as a reason to silence our wanting entirely, we are not practicing humility. We are practicing self-abandonment. It doesn’t disappear when we grow up either. It just gets quieter, more sophisticated. It shapes itself into something that looks like flexibility, like generosity, like being easy to love.

And self-abandonment is costly.

Here is what I have watched happen, in myself and in the people I work with, when desires go unacknowledged for long enough: resentment builds. Frustration becomes a low-grade hum. We start projecting onto the people around us, making them wrong for not figuring it out, for not just knowing. There is a little girl inside me who, when I have abandoned her long enough, starts screaming at me to speak up for her. When I don’t, those unresolved wants find their way out anyway, in ways that can feel hideous, even shameful. The want doesn’t disappear just because we stopped listening to it. It goes underground, like a bad pimple that takes forever to surface, just aching beneath the skin until it finally does.

The longer we go without listening, the scarier it becomes to come back. Numbness develops. The muscle of wanting begins to atrophy. Which is why this is a practice, not a revelation. With patient and repeated attention to our desires, we can renew an ability we were all born with. One that got silenced by our conditioning, our environments, the people and systems that taught us it wasn’t safe to desire things.

This showed up for me in a major way when I was younger, in my physical intimacy. I had lost so much connection to my own life force, to my own wanting, that when someone asked me what I wanted, I genuinely had no idea what to say. And I can see now how unfair it was to expect someone else to guess. To figure it out. No one could have found me there, because I wasn’t there myself.

Coming back to my wants has been one of the most expansive things I have ever done. It has allowed me to dream without a ceiling, without the weight of whether or not I will get there. I have found real joy in the wanting itself. As we say in Wheel of Consent work: it’s good to desire.

When we don’t know what we want, or we know and we silence it, we start outsourcing our self-knowledge to the people around us. We rely on others to know us better than we know ourselves. No one can do that. Relying on others to meet us when we haven’t first met ourselves is fruitless.

What this creates in relationship is a very specific kind of friction. One person is walking on eggshells. The other is quietly collecting data to prove a story they’re already telling themselves: my partner doesn’t know me. Which is a slippery slope to my partner doesn’t love me.

When we can't be known from the inside, we start measuring love from the outside. Did he do the dishes? Did she plan the date? Did they remember? Those gestures become the only proof we have that we matter to them, because the deeper evidence, feeling truly seen, isn't available to us.

I used to do this with my partner.

I would share wants that I believed were palatable. Wants I was pretty sure he’d say yes to. Wants that I believed wouldn’t make him uncomfortable, insecure, or cause him to pull away. I was curating myself in real time, making sure only the acceptable parts made it through. And I told myself this was consideration. Kindness, even. But I want to pause here and ask the question I had to ask myself: where did I get the message that my partner’s feelings were in my domain? His feelings are not my responsibility to manage. And frankly, the belief that I could alter his emotional experience by carefully curating my wants is a little pompous in its own right. His feelings belong to him. Mine belong to me.

What I understand now is that it was fear. Fear of rejection, dressed up as thoughtfulness. And in doing it, I was denying him the chance to actually know me. Every filtered want was a small withdrawal from the intimacy account. A little way I stayed safe by staying hidden.

Here’s what I’ve learned about what happens when two people are both doing this, when both partners are only putting their socially acceptable, digestible, pre-approved wants on the table: you end up negotiating from two already-compromised starting points. You land somewhere you’re both only mildly satisfied with. You call it compromise. But it’s not really compromise. It’s two people who never showed up fully, meeting in the middle of nowhere. Similar to what happens when no one decides to drive the car. You never get to the destination.

Contrast that with what happens when both people share their actual wants, unfiltered, unapologetic, even the ones that feel outrageous. Now you have something real to work with. A true negotiation. Two full humans in the room. And whatever you land on together carries the weight of real intimacy, because it was built from truth.

In my work with the Wheel of Consent, I facilitate a practice where I invite people into pairs. Before they speak, I ask them to check in with their body. To drop out of their head and feel for what their authentic, intrinsic want actually is in that moment. Then they take turns naming it. Not making a request. Just naming a want.

This distinction matters enormously.

A want is not a request.

A want carries no expectation of being met. It requires nothing from anyone else. My want is how I understand where to plant my feet next. My want is my life force. My want is mine. That distinction changed everything for me.

What I watch happen in this practice, every single time, is that people discover how unfamiliar this muscle is. How long it’s been dormant. How much noise they have to get through before they can hear what they actually want. And then, when they start to name it, something softens. Because finally, someone is listening. Even if that someone is just themselves. And here is what I want you to hear: even though it feels unfamiliar, it does come back. With some level of ease, actually. Because desire is the most natural thing in the world. It was never foreign to you. It was just buried.

When we are out of relationship with the body we inhabit, fused with the noise of our minds, we lose our capacity for true connection with other people, with ourselves, with the world around us. These are the conversations, with ourselves and eventually with others, that allow the body’s safety perception to soften. When we let people know who we truly are beneath the masks we’ve layered over a lifetime of unmet needs, something shifts. The body exhales. The nervous system gets the message: I am known here.

Sharing our wants, and eventually, when it feels right, making them into requests, is a multi-step process. It starts with practicing the muscle of self-knowing.

We cannot share what we want until we get quiet enough to hear it within our bodies.

This is a muscle. One that most of us are not practiced in. One that has likely been shut down by the culture we inhabit, by the families we were raised in, by the relationships that taught us it wasn’t safe to need things.

So here is your invitation.

Take ten minutes. Somewhere quiet if you can find it. And either say out loud or write down all of your wants in this present moment. Let them have range, the small and the enormous, the practical and the wild. And notice, gently, where you might resist revealing yourself to yourself. Where you edit. Where you minimize. Where you go quiet.

That noticing is the work.

I commend your courage. And I would love to know how it goes.

Want to go deeper with this?

This is exactly the kind of practice we explore in my Wheel of Consent Weekend Immersion, a full weekend diving into body literacy, authentic desire, and the art of giving and receiving. If this essay stirred something in you, I’d love to have you in the room. You can find all the details and grab your spot here: Wheel of Consent Weekend Immersion.