You Don't Know What You Want Anymore, And It's Not Because You're Empty

There's a moment I hear about constantly from women healers over fifty. It happens in the kitchen, usually. Late afternoon. The house is briefly quiet, the pager is briefly silent, and for once nobody needs anything.

And she asks herself a simple question: What do I actually want right now?

Nothing comes back.

Not what does my family need. Not what does my caseload need. Not what would make things easier for everyone else. Just — what do I want? And the answer is static. A blank. A strange, hollow silence where a self used to be.

If that's you, sweet soul, I want you to hear something before you spend one more minute calling it a personal failing: that silence is not emptiness. It is not who you've become. It is a degraded signal — a measurable, documented, neurological consequence of decades of self-override. And degraded signals can be recovered.

How the Disappearing Happens

You have been disappearing inside your own life, and everyone around you has been calling it strength.

They called it resilience when you absorbed what should have been addressed. They called it professionalism when you smiled through something that deserved your anger. They called it being a team player when you said yes while your whole body screamed no. And somewhere along the way — so gradually neither of us could name the date — you started believing that being needed was safer than being honest.

That is not a character flaw. That is a survival strategy. A brilliant, effective, deeply costly one that your nervous system built in response to environments that consistently rewarded your disappearance and penalized your truth.

And let's name the trainer, because vague villains don't get held accountable. The healthcare system — the hospitals, the agencies, the schools, the hospice organizations — didn't just take your energy. It took your permission to have needs of your own. It extracted your labor and called the extraction a calling. It made self-sacrifice the price of belonging, and then it promoted the women who paid it most quietly.

We love the saying that women can't pour from an empty cup. But that's not what actually happens. What happens is the woman becomes the empty cup — the container everyone else drinks from, while nobody, including her, remembers to ask what she was holding for herself.

The Science of the Silence

Here's what nobody tells women healers about the physiology of chronic self-override.

Dr. Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, spent decades documenting what he called the somatic marker hypothesis: the discovery that the body registers emotional truth well before the conscious mind allows itself to acknowledge it. Your body knows you're angry before you permit yourself the word. Your body knows the boundary was crossed while your brain is still drafting the diplomatic response that will smooth it all over.

More striking still, Damasio found that these body signals aren't decoration on top of decision-making — they are decision-making. People who lost access to their somatic markers didn't become more rational. They became unable to choose. Unable to prefer. Unable to want.

Read that again: the capacity to want is not a mood. It is a neurological function, and it runs on body signal.

The channel carrying that signal is called interoception — your nervous system's ability to sense and accurately read your internal states. Hunger, tension, desire, grief, resentment. These aren't vague feelings; they're transmissions routed through a brain region called the insular cortex, generated faithfully your entire life.

And here's the devastating part. Dr. Sarah Garfinkel at University College London, whose research examines interoceptive accuracy under chronic stress, has documented that prolonged stress and self-suppression progressively degrade that signal. When you spend years overriding what your body tells you — smiling through the anger, swallowing the want — your brain literally turns down the volume on your own internal channel. The insular cortex learns those signals won't be acted on, so it stops prioritizing them.

The body begins speaking what the mouth refuses to say. And when the override becomes automatic, the body eventually goes quiet too. Not because nothing is happening inside you — but because the signal has been ignored so many times your nervous system stopped sending it to the surface.

That is why so many brilliant, accomplished women healers tell me: I don't know what I feel anymore. I don't know what I want. I don't know who I am when I'm not taking care of someone.

That's not emptiness. That's a muted signal. And muted is recoverable.

Where Wanting Lives — and Where It Went

In chakra psychology, chronic self-erasure dismantles two centers first, and they work as a pair.

The sacral center, low in the belly, governs authentic desire, identity, and the fundamental capacity to want — not need, want. In women trained to need nothing for themselves, that energy doesn't disappear. It goes underground, becoming what I call Sacred Resentment: unspoken truth collecting interest in the body because it had nowhere else to go.

The throat center governs truth-telling and voice — not the diplomatic version, the actual embodied truth. And neurologically, these two are one circuit: the sacral center is the felt signal of wanting; the throat is the expression pathway that tells the brain the signal matters. A want that is chronically felt but never voiced keeps the volume dial turning down. A want that finds voice — even one sentence, spoken aloud to an empty room — closes the loop. The system learns: her signals get received now. Send more.

The Want Recovery Ritual

Ten minutes. Three steps. Here's the way back.

One — the Sacred Resentment Scan. Sit with both feet on the floor and place one hand flat below your navel. Ask: Where in my body have I been silent this week? Don't think — feel. A tight jaw, a heavy chest, heat in the throat. Just locate it and name it silently. That's your truth living in your tissue.

Two — the Want Recovery. Hand still on your lower belly, ask slowly: What do I actually want right now? Not what you should want or could justify. Let the answer be small — silence, four unaccountable hours, a cry nobody needs you to recover from quickly. Whatever surfaces, let it be true. Don't edit it into something more palatable.

Three — the Throat Liberation. Hands in your lap, spine tall. Speak one true sentence aloud that begins with I. "I have been silent about something that deserved my voice." "I am tired of disappearing and calling it strength." Out loud is non-negotiable — internal narrative is the override mechanism, and your own voice is the activation. Feel the difference between the sentence in your mind and the sentence in the air.

That difference is your signal coming back online.

She's Been Waiting

You are not broken, friend. You are muted. And the woman underneath the decades of usefulness — the one with preferences and desires and a voice — has been waiting patiently for one person to acknowledge she exists.

You.

If you want to know what chronic stress has been storing in your body, take the Somatic Signatures Quiz at www.juliemerrimanphd.com/quiz. And if you're ready for twelve weeks of structured, neuroscience-grounded reclamation, my book In Pursuit of Soul Joy - link in menu above.

Go recover your want this week, sweet soul. She has been patient. She is ready.