Sara Sweat, MA – Founder, Monarch
What happens to you when somebody asks what you want?
I know it’s probably been awhile, so give yourself a minute. But, think back to the last time someone asked you about you. Not when they were asking what needed to get done, or what would help, or what the group should do about dinner. When they were asking about you.
Did you mind go completely blank? Like, a frazzled cartoon robot “does not compute”.
You said something, right? When someone asked what you wanted? You always say something, because a silence as long as you’d need gets a little weird and you basically have a Ph.D. in avoiding other people’s discomfort.
Did you answer with “the list”?
Well, my partner really needs me to get on top of the house stuff, and my daughter’s got this thing in October, and work needs me to figure out the reorg before Q4, so I’m trying to get that wrapped up while I’m at my mom’s doctor appointment.
The “list” is just a dump of everything that’s important to everyone else – that’s currently occupying space in your brain.
But, maybe you’re not a list person. Maybe you were feeling particularly honest the day someone asked you what you want and you dug a little deeper in your response.
What I want is a little help.
I want to stop feeling so tired all the time.
I want someone else to do something without me having to ask them to do it.
I want to feel like there’s room for me in my own life.
I hear sentences like these every single week, from brilliant, high capacity women who run companies or households or entire extended families without dropping a single important ball.
They’re asking for a little relief. Less pressure. A little less pain. They’re not telling me what they want – just less of what they don’t. As if anyone has ever gotten to the end of their life and said the thing they loved most about it was the part where it briefly stopped hurting.
All these statements are true. But, they’re not actually answering the question being asked.
What do you want?
We respond with literally anything else. Because, at least for most of us, what we want is information we simply do not have.
What Do You Want?
There’s a 1999 romantic comedy called Runaway Bride that accidentally contains the most accurate diagnosis of this pattern I’ve ever seen committed to film.
Julia Roberts plays Maggie Carpenter, a woman who has left three different men standing at three different altars. Richard Gere plays a reporter, named Ike Graham, who goes digging to find out why. He finds an unusual pattern in her jilted bridegroom’s answers to one simple question.
How does she like her eggs?
Guy #1 says scrambled, same as him. The second guy she ghosted says fried – just like he likes them. Number 3 says poached, and by then you know why. But, Ike actually says it to her face.
“You’re so lost, you don’t even know what kind of eggs you like.”
Ouch. When I saw that scene play out for the first time, it hit a little too close for comfort.
You Learned To Read The Room Instead
The short version of my story is that when I was young, there was a lot of disruption in my home. My father died, my mother fell into addiction, and my brother followed suit. My home was functional enough that no one ever really knew how bad it was. And, I got really good at keeping all of our heads above water – because someone had to and no one else could.
I became extraordinary at reading other people. At taking the temperature of the room. At anticipating risk and putting a plan in place to mitigate it.
Maybe your background was less severe. Maybe there weren’t obvious traumas, addiction, or unhealthy patterns in your home. But, somewhere, you picked up the message that what was going on with everyone else – was way more important that whatever was going on with you.
So, you learned to read their wants and needs instead of your own.
That skill has a lot of really practical applications. People love when someone knows what they want and gives it to them. Companies hire and promote those people. Partners and friends are immensely grateful for the ones who know how to show up when things are hard. And, kids, well – they already know the world revolves around them. Your ability to anticipate their needs and deliver just confirms it.
There is actually nothing wrong with having the superpowers that you have. They’ve probably been a very helpful adaptation in your life.
But, you’ve missed the step where you were supposed to put those superpowers to work for yourself.
You’re absent the foundation of self knowledge, self acceptance, and self understanding that everyone else seems to have picked up along the way.
In other words, you missed the part where you figure out what kind of eggs you like. And, skipping steps leaves gaps.
The Woman Who Rocked A Seven Year Old
Dr. Bruce Perry is the psychiatrist that’s called in for the worst child abuse and neglect cases there are. The cases that make the news like the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas and many others you’ll never hear about that would break your heart.
One of those stories, about a boy who was literally raised as a dog, is the title character of one of the books on my required reading list in grad school.
The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, tells the stories of dozens of extreme cases of abuse and neglect and its impact on the neurodevelopment of the children involved. In one story, he talks about a foster mother he calls Mama P.
Mama P. brought Dr. Perry a seven year old named Robert. By then Robert had been through six foster homes, three shelters, three hospitalizations, and had collected roughly a dozen diagnoses, which is what happens to kids when the adults responsible for them have run out of ideas to help.
Perry, being a young and very confident doctor, recommended medication.
Mama P. folded her arms and said, “You will not use drugs on my baby.”
So he asked her what she would do instead.
“I just hold him and rock him,” she said. “I just love him.”
When he woke up frightened at night she put him in her bed and rubbed his back and sang a little until he fell asleep. When he came apart during the day she stopped whatever she was doing, pulled him into a rocking chair, and rocked him like an infant.
Perry asked whether it frustrated her, a seven year old acting like a baby.
“Do you get angry with a baby when that baby fusses?” she said. “No. That is what babies do.”
“They are all my babies. It’s just that Robert has been a baby for seven years.”
The clinic staff used to watch her in the waiting room, rocking children far too big to be rocked, and worry that she was infantilizing them. That treating them like babies would stunt their maturity. But, the results she got with her kids far outpaced their own.
Now, the research backs her up. Mama P’s intervention was just about a decade ahead of everyone else.
What The Rocking Was Doing
Rocking is neurological construction work.
We intuitively rock babies at roughly eighty beats per minute, which is about the resting heart rate of an adult. It’s patterned. It’s repetitive and rhythmic. And done ten thousand times it teaches an infant brain one specific lesson.
I am allowed to have needs and can expect those needs to be met.
Robert never got that. He was too busy surviving to do the developmental work of being a baby, so the wiring never went in. Mama P. went back to the developmental age where it had gone missing and put it back. And, Robert thrived as a result.
You Missed A Step, Too
Your childhood was probably nothing like Robert’s and your gap is nowhere near as severe. But the mechanism you missed is just as fundamental.
There is a stretch of your development where you were supposed to find out who you are. What you like. What you value. What fuels you and flattens you and what you’d choose to do if nobody else got a vote. Not what soothes you or what calms your nervous system down – but what you would actually want – if you could ask for more than regulation and peace.
You spent that stretch of developmental time navigating challenge. Or surviving. Or simply being a person whose needs ranked below everyone else’s.
So the part of you that knows what you want is underdeveloped. You never got the reps required to create a strong sense of self that knows what it needs and expects those needs to be met.
The answer to rewiring what you missed isn’t some enormous life change, years of therapy, or a 5 week retreat to Portugal where you learn how to make ceramics…thought that last one does sound pretty sweet.
There are no AI prompts or journaling questions that will unlock your purpose and get you in touch with the part of you, you missed. Because the real work of rocking yourself back to life is almost embarrassingly small.
You just have to get curious and make room.
Claiming Your Identity
At Monarch, this is where we start. It’s the first part of a three step process designed to give you back – you.
Claim is where we reintroduce you to yourself.
We figure out what you value and how those values show up. We figure out matters to you when nobody is watching and when there’s no one you can disappoint. We create a sandbox, where you get to choose your life as if every single choice were available to you and free.
We unlock what lights you up, what drains you, and what you have been calling a preference but which is really just a habit you inherited from somebody else.
We rebuild preference, desire, and voice, just like you would have – had you been given the chance.
We lay the foundation of who you are so you can build the foundation of your life to support it.
Right now, you feel scattered. Stretched thin, pulled in nine different directions, flitting from one urgent thing to the next. Because when you don’t know what you want, everyone else’s priorities become the default, because theirs are the only ones anybody has stated out loud.
Get grounded in yourself and everything shifts. Life is still gonna life. People still need things. The ground still shakes, because the ground always shakes. But you stay steady throughout it, because you know who you are and what matters most. And, that can’t be disrupted anymore.
Where To Start This Week
Everything is easier with people cheering you on. That’s why Monarch exists. To offer you the container and community you need to do this work. But, if coaching isn’t possible right away, there are some things you can do to begin this process on your own.
Start small. Maybe it’s the eggs, honestly. Or, the the coffee order you actually like. The playlist you want to hear when you’re driving in your own car. Start where being wrong costs nothing and make it fun to explore your options. Give yourself the time to figure out what you actually like and then start doing it unapologetically – your way.
Sometimes pause. When someone asks you a question, there’s a half second before you answer where you instinctively check the room. You’re trying to figure out what the “right” answer is. What everyone expects you to say. Pause. It’s gonna feel like 7 years the first time you do it, but it’s probably like 15 seconds. Take the extra time to consciously trade the “right” answer for your own.
Sometimes speak. Other times, you know what you want to say, but your desire avoid the discomfort of others moderates your thoughts. Try speaking your first instinct out loud, before the committee in your head revises it into something more convenient for everybody else. PS – pick one grown up human to try this with first & let them know what you’re doing before you do.
Get together. Mama P’s rocking worked, because the kids in her care trusted her. They were in it together – in relationship. I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you, but the journey to self discovery does not work as a solo project in your journal at eleven o’clock at night. It needs witnesses and mirrors and a whole lot of support. So, grab your people and start doing it together.
Get bored. This is a practice. And, just like lifting weights or learning to play the piano, the more you practice, the better you’ll get. You’ve got to put in the reps. Keep at it. Keep learning about yourself. Not to figure out what’s wrong with you – because, spoiler alert – nothing is. But, to keep developing, changing, and giving yourself the space to exist.
Embrace the Imperfection
There are still rooms where I cannot locate what I want. I’ve been doing this work for years and I still occasionally catch myself ordering the first thing I noticed on the menu because it’s just freaking easier than figuring out what I actually want.
But, it’s no longer the norm. More often than not, when people ask me what I want – I can tell them. Without apologizing or explaining or taking 15 hours to figure it out.
I may need a beat longer than someone who grew up with their foundation of self intact. But, I have one now and it’s pretty awesome and secure.
At the end of Runaway Bride, Maggie finally figures what kind of eggs she likes. She sits down by herself in the kitchen and cooks every kind of egg there is. She tastes them one by one and decides.
“Benedict. I love Eggs Benedict. I hate all the other kinds of eggs.”
Nobody told her what she liked. That’s not information anyone else could ever have. She always had the ability to know what she wanted. She just had to make the time to sit down and figure it out.
You can too, Monarch.
What do you want?
Claiming Your Identity is where every Monarch engagement begins, and it’s the part nobody else will do with you. If you read this and realized you genuinely don’t know what you want, stop treating that like a problem. That’s just a starting place.
Come talk to me, subscribe to stay with me, or get on the waitlist for our group coaching experience, Kaleidoscope. You don’t have to do this alone.
