Most women I know are not confused about what they want. They know. They’ve known for years.
The career pivot. The financial freedom. The relationship that actually feels good. The body you want to live in. The version of yourself who doesn’t need wine at the end of the day.
You meant it. You weren’t lying. And yet.
I think about this with my own life sometimes. I was twenty years old when I saw a woman running and had a quiet, wordless thought: I want to do that. No plan, no journaling, no affirmations. Just something in me pointing toward something in her and saying yes. Twenty-six years later, I’m still running.
In my early thirties, I had the same kind of knowing about alcohol. I didn’t want it in my life anymore. That one took time and real work, but it happened. It became true.
And then there’s the financial freedom. The version of my forties where work was a choice. I wanted that too. Said it just as clearly. And yet, I’ll be honest with you, this bish does not have a choice.
So what is actually going on?
Because the wanting felt the same. It always felt like wanting.
The Part That Positive Thinking Misses
Most of us, when we want something we’re not getting, reach for the same tools. We journal. We set intentions. We do the affirmations. We try to think more positively and visualize the outcome.
And there’s nothing wrong with any of that, as a starting point.
Emmet Fox wrote that real change happens at the level of the heart, not the intellect. That prayer isn’t about forcing outcomes but about creating a pause, a place to bring what you want without rushing to make it happen through sheer will. I believe that. The pause matters. The turning inward matters. And I can’t recommend his book The Sermon on the Mount enough if this is territory you want to explore.
But I also think we’re contending with something that positive thinking and even prayer don’t fully account for.
Carolyn Elliott captures it this way in Existential Kink: focusing only on the light is like staring up at the sun without noticing you’re standing in something that smells terrible. You spray affirmations over it like perfume. The smell doesn’t go away. And meanwhile, shadow work is looking down at all that shit so you can clean it up, or even compost it into a lush garden.
Here’s what Elliott says that stops most women cold: having is evidence of wanting.
The first time I sat with that I got defensive. Because I did want it. I genuinely, consciously wanted it. And the idea that some hidden part of me was working against that felt like one more way to blame myself for something that already hurt.
But that’s not what she means.
Jung called this the shadow: the parts of ourselves we’ve pushed underground because they didn’t fit the life we were performing. The part that doesn’t believe she deserves it. The part that’s actually terrified of having what she says she wants.
It’s not a character flaw. It’s not weakness. It’s just that some part of you learned, somewhere along the way, what was safe, what was allowed, what would happen if you actually got the thing.
For a long time, I interpreted this internal tension as inconsistency. As a lack of discipline. As evidence that if I really wanted something, I would have made it happen by now. But over time I began to notice that the part of me resisting certain changes didn’t feel lazy or self-sabotaging. It felt protective. Protective of familiar identities. Protective of the ways I had learned to navigate the world, even when those ways no longer fully fit.
When I look at the financial freedom I keep not quite reaching, I have to be honest with myself. There might be a part of me that knows what having it would require. The visibility. The claiming of space. The loss of the story that’s kept me striving but never arriving. Striving feels purposeful. Having means something else is asked of you.
That’s a shadow. And it’s been running the show from somewhere I wasn’t looking.
Three Brains, Three Agendas
To understand why this happens, it helps to understand what you’re actually working with.
You don’t have one brain. You have three, and they don’t always agree.
Your neocortex is the thinking brain. The one reading this right now. The one that sets goals, makes plans, and says I want to change. This is where your conscious intentions live.
Your limbic system is your emotional brain. It holds memory, attachment, and the deeply felt sense of what feels safe or threatening. It doesn’t respond to logic. It responds to feeling.
And your reptilian brain, your survival brain, is running patterns so old and so automatic that you barely notice them. Its only job is to keep you alive, and it defines alive as familiar. Change, even change you consciously want, can register here as threat.
So when a woman says I want to change (the drinking, the marriage, the career, the financial picture) that's her neocortex speaking. Her conscious mind. And she means it completely.
But her limbic system is holding a different kind of memory. What happened the last time she tried. What it cost her. What she had to feel when the thing she reached for didn’t work out.
And her survival brain is just doing what survival brains do. Keeping things familiar. Keeping things known. Treating the life she already has, even the parts she hates, as safer than the life she doesn’t yet.
Three brains. Three agendas. And willpower, which only lives in the neocortex, is outnumbered two to one.
This is why white-knuckling doesn’t work for anything. Not for sobriety, not for financial change, not for leaving the marriage, not for finally building the thing you’ve been circling for years. It’s not a discipline problem. It’s a competing agendas problem.
So What Do You Actually Do With This?
You start by getting curious rather than critical.
Instead of asking why can’t I just do the thing I said I wanted, which is a question that always leads back to shame, you ask something softer; What might I be getting from not having this? And you hold that question with genuine openness, not as an accusation.
It becomes less a question of why can’t I make myself do this and more a question of what might this part of me be trying to keep safe. And that question changes everything. It moves the conversation out of shame and into curiosity.
"Hold your shadow in front of you. It can only take you down from behind.”
For years, I avoided looking at certain parts of myself because I was afraid of what I might see. The woman who had made choices she regretted. Who had numbed out instead of speaking up. Who had sought relief in ways that didn’t ultimately serve her.
When I finally began to sit with those parts, not to excuse them, but to understand them, something unexpected happened.
I began to see that those versions of me were not trying to ruin my life. They were trying, in imperfect ways, to protect me. To cope. To feel something. To access parts of myself that had nowhere else to go at the time.
And then, slowly, something I did not see coming: I started loving the hell out of her.
Because she was trying. In all the wrong ways, with all the wrong tools, but she was trying to survive something. To feel something. To access parts of herself that had nowhere else to go.
When I brought some loving light to that darkness, it wasn’t as dark.
That part of me isn’t gone. I’m not fixed. She’s still in me, she’s just not running the show from a place I can’t see anymore. She’s integrated. And because of that, I feel more whole than I ever did when I was busy pretending she didn’t exist. And because I’m not living in shame anymore, because I’m coming from a place of self love instead, I’m not the least bit inclined to be dishonest with myself or with anyone else.
That’s what Jung was pointing at. Not the elimination of the shadow, but the integration of it.
What I keep coming back to is this: the things we say we want and keep not getting are often pointing at exactly this. Not a strategy problem. Not a timing problem. A shadow problem. Some part of us that learned, a long time ago, that wanting too much was dangerous. That being too visible was dangerous. That having the thing would require becoming someone we don’t yet know how to be.
You don’t have to love every part of yourself immediately. That’s not how it works and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
But you can start by looking. Holding it out in front of you where it can’t come at you sideways. Getting curious about why she keeps stopping just short of the thing. About what she might be protecting you from. About what she learned, and when, and whether it still needs to be true.
She wasn’t trying to sabotage you.
She was trying to keep you safe with the only map she had.
Understanding that is where the real work begins. Not the willpower. Not the vision board. Not the affirmations sprayed over something that needs composting.
The looking.
