What You're Supposed to Want

I've spent years sitting across from people who arrive at a session with the same sentence, dressed up a thousand different ways: "something feels wrong with me."

And almost every time, once we start untangling that sentence, we don't find anything broken. We find a list. A very long list of things they're "supposed to" feel, want, enjoy, desire, tolerate, endure, avoid. You're supposed to want sex three times a week. You're supposed to be comfortable in your body. You're supposed to be over that thing that happened to you by now. You're supposed to enjoy this in a certain way, with a certain intensity, in a certain order.

Nobody asked us if we actually wanted that list. We just inherited it.

And here's what I've learned, after years of walking alongside people's processes: most people don't suffer because of who they actually are or what they actually want. They suffer from the distance between that and what they think they're "supposed" to be.

That distance has a name: expectation. And it's exhausting. It's the background noise that keeps us from hearing what we actually feel, because we're too busy measuring ourselves against a standard we never even chose.

Where does this come from?

It doesn't come out of nowhere. It's built starting in childhood in what we saw, in what got rewarded, in what got punished, quietly or loudly. And it keeps getting reinforced later by partners, social media, culture, this idea of "normal" that nobody defines but everyone feels pressure to meet.

Working through this isn't about "fixing" anyone. There's nothing broken to fix. It's more about taking responsibility: recognizing the pattern, understanding where it came from, and deciding consciously, not on autopilot what actually belongs to you and what was just handed to you.

Why does this weigh so heavily around pleasure specifically?

Because that might be the one place where we carry the most borrowed expectations of all. About gender. About partnership. About what desire, the body, intimacy are "supposed" to feel like. And when pleasure gets lived from a place of "supposed to" instead of "I am" or "I want," it stops being pleasure. It becomes just another task to complete, another test to pass.

What I care about in sessions, in this space, in everything I'll be sharing here is exactly this: helping you put down the borrowed list and come back to what's actually yours. Not to arrive at some "correct" version of yourself. Just to arrive, simply, at you.

If any of this resonates, if you've spent time measuring yourself against something you never actually chose this is where we'll keep talking about it. No magic formulas, no checklist of what you're "supposed" to do differently.

Just the honest conversation you deserve to have with yourself.