“Am I Being Selfish?” — And Other Questions That Shut Us Down Before We Begin
There’s a moment I see often in therapy and group work — someone speaks aloud something they want. A change. A shift. A desire. Sometimes it seems small: “I want a weekend to myself.” Sometimes it big, life altering stuff like: “I want to leave this job,” or “I think I want more from life than this.”
And then, almost without pause, come the qualifiers:
“But am I just being selfish?”
“Is this immature?”
“Am I having a midlife crisis?”
These are what I’ve come to think of as frameworks for inaction — internal scripts that rise up as soon as we start to name the things we long for, and start to understand the things we would have to change in order to make them happen. The people we would upset. The expectations we would stop meeting.
They don’t sound like ‘no’ at first. They sound like reflection. They sound responsible. Reasonable. However I think that their effect is clear: they make us bury ourselves. They shut the door before we’ve even had a proper look at what’s on the other side.
I run a group called ‘Who Am I Now’ on an online therapy platform. One participant shared their inner conflict: they felt drawn to a new way of living, a new version of themselves, and they almost immediately found themselves spiralling into self-doubt. “Maybe I’m being unrealistic,” they said. “Maybe this is selfish.”
I offered a gentle reframing: What if the problem isn’t the desire, but the belief that wanting something more is a moral failing? What’s happening that you are moving so quickly to rejecting what you want? How did you learn to shut down your desires so quickly?
Somewhere along the way, many of us learn that to want something for ourselves is to take something from someone else. That joy has to be justified. That change must be pre-approved by everyone it might affect — and even then, only if it doesn’t inconvenience them too much.
No wonder we stay stuck.
Calling it selfish to name what we want is one of the most effective ways to keep ourselves quiet. It doesn’t just delay change — it delegitimises our inner world. And over time, we can become strangers to our own needs. Big questions like “What do I actually want?” and “What am I getting out of this?” become avoided and crowded out by the roles we fulfill and the expectations we put on ourselves to be a certain way - and inner conflict, tension and distress build.
So what might it look like to take our desires seriously?
I don’t think that means acting on every impulse. It doesn’t mean blowing up our lives. It just means giving ourselves a chance to be honest. To say: “This matters to me.” To sit with a want without shaming it. To trust that sometimes our longings aren’t flaws — they’re clues. When a desire is overlooked and rationalised SO quickly after being expressed, it makes me think “Oh, what are we seeking to avoid here?”
Of course, we live in complex worlds. We have responsibilities, relationships, communities we care about. But we also matter. And the more we learn to listen to ourselves without interrogation, the more likely we are to live lives that feel like our own.