On Longing and What Is Not Yet Ours

Life, at its core, is governed by a principle of taking in what is needed so that we can grow and continue to develop. This means that, in regard to what helps us grow, we must learn to adapt or redirect ourselves toward what allows us not only to survive, but to emotionally flourish. The question is not simply how to keep living, but what we need in order to feel more emotionally connected to ourselves in ways that feel meaningful as our lives unfold.

As life progresses, however, discovering what helps us feel more alive is not always straightforward. Unlike other living beings, we are not preprogrammed to know what will help our lives feel fuller and more meaningful. We have to learn this over time, often through years of trial and error, and even then what we find ourselves longing for is not always easy to make sense of.

What helps one person flourish may not help another, a theme I explore more fully in my piece on the Wellbeing Equation, where I describe how each of us must discover what uniquely supports our wellbeing.

Before we begin asking ourselves what we need or long for, we grow up in the care of others and within the world we were raised in. Yet what we are given early on does not always align with our later emotional and psychological needs. As a result, much of adult life can feel uncertain and even painful, leaving us to discern what truly sustains us emotionally, a process that is rarely simple.

It is often within this uncertainty that we begin searching for what might help us feel more secure and alive. For some of us, this search organizes itself around what feels missing, while for others it takes shape around what captures our interest and brings a sense of vitality. Few of us remain fixed in one position, and over time our lives reflect movement between these orientations.

Gradually, we may begin to notice that what we learned growing up and what we need later on in life can feel at odds with one another. We may feel this as a tension within us, even when we cannot yet name what feels off. Over time, this tension creates a gap we end up living with, and we begin to shape our lives around it in ways we may not fully recognize. We build relationships, pursue interests, and develop routines around it, often without fully realizing how these choices help us manage what still feels unresolved.

As we grow older, it often becomes clear that this gap does not entirely disappear, though aspects of it can lessen depending on how we respond to it. Some of us wrestle with persistent feelings of not being good enough, while others contend with abandonment, grief, or the sense that no matter what we attempt we fall short.

Still others carry the feeling that the love and affection they longed for was rarely shown to them, or not in ways that felt real. Beneath these different hardships lies a shared human experience: at some point we come to feel we need or want something more. When that “something more” is unclear, it can leave us with a yearning for what might help our lives feel more whole.

What we inherit from our early environments is not limited to our families. We are also shaped by the broader social spaces we participate in, including school, places of worship, and organized activities such as sports or community programs. Within these spaces, we are taught to become competent members of society. We learn what to pay attention to, what to value, and what success is expected to look like. We are asked to function in specific, prescribed ways meant to lead to success in the world, and in the process learn who is seen as capable, who is encouraged, and who is not.

Over time, we can move through these structures and expectations successfully, yet still find ourselves later in life feeling emotionally unsettled or unsatisfied. From the outside, our lives may look stable and appear to be moving forward as they should. Yet inwardly something can feel disconnected from a sense of aliveness. At times, we may be living in ways that are expected of us and yet feel increasingly empty or emotionally unfulfilled.

When this happens, we may not recognize the disconnection right away. We often continue living as we have because it feels necessary or because it is what we have become accustomed to doing. At other times, we may sense that something feels off but not know how to live differently.

David came to see me in his early forties because he no longer feels connected to his life or able to find much joy or meaning in it. By outward appearances, he is successful. He has built a thriving business and is known as dependable and responsible. He is married with two children he loves and feels deeply committed to providing for, and much of his life is organized around work and caring for others.

Yet he often feels as though he is going through the motions rather than living in a way that feels personally meaningful. Even though he is surrounded by colleagues and people he interacts with regularly, he finds it difficult to form close friendships or feel at ease with others.

Growing up, his family prided itself on being practical, and he was taught early on to take his responsibilities seriously. Conversations in the home centered on what needed to be done regardless of how anyone felt, and he learned to keep much of his inner life to himself. Over time, he focused on being reliable and taking seriously what others wanted of him.

His father was highly successful in business and placed great emphasis on discipline and productivity. As he grew up, he noticed that his father was more attentive and affectionate when he focused on what his father wanted from him. His father’s attention and affection were deeply important to him. When he focused on interests separate from his father’s, his father withdrew and paid him less attention. Over time, he came to see that doing what his father wanted was the most reliable way to receive love and affection.

He has spent most of his adult life doing what his father expected of him when he was young. In many ways, he has grown into a good and responsible man. In others, he remains tied to being the good boy he was raised to be and does not understand why he feels so little enjoyment or interest in the life he is living. He now finds himself torn and uncertain about what to do with his life, even if he cannot fully understand why. All he knows is that he needs to keep providing for his family, yet he takes little interest or pleasure in how he spends his time.

In our own ways, each of us is raised in relation to those who care for us. It is in relation to them that we learn about life, what their beliefs and wishes are for us, and who we are in their eyes. Through these early relationships, we learn what is expected of us and what we must do to remain connected. Over time, these experiences influence what we come to want, what we believe will bring love and happiness, and what we expect from ourselves and others.

It is in relation to these early experiences that we begin wanting certain things that are emotionally important to us, often before we have the words to understand them. No matter how we were raised, each of us carries emotional tensions and wishes that were difficult to manage at the time. These tensions do not disappear as we grow older but continue to shape, often outside our awareness, what we long for and how we try to live our lives, as we see in David’s life.

We can continue our lives in responsible ways while still feeling disconnected from ourselves and from our own sense of aliveness. Like David, we may meet expectations, offer care to others, and even build a life that appears solid from the outside, yet remain only partially engaged with what feels personally meaningful. When this happens, it is often not solely because something is missing in the present, but also because earlier longings and the tensions around them continue to shape what we expect from ourselves and from life.

Over time, many of us develop patterns around these tensions that reflect what was provided for us when we were young, even when they no longer serve us. It is often during periods of emotional struggle that we begin to question how these patterns have shaped us, to consider how our longings have influenced them, and whether we want to change how we respond to these patterns and the longings beneath them.

Thus, if we hope to move our lives forward differently, it helps to understand what our longings have been and the psychological dynamics that come with them. Yet when we begin to explore them more closely, what we long for is not always clear and can often feel conflictual. Often, that conflict reflects a tension between the emotional world we grew up in and the needs that arise as we grow older. In one form or another, all of us live with this tension.

This gap can be understood as a layered psychological space that forms in relation to our earliest emotional experiences and the ways we learned to respond to them over time. It takes shape around what we received from those who cared for us and what felt absent, uncertain, or difficult to count on. At times, it registers as an emotional distance between what we have known and what we still find ourselves needing.

Over time, this space becomes woven into the very fabric of how we live and what we long for. It informs the expectations we carry about love and how we expect to belong, as well as the assumptions we hold about who we are and what we need in order to feel more fully alive. It also holds what remains unresolved from our earlier experiences.

Many of our central wishes take shape within this space, often without our full awareness. They often center on feeling securely loved, being seen and valued for who we are, belonging without fear of exclusion, and being free to pursue what genuinely interests us.

These wishes do not simply disappear with age. Formed within our early environments, they continue to carry the emotional conditions in which they first took shape. They shape not only what we long for, but how we pursue them, the terms under which we feel permitted to do so, and the means through which we attempt to gratify them. In this way, they remain closely tied to the underlying anxieties that, without love and connection, we risk feeling emotionally abandoned.

We can see this clearly in David, whose longing for his father’s affection was so strong that he built his life around what his father wanted for him. Even now, much of what he continues to pursue is tied to what his father taught him: that to receive love and approval from others, he must place their needs above his own wishes and desires. In moments like this, his longing to do what his father or his wife wants overrides his ability to explore what he himself wants.

Even now, asserting what he wants carries the fear that he will be emotionally abandoned by those he loves. Over time, this has made it difficult for him to remain curious about his wishes and to pursue his interests in ways that would allow him to feel more engaged with his life.

In this way, his practicality and sense of responsibility, though deeply important to him, are shaped by his wish to do the right thing in his loved ones’ eyes and by his effort to secure the kind of love he unconsciously feels he can only have under certain conditions. Over time, this dynamic begins to resemble a form of codependency, in which his sense of being loved becomes tied to fulfilling the wishes of others.

In preserving love like this, he gradually relinquishes a measure of psychological freedom, as his life becomes organized around maintaining connection to others at the cost of connection to himself.

If much of how we have lived our lives, including how we continue to live them, reflects what we needed as we grew up and what we experienced instead, then an important question emerges. How do we understand our longings within this broader personal and historical context, and how do we use them in ways that move our lives forward?

At certain moments, we are confronted with a difficult truth: some longings cannot be fulfilled in the forms in which we first encounter them. What we imagine will gratify our longings is often tied to earlier hopes about what might help us feel more whole. Because these imagined forms of fulfillment can become bound to how we hope to receive love and acceptance, or to ways of being that once felt untenable, relinquishing them can feel less like giving up an illusion than like abandoning parts of ourselves.

For some of us, relinquishing what we have longed for is experienced primarily as loss. For others, it touches upon a more existential anxiety that can, under certain circumstances, give rise to emotional panic. It can feel as though we are letting go of parts of ourselves that still hold hope for a different emotional life. At times, it can even feel as though we are required, in the name of reality, to extinguish a part of ourselves.

The part that has carried the only form of hope we have allowed ourselves to hold onto—the hope that we might one day feel loved enough to feel fully alive and enough as we are.

To work with our longings in ways that are helpful, we first need to understand them as clearly as we can. For instance, in my own therapy, I continue to notice how easily I can make myself small and silence what I want when it stirs anxiety about disappointing those I care about. This requires asking not only what we want, but why we are drawn to certain longings and why some carry more force than others.

We can begin by noticing what occupies our minds over time. What we return to often tells us something about what holds emotional significance for us. Yet thinking alone rarely gives us the full picture. We often understand our longings more deeply when we move closer to what we say we want and pay attention to how it feels and what happens when we do.

Returning to David, we see how easily he could name what others wanted from him, and how difficult it was for him to name what he wanted for himself. When asked what he wanted apart from others’ expectations, he often fell silent. Eventually he said he could not think of anything he genuinely looked forward to. Most of his days felt lifeless, spent meeting other people’s wishes, and he wished he could feel passionate about something again that felt like it belonged to him.

When I repeated his word back to him as a question, “Again?”, he became visibly shaken. After a long silence, he spoke about building model airplanes when he was young and wanting to become a pilot. His father had dismissed the interest as childish and put the planes away. He never returned to building them again.

Yet as we continued to meet, it became clear that his longing to feel more alive had not disappeared. The part of him that once felt engaged with life and with his own interests gradually gave way to the part that secured love by doing what was expected. As an adult, he could easily identify what others needed from him, yet struggled to name what he wanted.

In this moment, his longing came into clearer view. The planes stood for more than a childhood interest. They carried the hope that a different way of being in his life might still be possible.

In the weeks that followed, we began to talk about what it might look like for him to explore his interest in planes again. At first, he wasn’t sure how to begin, so we spent some time recalling what interested him about planes when he was younger. As he spoke, his voice became more animated, and he began describing what drew him to planes and navigation.

Over time, he began to wonder what it might be like to return to those interests, given the current demands of his life. After exploring what demands might be contributing to his hesitation, a few weeks later he mentioned that he stopped by a local hobby store. He remembered the smell of the glue and the wood from his childhood. He bought three planes, one for himself and one for each of his children, and slipped a flyer for a local plane club into his pocket.

He looked at me, almost puzzled, and said he was excited to buy those planes. He did not feel guilty. He waited to be corrected, to tell himself he was being indulgent. But it did not happen. Instead, he felt excited, almost giddy, he said. “I can be a responsible father and still find time for my planes.”

Over time, he was able to see that this was not only about planes, but about no longer shutting down in the face of his own interests and longings. What he had long set aside was now something he consciously began to make room for in his life. As we continued our work, we helped him explore other areas of interest in his life, and he developed a few new hobbies as well.

He talked about going to warm, exotic places and looked into flights with genuine excitement. His renewed interest in building planes began to connect with a desire to travel to places he had once only imagined. He considered whether his wife and children would want to join him, but he no longer felt required to abandon the idea if they did not. He could speak about his excitement with them without assuming he would once again have to leave his own interests behind. In doing so, he resumed building planes and let that interest carry him into flying on them as well.

For many of us, what we long for may live primarily in our imagination until we are willing to engage it more directly. When longing remains imagined, it can preserve hope while keeping us removed from our own experience. As we begin to engage it consciously, in thought and in action, we often find that we experience our lives differently, no longer relating to them from a position of distance. In doing so, we begin to discover which longings deepen the quality of our lives, and what changes is not simply whether we obtain what we desire, but how we come to relate to ourselves in the process.

As adults, engaging with our longings is not merely about recreating the conditions in which they first formed, but about taking them up, differently, more consciously, in the present, and interacting with them in ways that foster new growth and a renewed sense of being alive within us. This requires time and a willingness to experiment with how we are living, and whether our longings are being taken up in ways that truly support our wellbeing.

Through lived experience, we give ourselves the invaluable opportunity to learn how to engage our longings in ways that help us inhabit our emotional lives more fully and feel more at home within ourselves.

To go deeper, The Self as Relationship: How We Live With Ourselves Over Time explores more directly how the way we live with ourselves shapes our capacity for emotional repair and growth over time. An excerpt is available to all readers, with the full essay reserved for paid subscribers.

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