“What about the people who have never had a dream about what they wanted to be when they grew up?”
I occasionally stop by the You Tube page where my TEDx Talk lives to reply to any comments. The majority are very positive. There are a couple of complete trolls who probably question and heckle everything, and then … there is this burning question repeated time after time.
In the talk, I mentioned people who don’t dream or can’t remember having a dream from childhood about what they wanted to grow up to be. I mention that even those that can’t even daydream now may have come from a childhood that forced them to grow up faster than appropriate.
Kids who were scared for any reason (maybe losing a parent and fearing the other would die or go away, not being allowed to be themselves for whatever reason or fearing for their safety) will tend to be adults who don’t have a dream. While it is possible to dream if you grew up with these circumstances, when someone can’t, I have found they typically have lived these scenarios.
I apparently left a lot of people hanging but twelve minutes only allowed one through line of solutions.
“What do I do if that is me?”, you might ask.
If this is you, here’s what you do:
Get thee to a therapist — Really. I’m not kidding. If you shut off your dreaming mechanism because it wasn’t safe to check out temporarily, you have to go back and revisit the trauma. What caused the erosion of your sense of safety?
Let’s say you’ve already been to therapy or you just won’t consider going. OK – try this:
Re-sensitize your self — The connection that seems to be missing for people who don’t or can’t dream or imagine a desirable future for themselves is the distance between the body and the mind. You may be desensitized to your own feelings. Not the extremes like anger or elation, but the subtle ones like what you like, what you want, or even what brings you joy. If you feel like you don’t really even know what you want on a daily basis but decide things in order to avoid the pain of NOT making a decision, you are desensitized to your own body.
Your body has a lot of information for you.
How do you re-sensitize? Start or revisit a hobby that involves working with your hands or that requires full-body engagement. For example, knitting, painting, pottery wheelwork or other building/making activity is tactile and preferable. If there is nothing like that you used to do or would like to do, think of something that engages your full body like dancing, running or cycling.
After a couple of weeks of doing one of these activities four or more times per week, notice if you are feeling more sensitive and more aware of your feelings and subtle preferences.
Practice WANT days — Whether you can devote one-hour, three hours or a whole day, take time out to have no agenda whatsoever. Don’t even carry the responsibility of walking the dog or feeding a child. Just give yourself blank space. In that space, notice. Notice your gut. Notice what you want. In fact, keep asking yourself “What do I want?” What is the answer? What do you want?
Do you want to go for a walk? Read? Paint? Sleep? Eat a particular thing? Just practice hearing and responding to what you want. This isn’t about indulging yourself in stuff that’s not good for you. It’s not about masking your emotions with a substitute for feeling like food, alcohol, drugs or other forms of numbing yourself. Feel what you WANT!
Practice WANT days as often as you reasonably can until you can start to FEEL the difference in your body between a true want and a bad habit. When true wants are fulfilled, you will feel a sense of satisfaction. If you’re feeding a bad habit, you’ll ultimately feel negative emotions like guilt, anxiety or anger.
NOW WHAT? — Some feeling should be restored now which means an ability to see in your mind’s eye and/or dreaming should be coming back. See if you can see yourself in a role that brings you joy when you simply think about it, whether it be a specific job, career or life role.
Can you imagine yourself in a new future? Can you daydream about other possibilities for yourself? How does it feel as you envision these possibilities? Whether you are going to take action on them or not does not matter. What does matter is that your dreaming mechanism is now turned back on.
NOW, go back to the TEDx talk, and listen to it for the next steps. Welcome back.
Let me know how I can help you see what’s next.
Wow. What a great article. Excellent advice. Thanks.
I wish this helped. How are you supposed to know what you want when you have no frame of reference for what would leave a positive impact on your life? You say listen to your gut but all my gut tells me to do is cease the basic routine of just enough calories every few days to continue living. There is no want or desire in my heart for anything I can possibly conceptualise and growing up around people brimming with aspiration has made this disconnect inside myself more and more haunting with each passing month.
Jarrod–I’m sorry to hear you feel so rudderless. In my twenties, I had to learn how to know what I wanted. I had no idea.
I didn’t know how to decide. I hope you make an effort to find an affordable social worker or therapist who can support you.
I remember my dreams but they were sad in their scope. I prayed that when I grew up that I could avoid jail and not end up digging ditches. I did well vs. those goals. Engineering degree, good salary, wife does not have to work and 2 kids and only traffic tickets. I still only find energy to move forward in fear of failing and anger redirected to the ‘war’ of getting thru today. I have been to therapy and it made me worse, miserable, and intolerable at home and work. It backfired. No feelings, that’a me, nails it. Tried going back to hobbies but they take away from what my wife wants from me at home; I am excoriated for being selfish. I get questioned on why I cannot be happy doing for her and the kids like she is happy with, but instead of wanting to stuff ‘apart’. Running the kids to stuff, participating in their activities, and help her in the House is just more work to me. So stuck…
I was hoping for more of a reply than see a therapist. I’ve been working on this in therapy for the past year and half and it hasn’t work. Do you know of anything that can help in extreme cases?
I have seen therapists, and through those discussions and your comments, I now realize that I lost my ability to dream (age 8) when my mom became a major alcoholic and I had to grow up quickly (as the oldest child). I’m now 54, have had a successful career, marriage and kids, but jumped into a new job without thinking. I am struggling with finding an internal motivator and figuring out what do I want? I have no hobbies and also recognizing I am masking my emotions with alcohol.
I’ve recently listened to Laura’s excellent TEDx talk on YouTube and (fortunately) found this article as I was part of the people wanting to know the impact of a rough childhood on professional dreams and how to overcome these difficulties. I can see the article is already over a year old so maybe everybody moved on from the topic and I arrive too late but for the people like me who will come across this content later, I wanted to share my experience of a 40-something professional existential crisis I’ve been stuck into for over a year now.
Unlike what I have read above from Jarrod, my experience of being unable to have a dream is manifested by some sort of scattering of the mind across various potential activities going from a PhD in Geography (I have a Master already so it’s not irrelevant) to becoming a professional backer and making pastries, to become a psychologist or open a Gelateria and study how to make ice creams in Italy, or maybe the solution is to move abroad again, etc, etc. I felt very interested by Laura’s talk and article about the shell of the egg and the yolk but mine seems to be an egg carrying multiple twins in the yolk, or maybe I haven’t found the common denominator just yet. It’s not better than having zero dream (which to me sounds a bit like depression if I may say) but having too many possible things and not one call is also freezing. I have started therapy for the fourth time in my life (going step by step, I guess) and it does help even though progress is (always too) slow and time/money are running against me. I’d be glad to hear from other people with the same issues or for a piece of advice. Otherwise I’ll be happy to think that maybe someone like me will find this post one day and thing: “Ah! At least I’m not the only one”. Thanks for reading 🙂
Pascale I read your comment and understand completely! I am the same way and dream too often and often about very different things! But thinking back to Laura’s talk (which was amazing ?) I wonder if there is some common theme to your various dream jobs. The connection between psychologist, baker and gelato maker is that you’d like to connect with people and share something that will bring them joy (people that come into the shops or solicit your services… I know I’m reaching). I also understand the desire to live abroad again. I have done this once before and it’s such an exciting and life altering experience. My current too many dreams include counsellor, teacher (but not teaching children), house flipper/real estate investor and translator. When there are too many things it can seem really scary to chase after just one of them and, insoding, give up a good paycheck.
Thank you for this!
Thank you for following up on this topic from your TED talk!