Why Don't I Know What I Like or What I Want?

Not knowing what you like or what you want is common in people who spent years putting their own needs aside. Liking something is a feeling before it is a thought. It arrives as a pull toward something, or away from it, usually before you have words for it. When you spend long enough ignoring those feelings in order to cope, you stop noticing them, and questions about your own preferences stop producing an answer at all.

What happens when someone asks you

The clearest version of this I see is also subtle. Someone sits down and describes, in real detail, what is happening for everyone around them. The partner who is struggling. The parent who needs managing. The colleague who is difficult and why. The reading is accurate and quick.

Then I ask what they need, and the room changes. They start a sentence and stop. There is a blankness. They say they are not sure, or ask me to repeat the question, or tell me what they think they should want, and they usually hear themselves doing it.

They are not holding back. They look inward for the answer and find nothing there. Most people call this being bad at knowing themselves, which sends them off to think harder about a question that thinking was never going to answer.

Wanting happens in the body before it happens in words

Staci Haines, who cofounded generative somatics, describes sensation as the foundational language of a life. Her argument is that what matters most to us, and what we long for, reaches us first through sensation and impulse. Numbing or overriding those sensations is a sound survival strategy at the time, and it cuts us off from the main source of information we have about ourselves.

This is more ordinary than it sounds. You are offered a job and your chest tightens while you are still saying yes. Someone walks into the room and your shoulders come down before you have formed an opinion about them. You open a message and your stomach drops. None of that is reasoning. Your body registers a yes or a no and sends it up, usually before your mind arrives. Yet how often do we pay attention to these sensations, or take them seriously enough to base our decisions on them?

Most of us learn to push past them. Then someone asks what you want. You are not calculating an answer. You are searching for that yes or no inside you. If you have been overriding the sensations for years, they may have gone quiet. Nothing comes back as a felt sense (a sensation i.e. the tightness or ease your body uses to tell you yes or no). All that sits within you is a state of blankness that reflects the absence of cues.

Why it went quiet

Nobody chooses this. This usually starts when we are young, and for good reasons.

If your wants were treated as inconvenient or too much, or if saying what you needed reliably made things worse at home, then feeling the want became a liability. The cheapest solution available to a child is to stop registering it. It works. It keeps you close to the people you cannot afford to lose, which at that age matters more than anything else. The same thing happens later to people whose circumstances demanded years of coping, caregiving, or getting through something hard. You override to survive it, and the override stays on.

This has one consequence people do not expect. You cannot switch off the feeling that says I am overwhelmed and keep the one that says I would love this. They come through together. People who numbed the painful sensations are often surprised to find that food, music and rest went flat at the same time. What is missing is the capacity to feel, which is why no amount of thinking about your options brings it back.

What I know about this myself

I have an autoimmune condition, and the years I spent overriding what I needed are part of how I developed the condition. For a long time I could explain my own patterns fluently and still not feel them, which is its own kind of blankness. Learning to notice what was happening in my body stopped being simply a professional interest and became something closer to necessary. It is part of why I am slow with people who tell me they cannot feel anything, and why I do not treat that as a lack of effort. You can read more on autoimmune illness and self-abandonment.

Why this is so common in Singapore

Here, putting your own needs aside is treated as a strength, and you are rewarded for it early. Sit still. Cope. Do not make your state everyone else's problem. That training produces adults who are reliable, capable, and very good at functioning while feeling very little. The cost only shows up when someone asks them a simple question about themselves and nothing comes.

It lands hardest on the people who look most sorted. Decisive at work, consulted by everyone else about their problems, making choices all day, and then unable to say where they want to eat. They practised reading other people constantly and never practised reading themselves, which is also the ground underneath people-pleasing patterns.

How it comes back

Slowly, and in smaller pieces than people expect. Sitting down to work out what you want from your life is the version everyone tries first, and it usually produces more blankness.

It starts much lower. Noticing that your shoulders dropped when a particular person left the room. Noticing you did not want the second coffee. Noticing the small no that turns up just before you say yes to something, which most people step over so smoothly they never see it. These are tiny, and they are the same thing as the large answers you are after. Noticing gets more accurate the more you do it.

It also tends to need another person there, at least early on. We learn to read our own internal state because someone else noticed it and named it for us, over and over, until we could do it ourselves. Where that did not happen, it is hard to install on your own, which is why handing someone a body scan and leaving them to it so often produces nothing. This is the slow part of somatic therapy, and it is less dramatic than people imagine. Mostly it is sitting with someone while they get used to the idea that what they feel counts as information.

The answers do come back. They are usually smaller and more ordinary than anyone hopes for, and they turn up in the wrong order, about things that seem not to matter. That is normally the sign it is working.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why don't I know what I like anymore?
Usually because your preferences stopped being safe or useful to have. If liking something that inconvenienced other people led to friction, or if your household ran more smoothly when you had no strong opinions, the quickest solution was to stop registering the preference at all. It tends to return in small things first, a food, a kind of music, the temperature of a room, long before it returns in large ones.

Why don't I know what I want in life?
Often because the feeling that tells you what you want has gone quiet, and you are left with no answer to find. Wanting registers in the body as sensation before it becomes a thought, and people who spent years overriding their own signals in order to cope lose access to that reading. This is why values exercises and pros and cons lists frequently fail here, since they work on the thinking layer while the problem sits underneath it.

Why do I go blank when someone asks what I need?
Because you are reaching for something that is not currently reporting. If needing things was unsafe or unwelcome when you were young, the quickest available solution was to stop registering the need at all, and that setting tends to persist into adulthood. The blankness is the result of an old adaptation rather than a lack of self-awareness.

Is this the same as being indecisive?
Indecision usually means you can feel several pulls and cannot choose between them. What this post describes is the absence of the pull, which is why the usual decision-making advice does not help. If you weigh options endlessly but can still feel which one appeals, that is indecision. If you look inward and find nothing there, it is closer to what this post describes.

Can you learn to feel what you want again?
Yes, though it tends to be slower and less dramatic than people expect. It usually begins with very low-stakes noticing, such as what your body does when someone leaves the room, rather than with large questions about your life. It also often needs another person involved, since the ability to read your own internal state is something we first develop in relationship with someone who reads it for us.

Why can I tell what everyone else wants but not what I want?
Because reading other people was the skill that got practised. In households where you had to track an adult's mood to stay safe, that capacity develops early and becomes very accurate, while attention to your own state is what gets dropped. Many people who are highly attuned to others are working with almost no information about themselves.

Is not knowing what you want a sign of depression?
It can be, particularly if it comes with a wider flattening across sleep, appetite, energy, and interest in things you used to enjoy. If the blankness is longstanding and specific to questions about your own wants and needs, while the rest of your life is intact, it is more likely to be the pattern described here. If you are unsure, it is worth raising with a doctor or counsellor rather than working it out alone.

You might also want to read
Why Do I Feel Responsible for Everyone
Can You Heal Attachment Wounds on Your Own
Why Do I Doubt Myself All the Time?
People Pleasing and Exhaustion Singapore — Why Always Being Okay Is Costing You More Than You Think

If something in this article resonated and you're wondering whether therapy might help, you can find out more about how I work and book a session on the Services and Booking page.

Tags
why don't I know what I like, why don't I know what I want, losing your preferences, somatic therapy Singapore, self-abandonment, people pleasing Singapore, attachment counselling Singapore, counsellor Singapore, inner child therapy Singapore, emotional numbness, Staci Haines, generative somatics