Dear Jonathan:

Jonathan (Oct 2016): “I don’t know what it is that I’m truly looking for”-

What I hear in your words today is not just confusion about what you’re looking for, but a deeper sense of disorientation after years of losses and instabilities which naturally led to you living in Survival Mode.

You lived through a lot of instability and losses: the loss of Parental unity (your parents separated when you were 11–12), the loss of Farm life and Financial security (becoming “penniless” after the farm collapsed), the Loss of School stability (shifting schools), the loss of a Daily routine (your mother working late, long waits after school), the loss of Direction (dropping out of university, drifting between jobs), and the Loss of health (your mental health deterioration during drug use and unstable living).

* I can very much relate to the upheaval created by Housing instability and Multiple moves (yours: farm → grandparents → rented house → city → yard job housing → shared accommodation → grandparents again)- because I experienced so much of it in my adult life.

You lived through so many losses and instability that understandably, you never felt safe and it makes sense you wouldn’t know what you want — because wanting requires safety.

Wanting only becomes possible when the body feels safe enough to look forward instead of just getting through the day. When life has been full of instability, the nervous system learns to focus on the next hour, not the next chapter. In that state, desire shuts down.

Wanting something — a home, a future, a relationship, a direction — requires you to reach for it. But reaching is only safe when you trust that what you reach for won’t be ripped away. If your history taught you that things fall apart, people leave, or life collapses without warning, then wanting becomes tied to anticipatory loss.

Anticipatory loss is the nervous system’s habit of expecting things to fall apart before they even happen. When someone has lived through repeated instability— the body learns that anything good is temporary and anything wanted is at risk. So instead of letting you reach for something, the nervous system jumps ahead to the imagined moment when you will lose it again. This creates a protective shutdown: it feels safer not to want than to want and be hurt. Wanting becomes tied to the fear of losing.

Anticipatory loss is a trauma-based prediction. The body is trying to spare you from the pain of future loss by preventing you from attaching to anything in the present. It’s a survival strategy — but it blocks desire, direction, and hope until enough safety accumulates to override it.

In adulthood, anticipatory loss shows up as pulling back before you attach — ending things early, as self-sabotage (quitting, withdrawing, or numbing), and it shows up internally as future-blindness — the inability to imagine a stable future because your nervous system only knows how to prepare for loss.

None of this is character weakness; it’s the body trying to prevent you from reliving the pain of losing what you once needed but couldn’t keep.

Safety is what allows the mind to lift its eyes from survival and ask: What do I actually want? It’s what creates the inner space for preference, curiosity, and direction. So, it makes sense that you’re only now beginning to feel the faint outlines of wanting: your system finally has enough steadiness to imagine a future instead of bracing for the next disruption.

The fact that you’ve stopped using drugs, quit smoking, improved your mental health, and are beginning to imagine moving out. These aren’t small things; they’re signs that your system is slowly shifting from survival mode into self-direction mode.

What you’re “looking for” may not be a single answer but the beginning of a relationship with yourself — a sense of belonging to your own life after years of instability. You don’t have to know the whole path yet. It’s enough to notice what feels supportive, what feels draining, and what feels like the next small step toward a life that fits you.

Anita