How to Discover What You Actually Want When You Spent Years Wanting What They Wanted

RELATIONAL TRAUMA • June 11, 2026

It’s 8:10 on a Thursday night. Priya, 45, a partner at a Boston firm, sits in a corner booth with the leather-bound menu open like a courtroom brief. The room hums, forks clink, a waiter glides by with martinis, and her eyes fill. For eight years she said, “Whatever you’re having is fine.” He loved spicy, rare steak, wine pairings, tasting menus, “trust me, you’ll like this.” The server returns: “Do you know what you’d like?” Priya hears herself say, “I… I don’t know what I like.” The admission lands in her throat like a stone. She closes the menu, presses it to her ribs, and waits, trying to feel something that feels like her.

In my consulting room, scenes like this aren’t about indecision. They’re about identity. In narcissistic relationships, you don’t simply compromise; over time, the relationship turns you into a mirror for someone else’s wants. The project of leaving isn’t the end. The project after leaving is rediscovering yourself after a narcissist, the slow, tender excavation of your original preferences and the building of a self you can trust.

This article is my clinically grounded guide to that excavation. If you’re a driven and driven woman who can negotiate term sheets, repair a ruptured aorta, or cross-examine witnesses before lunch, and yet cry in front of a dinner menu, you’re not broken. You’re rebuilding.

If you want a broader map of the healing landscape after these relationships, you might also explore my guide to identity reconstruction after narcissistic abuse, my overview of the stages of narcissist recovery, and why I often begin with fixing the foundations of safety and stability in early work.

In short: Reclaiming your own desires after years of enmeshment means learning to distinguish between wants that are genuinely yours and wants you adopted to stay safe or connected in your family system.

What Is Rediscovering What You Want After a Narcissistic Relationship?

When I say “rediscovering what you want,” I’m talking about a specific phenomenon many clients face after coercively controlling or narcissistic relationships: your preferences and priorities have been overwritten. You’ve outsourced your taste buds, your calendar, your weekends, even your inner weather report to someone else’s climate control. It can look like tears over menus, buying the coffee you don’t actually like because it was “the good one,” or spending Saturdays in a kind of paralysis because you can’t yet hear your own “yes” and “no.” It’s not that you never had strong preferences; it’s that the context trained you to mute them.

The erosion can be subtle. It often starts as attentiveness, the generous attunement many driven and driven women naturally bring to intimacy and work. Over time, under coercive control, attentiveness becomes domination. Your taste becomes their taste, and you may even praise yourself for being “easygoing” while slowly losing the pathway back to your own likes and dislikes. This isn’t about being indecisive; it’s about surviving a context that trained you not to know what you know. If you relate to betrayal trauma dynamics, you may also resonate with my comprehensive guide to betrayal trauma.

A quick note on differentiation: difficulty making choices can stem from many places, burnout, depression, ADHD/executive overload, cultural conditioning to defer, or grief. I assess for all of these. What distinguishes preference erosion after narcissistic abuse is the specific tie between “having a preference” and “threat to safety.” That pairing lives in the body and shows up reliably at choice points that touch your pleasure, rest, or autonomy.

The Neurobiology / Science

Understanding your body makes it easier to stop blaming yourself.

• Lisa Aronson Fontes, PhD, expert in intimate partner abuse and author of Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control, describes how coercive control operates through jealousy, micromanaging, isolation, threats, and gaslighting, progressively reducing a partner’s autonomy. When you’re perpetually monitored and corrected, it’s adaptive to orient to the controller’s wants because that’s where relative safety lives. Over time, that orientation becomes habitual and identity-shaped. ^[1]

• Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, writes that traumatic stress lives in the body, perception, and agency. If the price of peace was suppressing your preferences, your nervous system learns that preference equals danger. He also emphasizes interoception, the sense of internal bodily signals, as foundational for agency. In my office, we actively practice interoceptive awareness to rebuild preference from the inside out. You can’t think your way into liking something; you have to feel it. ^[2]

• Resmaa Menakem, MSW, somatic abolitionist and author of My Grandmother’s Hands, reminds us that bodies carry inherited and socialized patterns. Many driven and driven women were socialized early to minimize their needs for the comfort of others. Layer a narcissistic partner onto that conditioning and self-erasure becomes automatic. Healing requires embodied practice, not cognition alone. ^[3]

Stephen Porges, PhD, originator of Polyvagal Theory, shows how our autonomic nervous system constantly scans for safety. If “having an opinion” historically triggered conflict, your body may interpret a strong preference as a threat, cueing shutdown or fawn responses. ^[4] Pat Ogden, PhD, and Janina Fisher, PhD, emphasize tracking sensation and movement to restore choice, action, and boundaries, microfoundations of identity. ^[5] Naming patterns matters, too. Many clients call their over-accommodation people-pleasing; Ingrid Clayton, PhD, names one facet the “fawn” response, appeasing as a trauma strategy that once kept you safe but now obscures self-contact. ^[6]

This is why rediscovering yourself after a narcissist isn’t indulgence. It’s neurobiological rehabilitation. In practice, it’s often as simple and profound as noticing the warmth in your chest when you take the trail with a view versus the paved loop around the pond, and choosing more of what creates warmth. If you’ve never explored body-based work before, you might appreciate my primer on somatic healing and how to start safely.

A few practical neurobiological points I explain to clients:

• Interoceptive signals are typically subtle and can be drowned out by chronic hypervigilance. That’s why micro-experiments matter, they give your nervous system repeated, low-stakes feedback.

• Sighs, yawns, warmth in the chest, and digestive ease are common “yes” markers; muscular tension, throat tightness, and shoulder brace often show up as “no.” Over weeks these become recognizable patterns.

• Repetition rewires. Neural pathways respond to frequency and reward. The more you permit a bodily “yes” and act on it, the stronger that pathway grows.

If you want a short primer on body-based anchors for preference work, try my body compass primer, which collects simple daily practices to begin rebuilding interoceptive attention.

How This Shows Up in Driven and driven women

Externally, you look decisive and competent. Internally, when the decision touches your own pleasure or rest, you go foggy. Common presentations:

• Indecision around pleasure: You can choose a vendor for a seven-figure contract but feel paralyzed by Saturday plans.

• Auto-default to others: Colleagues know you as “flexible” and “low maintenance,” but inside that flexibility is often a blank space.

• Somatic shutdown at choice points: Heart rate spikes, stomach drops, throat closes when you’re asked, “What do you want?”

• Taste confusion: You buy their favorite coffee grind or playlist without realizing it, then feel almost homesick in your own kitchen.

• Relational fawning: You nod, accommodate, and reassure in new relationships before you even know if you agree, a pattern that once kept you safe and now obscures your preferences. ^[6]

• Pleasure, relief mix-ups: Relief (numbing, zoning out) masquerades as pleasure. It takes practice to separate “I feel less anxious” from “I actually like this.”

• Choice fatigue: Streaming platforms, group chats, open office calendars, modern life is a buffet of options. When your interoceptive compass is quiet, that buffet can be exhausting instead of liberating.

Saturday morning, 9:30, sun pouring into an Oakland loft. Jordan, 36, VP of Product at a fast-growing AI startup, stands in front of her closet staring at a row of black silk blouses and high-waisted trousers. Her ex loved “timeless.” He’d say neon sneakers were “loud.” Today is a friend’s low-key brunch, and Jordan pulls a cobalt jumper from the back, a color she hasn’t worn in years. She lifts it to her collarbone and waits. Her hands tingle. Does she like this, or does she like imagining herself as the kind of woman who would wear this? She tucks it back, then pulls it forward again. At brunch, a friend says, “That color lights you up.” Jordan flushes, not from the compliment, but from the tiny fizz of recognition in her chest: Oh. I like this.

Whether you’re a professor, a surgeon, a founder, or a partner at a firm, the theme holds: the relationship trained your nervous system to use someone else’s preferences as your compass. After, reclaiming your compass can feel both thrilling and disorienting. It’s common to oscillate, to buy the bright jumper and then want to hide, to order dessert and then feel inexplicably guilty. You’re not flaky. You’re practicing new neural pathways. If you want more on why these oscillations happen, my deeper dive on the dynamics of the narcissistic family system can offer context even if your partner, not your parents, was the primary source.

Related Clinical Topic: Fawning, Preference Collapse, and the Body’s Missing “Yes”

There’s a reason this line lands. When you’ve been living for someone else’s preferences, it’s easy to reach for numbing, overwork, wine, scrolling, rather than feel the grief and confusion of not knowing what you want. I don’t pathologize these detours; I see them as signals that you need help weaving back a handmade life. That’s what this article is about: not quick fixes, but practices that help you re-stitch choice, delight, and self-respect one day at a time. ^[7]

Clinically, the fawn response is an interpersonal adaptation: appease to avoid conflict or punishment. When that pattern is chronic, your brain deprioritizes the signals that used to anchor taste and preference. The work here is twofold: 1) lower the stakes so the nervous system doesn’t interpret preference as threat, and 2) repeatedly give the system clear, embodied feedback about what feels alive.

If you’re early in recovery, you might also appreciate the wider context in narcissist recovery and how building chosen community supports this piece of the work.

Both/And: You Lost Yourself AND Some of What You Liked Then Was Real

Clients often sit down and ask, “I don’t know who I am. Was any of it me?” Here’s the both/and I hold:

• You lost access to parts of yourself in that relationship. That’s true.

• Some of what you liked then was genuinely you. That’s also true.

After leaving, the impulse is to scrap everything associated with the relationship: throw out the records, sell the Peloton, repaint the walls. Sometimes that purge is regulating. Other times, it’s a different kind of overcorrection, an attempt to control the discomfort of ambiguity.

In my office, we slow down and run experiments. You don’t have to ban jazz because he loved Coltrane. You get to notice how your body responds when you listen alone, where no one is grading your taste. Maybe you discover you love late-night ballads but not the 45-minute solos. Maybe you realize you never liked steak rare, your jaw relaxes when it’s medium. You practice letting both truths coexist without forcing a tidy narrative. That’s a hallmark of recovery: you stop outsourcing the meaning of your preferences to someone else’s story.

A practical decision-rule I teach: give yourself three different contexts for any contested like. If the preference survives being tested alone, with a friend, and in a slightly different situation, it’s likely authentic. If it flickers dramatically across contexts, hold it lightly and retest later. This method turns ambivalence into data rather than a moral failing.

The Systemic Lens: Why Female Socialization Pre-Trained Women for Self-Erasure in Narcissistic Relationships

We can’t talk about rediscovering yourself after a narcissist without naming the water we swim in. Most driven and driven women were taught early, explicitly or implicitly, that being “easy,” “pleasant,” and “cool with whatever” is attractive, collegial, and safe. We learned to apologize for taking up space, to offer the window seat, to bring the snacks, to remember birthdays. None of that is inherently problematic. The issue arises when cultural training meets a partner whose entitlement requires your erasure.

Consider the cumulative messaging:

• Be agreeable at work.
• Be flexible with friends.
• Keep the peace at home.
• Don’t be “too much.”

Layer onto that the professional environments many of you navigate, medicine, law, academia, tech, where women are still often socialized to make themselves smaller to be accepted. It isn’t a character flaw if you became exquisitely skilled at attunement. It’s a survival skill in many systems. And in a narcissistic relationship, that very skill can be weaponized against you.

Lisa Aronson Fontes, PhD, writes about coercive control as a pattern of domination that can look like “care” at first: “I’ll take care of dinner,” “I’ll handle the finances,” “Wear this, you look amazing in it.” Slowly, your world shrinks. ^[1] Bessel van der Kolk, MD, reminds us your body maps those constraints. ^[2] Resmaa Menakem, MSW, adds that this mapping is not just individual but intergenerational and cultural; your grandmother’s vigilance lives in your shoulders, your mother’s silence sits in your jaw. ^[3]

So we hold the system responsible, too. Recovery isn’t simply an individual act of will; it’s a countercultural practice of taking up space. When we reconstruct your preferences, we’re working against the grain of misogyny and the narrow lanes available to women in late capitalism. This is one reason I advocate for chosen family as part of healing, communities where it’s normal to ask, “What do you want?” and to wait for the answer.

The systemic lens also helps with compassion. If you realize you defaulted to others at home after decades of being told “don’t make waves,” you can see the behavior as a response to social pressure, not a defect. That perspective reduces shame and makes curiosity possible, which is a more generative clinical posture.

How to Heal / Path Forward

In my work with clients, this is the practical arc we follow. It’s not linear; it’s iterative and humane. We anchor your nervous system, excavate preferences gently, grieve losses, and build a life you can feel.

1) Stabilize your system so choice doesn’t feel dangerous.

• Before we pick paint colors, we build capacity. Many clients go dissociative at choice points. We start with nervous-system regulation so your body can tolerate preference without flipping into fawn or freeze.

• Three stabilizers I teach early:
• Orientation: Slowly turn your head and eyes to take in the room. Name five blue things. Feel the chair under your thighs. It seems basic; it teaches your vagus nerve that you’re safe here, now. ^[4]
• Breath pacing: Inhale for 4, exhale for 6, 8. Longer exhales cue settling. Do this for three minutes before making choices. ^[4]
• Contact: Place one hand on heart, one on belly. Ask, “Where in my body do I feel most neutral right now?” Rest attention there for 60 seconds. Neutral is enough.

• If you’re early in your rebuild, see somatic healing to shore up safety skills alongside foundational supports.

2) The Preference Excavation Protocol: micro-choices, daily.

We don’t start with career pivots. We start with coffee.

• Set a daily 10-minute window for deliberate micro-choices. Consistency matters more than intensity.

• Use this rotation for 30 days:
• Day 1, 7: Taste, Coffee vs. tea? Lemon or plain water? Oat milk or dairy? Take a small sip of each option. Close your eyes. Notice: warmth/coolness, expansion/constriction, salivation/dryness, sigh/hold. Log observations, not verdicts. ^[2]
• Day 8, 14: Sound, Silence vs. music vs. ambient noise. Acoustic vs. electronic. Volume at 2 vs. 5. Notice breath, shoulders, jaw. Which setting lets your ribs move freely?
• Day 15, 21: Movement, Trail or pavement? Slow yoga or brisk walk? Ten minutes is enough. Track energy afterward.
• Day 22, 30: Texture/Environment, Cotton tee vs. silk blouse. Bright light vs. lamp. Window open vs. closed. Plants in view vs. art.

• Create a “Yes/No/Maybe” board. Yes = felt clearly good. No = constricted, numb, or spiky. Maybe = ambiguous; revisit later.

• Say out loud, alone: “I like…” “I don’t like…” Retrain your mouth to carry your preferences.

Pro tip: use contrasts. It’s easier to feel “this, not that” than to decide in a vacuum. Present your body with two options and notice which creates a micro-sigh. That’s data.

3) Small daily choices: scale slowly.

• Implement one Yes each day. If “open window” was a Yes, open it every morning for a week.

• Practice one No per day. Decline the extra meeting you don’t need to attend. Say, “I’m going to pass on sushi tonight.” Start with low-stakes contexts.

• Schedule weekly “delight experiments.” Try a new fruit, a new route, a new playlist. Keep experiments brief, 15 minutes is enough.

• Use “choice architecture.” Arrange your kitchen, closet, and calendar so your Yeses are easy to reach. Move the mugs you like to the front. Put the cobalt jumper on the first hanger.

4) The Body-as-Compass practice.

Interoception is the sixth primary sense. We’re going to train it.

• Build a Body Map of Preference:
• Draw a simple outline of your body on paper. After each micro-choice, mark sensations: warm spot in chest, heaviness in stomach, lightness behind eyes, pressure in throat. Use color codes (green for yes-like, red for no-like, yellow for unsure).
• Over weeks, patterns emerge. Many clients discover their “yes” signature is a warm, low chest sensation and a spontaneous sigh. Their “no” signature might be a tight jaw and lifted shoulders. ^[2][5]

• The 30-second drop:
• Before answering, “What do you want for dinner?” say, “Give me a second.” Drop attention into your torso. Which option yields a micro-sigh? Choose that.

• Movement cueing:
• If your body goes rigid at choice points, add movement. Shake your hands for 10 seconds, stamp your feet three times, roll your shoulders. Movement completes thwarted fight/flight energy and frees up access to preference. ^[5]

• Pleasure vs. relief check:
• After a choice, ask, “Do I feel more alive or more numb?” Relief can be useful sometimes, but it isn’t the same as pleasure. Notes like “felt blank after scrolling” vs. “felt spark after cello music” become guides.

If you’d like more tools for the Body-as-Compass sequence, my body compass primer has printable maps and daily scripts to use at home.

5) Everyday domains: work, food, clothes, home.

• Work:
• Identify one micro-preference you can assert weekly without permission: block a 30-minute focus window, take a walking 1:1, wear noise-canceling headphones if that’s a Yes.
• Use “decision handrails.” If self-caring choices are hard, pre-decide. Monday lunch = soup from the place you like. Friday 3 pm = 10-minute walk.
• Transfer decisional habits: practice the same quick-rule you use at work in personal choices. If you triage tasks at work, triage weekend options the same way: mood, energy, logistics.

• Food:
• Order sides to sample (two vegetables, two sauces) and taste-test at the table.
• At home, run “two ways” weeks: pasta two ways, eggs two ways. Sense which lights you up.
• Keep a “taste log” on your phone. After meals, note one word: satiated, bright, indifferent, heavy. Over time, patterns show.

• Clothes:
• Create a “hot rack” in your closet: five items that felt like a body Yes recently. Dress from the hot rack on busy mornings.
• Try a “mirror test”: put on an item and say aloud, “This feels like me.” Notice if the sentence lands or feels foreign.

• Home:
• Choose a corner and make it a Yes corner, one chair, one lamp, one throw, one plant. Your nervous system needs a predictable place where your preference is clear.
• Small environmental edits can have outsized effects: softer lighting, a plant on the kitchen counter, rearranged pillows. These are low-cost ways to teach your body that your choices matter.

6) Why your old hobbies might not be your new hobbies.

Your ex loved backcountry skiing; you did it, too. Was that you? Maybe. Maybe not.

• Decouple the activity from the relationship. Try it alone or with safe people. Change context: different mountain, different pace, different soundtrack.

• Notice grief. Pain may arise even if you like the sport. Take that as information, not a verdict.

• Allow identity expansion. You might discover you prefer snowshoeing, pottery, or indoor bouldering now. That isn’t regression; it’s growth. You’re meeting the woman you are at 45, not the woman you were at 33.

• Permission to retire a hobby: If your body repeatedly says “no,” you can stop, even if you invested time and gear. Sunk cost is a finance term, not a life rule.

7) Date yourself for 12 months before anyone else.

I often suggest a year of profound self-dating after a narcissistic relationship, not as punishment, but as an incubator.

• Months 1, 3: Stabilize and listen
• Friday evenings are for you. No social obligations unless they’re deeply wanted. Go where your body says “yes”, a bookstore with armchairs, a quiet museum hour, a coastal walk. Phone on Do Not Disturb.
• Create a “Me Menu” of 10 regulating activities (baths, specific tea, favorite bench). Use it like room service for your nervous system.

• Months 4, 6: Experiment and record
• Weekly “micro-dates” with discrete themes: taste (new bakery), sound (live acoustic set), movement (intro dance class). Keep a “Date Log”: What did I notice? What did my body do? Would I repeat?
• Try “context shifting”: do the same activity in different settings to test whether the activity or the association with the ex carries the response.

• Months 7, 9: Share and be witnessed
• Invite one or two trusted friends into this process. Tell them: “I’m practicing saying what I want. Will you ask me and wait?” Let them be your memory-keepers: “You lit up when you mentioned that ceramics studio.”
• Consider a month-long class in something that calls to you now, not then. Commit lightly: one month, then reassess.

• Months 10, 12: Consolidate and celebrate
• Review your logs. Identify top-five “body yes” activities, spaces, foods, sounds. Schedule them like a board meeting.
• Plan a solo celebration, a day trip, a splurge meal, a matinee, to mark how far you’ve come. Ritualize it: write a note to yourself naming three things you can feel now that you couldn’t feel a year ago.

If you’re considering dating others during this year and wondering how to make it safe, my guide to dating after a narcissist offers scripts and pacing suggestions.

8) Reclaim your voice in small, rehearsed ways.

• Script your lines:
• “I need a beat to decide.”
• “Let me check in with myself and circle back.”
• “I’m a no to that tonight; here are two yes options.”

• Practice in low-stakes contexts (coffee shops, with close friends) so the lines are in your mouth when higher-stakes moments arrive. This rewires the fawn pathway. ^[6]

• Try “two-beat answers.” Beat one buys time: “Give me a sec.” Beat two names a boundary or a preference.

• Create a “phrase bank” you can carry in your phone. When you rehearse the lines, record yourself saying them and listen back. Hearing your own voice practice makes it easier to use the words in real time.

9) Build a witnessing team.

In rediscovering yourself after a narcissist, isolation is the enemy. Find two to three people who can reflect you back accurately, friends, a therapist, a trauma-informed coach.

• Choose witnesses who:
• Ask open questions (“What do you want?”) and tolerate silence.
• Mirror your aliveness (“Your voice warmed when you mentioned the trail.”).
• Don’t rush you or take your “Maybe” personally.

• Be explicit: “I’m rebuilding my preference signals. Would you be willing to notice when my face brightens or my shoulders drop?”

• A few practical scripts to recruit witnesses:
• “I’m practicing saying what I want. Do you mind asking me and pausing for a full 10 seconds?”
• “When I tell you a micro-win (one thing I chose), can you reflect what you saw in my body?”

If you’d like guidance on building this kind of team, see my short guide to assembling a witnessing team.

10) Expect and normalize setbacks.

• There will be nights you order “whatever you’re having” out of habit. When that happens, don’t turn it into a morality play. Note it. Be kind. Try again tomorrow.

• If a particular decision consistently shuts you down (e.g., picking vacations), chunk it smaller. Instead of choosing a destination, choose the feeling-state you want (mountain quiet, urban buzz, ocean air). Then select options that fit.

• Watch for “preference whiplash.” Early on, you may swing from “I love this” to “I hate this.” That’s okay. It’s your nervous system stress-testing new circuits.

11) Track progress the right way.

Don’t measure by perfection (“I always know what I want now”). Measure by:

• Speed: How quickly can you sense your “no” compared to three months ago?

• Recovery: How fast do you come back to yourself after over-accommodating?

• Breadth: In how many domains (food, music, weekends, clothes) do you now have at least two clear Yeses?

• Self-trust: Can you tolerate the discomfort that sometimes follows saying what you want, and keep saying it?

Celebrate micro-wins. Neuroplasticity thrives on repetition and reward. ^[2]

12) When to get more support.

If the process repeatedly collapses, you dissociate, panic, or default to self-blame, this is a cue for more scaffolding. A therapist versed in complex trauma and coercive control can tailor interoceptive work to your window of tolerance, help you process the grief and anger that surface as you reclaim yourself, and coach you through the social risks of taking up more space. Therapeutic modalities I often integrate include somatic approaches (Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing), EMDR for traumatic memory processing, and attachment-focused work to repair relational templates. If you’re in Maine or open to coaching, this is the heart of my practice with driven and driven women.

As you work this plan, keep checking the bigger map: the post-relationship rebuild includes identity reconstruction and the broader skills of recovering after these relationships. Rediscovering your preferences is a cornerstone within that house.

If you cried at a menu, bought a cobalt jumper, or stood at your closet and felt blank, you’re not alone. In my office, the moment a client says out loud, “I like this,” is sacred, not because liking a pastry is profound, but because claiming your likes is how you stitch yourself back together. You’ve spent years wanting what they wanted, often to stay safe. Now you get to want what you want, not because it’s trendy or efficient, but because your life belongs to you. We’ll go slowly. We’ll listen to your body. We’ll build a handmade and meaningful life, one small yes at a time.

Sources Consulted

^[1]: Fontes, Lisa Aronson, PhD. Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship. Guilford Press.

^[2]: van der Kolk, Bessel, MD. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

^[3]: Menakem, Resmaa, MSW. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press.

^[4]: Porges, Stephen W., PhD. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

^[5]: Ogden, Pat, PhD, and Fisher, Janina, PhD. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment. W. W. Norton & Company.

^[6]: Clayton, Ingrid, PhD. Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, and How to Find Our Way Back. Sounds True.

^[7]: Estés, Clarissa Pinkola, PhD. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books.

Medical Disclaimer