A Desire to Be Known

*The experience I describe below may trigger a painful response in you if you have experienced trauma. It is not graphic or explicit, but I want to prepare you just in case….

My first year of college was rough. As I transitioned from high school class president and co-captain of the cheerleaders to “unknown freshman” in a class of thousands, I felt vulnerable and alone. Besides losing position and relative popularity, I also lost the attention of the guy I had been dating. Although I should have been glad to be rid of him—he started to call me “chubby,” for goodness sake—it only added to my mounting insecurity. Looking back, I see that self-doubt and vulnerability had always been with me; I just had scaffolding and props to buffer me from the crippling insecurity I felt. Freshman year exposed it all. 

Given that my insecurity was at an all-time low, it wasn’t surprising when a handsome guy asked me to dance to Love Shack in a crowded college bar, I jumped at the opportunity. I will never forget how he kept staring at me across the room before finally asking me to dance. His relentless gaze made me feel seen and pursued—a first for me. Deep down, his attention felt a little “too good to be true-ish,” but my dry heart needed refreshment, so I went with the flow. Besides, he told me he wanted to cook dinner for me—my primary love language—so a follow-on date was inevitable. 

When I arrived at the guy’s on-campus apartment, I was surprised and more than a little disappointed that there was no evidence that a meal was forthcoming. Embarrassed to ask about dinner, given that the “chubby girl” title was still fresh in my mind, I sat next to the guy on his couch as he asked. 

Within minutes the guy jumped up to (perhaps?) grab a prepared appetizer from the frig, but sadly, food was not forthcoming.

Instead, he went to the door and locked it. My heart sank. 

I can still hear the lock click in my head and feel the alarm in my body… 

The click of the lock woke me up to the truth: This guy was not interested in getting to know me. 

Instead, he planned to use me. 

My heart was devastated.

It’s taken me decades to finally be able to look back on my eighteen-year-old self with compassion; I had always seen my younger self as an embarrassment. I judged her to be naive, stupid, gullible, and needy, so I tried to detach myself from this part of me that filled me with shame. The problem with that strategy is parts of ourselves can never be amputated like some diseased limb; they get dragged around with us, often informing and directing our thoughts and behaviors like a silent (but sick) partner in a business deal. Shame and pain seep into every part of our lives until healing is finally sought. Ask me how I know…

Before you mistakenly assume that the source of my shame was directly related to being lured into a college dorm by a young man who intended to use me, I want to set you straight: shame and pain were already well-established in my life before that happened to me. I may not have been able to articulate it, but all the signs were there. 

I’ve spent years tracing the meandering pattern of shame in my life, often surprised to discover another tributary that has made itself known. Although healing has come, I was perplexed about how I got to that state in the first place. Surely, there was more to this than childhood hurts and wounds, I reasoned. As it turns out, I was correct. 

It wasn’t until I read the first chapter of Dr. Curt Thompson’s The Soul of Desire that I began to understand the complexity of my condition. Dr. Thompson is fond of saying, “Every baby comes into the world looking for someone who is looking for him or her.” In other words, as humans, we long to be seen, heard, and felt by one whom we sense desires to see us, hear us, and feel what we feel. Indeed, we are formed by being known by others. Ultimately, these relational circumstances are tied to our desire for God and our desire to be desired by him. 

“Embedded in the process of being known is our awareness that the one by whom we are known desires to know us. As such, a critical element of our desire is that of being desired. We long to be infinitely desired, wanted by the other yet—and crucially—without being consumed by the other. Without being exploited.”

Simply put, God made us with a desire for connection.

For children to develop a healthy connection with their caregivers, they must experience feeling seen, soothed, safe, and secure. Dr. Thompson explains that the four S’s are also necessary for our discovery of desire and in the setting of limits that channel desire into patterns of beauty and goodness. If any of the four S’s are missing in childhood—a common problem for many of us—we can easily be distracted or become blinded to our longings. In other words, “Our desire can become muted under the fear of relational affliction or misdirected in our attempt to cope with the pain of trauma.” That pain is what leads to either avoiding desire or coping with unmet desire through a variety of addictions (or, in my case, behaviors that include wanting a stranger in a bar to see and know me.) 

That explains a lot.