10.18.24 // “When you put your desires on mute, you also mute your intuition.”

I recently picked back up "The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power" by Katherine Morgan Schafler, and I’m damn glad I did. The book has given me incredible moments of understanding, challenging my perspective in the most beautiful ways. As I listened, I felt deeply known. Katherine’s words offer gentle suggestions, never blatant solutions, answering questions I never thought would be addressed outside my thoughts.
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One of the most impactful parts is chapter 9, where Katherine shares this: “When you put your desires on mute, you also mute your intuition.”
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She explains that pleasure, which leads to joy, is often confused with immediate gratification (joy + efficiency don’t mix). Pleasure isn’t loaded and doesn’t need justification. There’s a big difference between what you are supposed to do and what you want to do.
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“Without pleasure, our lives become performative; we perform in ways that make us happy instead of trusting ourselves to explore what feels good and right. This formula leads to depression and also leads women [she tends to address women since they were her clients] to conflate being selfish with experiencing pleasure - it made me feel good, so it was selfish... No, it made me feel good, so it was pleasurable.”
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This struck me: "performative joy." It refers to doing what we’re told should bring us pleasure rather than what we actually find pleasurable.
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Tied to performative joy is "conditional joy," which many perfectionists struggle with. Conditional joy means you only allow yourself pleasure based on performance rather than simply existing.
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This chapter called me out - and maybe it’ll call you out, too. I know I’m not the only one who confuses joy with gratification, puts boundaries on pleasure, and makes decisions based on achievement rather than what feels intuitively right.
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No wonder so many feel disconnected from intuition, unsure of what we even want. That’s not to say you should throw caution to the wind and live hedonistically (but also you do you), but for perfectionists trying to control - whether from trauma or other reasons - getting back to what brings joy may be key to reconnecting with intuition.