In her first book, Tell Me What You Want: A Therapist and Her Clients Explore Our 12 Deepest Desires, Charlotte Fox Weber delves headfirst into what she describes as the central mission of therapy: to uncover hidden longings and the deep desires that frighten and excite us. This includes desire in the sexual sense, as well as a yearning for love, understanding, attention, connection, and belonging. Weber is a London-based psychotherapist and the founder of the School of Life psychotherapy service. In Tell Me What You Want, she grants readers access to intimate conversations that unfold between her and her clients as they explore deep, often subconscious, wants and find ways to clarify priorities that will lead to healing, growth, calmness, and self-understanding. Client names and other identifying details have been changed to maintain confidentiality, but the difficult discoveries, hard-won insights and remarkable revelations that occur in productive therapy sessions are as viscerally real as it gets.
"Cultivating a healthy sense of self requires constant fine-tuning and updating," writes Weber in a chapter titled "Understanding." Here she and her client Sying, an architect and mother with an obsessive work style and low self-esteem, untangle the emotional layers of her personality to uncover long-ago dreams and ambitions. Working toward a resolution involves Sying breaking free of an unhealthy office dynamic while making space for her desire for professional recognition.
Tell Me What You Want offers readers client-approved strategies to fathom, interrogate, and accept innermost wants and longings as a springboard for personal growth. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer