Encore: Selfless Starvation: what dies in a woman when desire is abandoned

Women are praised for being selfless — but the cost is often desire: starved, silenced, abandoned. The marriage that quietly goes cold. The body that goes numb. The fire that flickers out. Melissa Barnes knows this terrain. Outwardly successful, inwardly empty, she spent years performing the role of the “good woman” while starving herself of desire, intimacy, and fire — until she became a ghost in her own life. After two decades as a funeral director and end-of-life care worker, she witnessed the sharp truth of what’s lost when we bury our hunger. Out of that rupture, she created The RISE Method™, guiding women who appear to have it all but feel hollow inside.