Understanding What Our Feelings Are Trying to Tell Us

Have you ever noticed that emotions rarely appear without a reason? Whether it is joy, anger, sadness, anxiety, disappointment, or excitement, our emotions are constantly responding to something that matters to us. We often think of emotions as unpredictable forces that simply happen to us, but in reality they are deeply connected to our wants, needs, values, and expectations. The stronger our desire for something, the stronger our emotional response is likely to be when that desire is fulfilled, threatened, or left unmet.

As a marriage and family therapist, I often remind clients that emotions are neither good nor bad. They are information. They are part of an internal guidance system that continuously tells us what is important, what feels safe, what feels threatening, and what deserves our attention. When we begin to understand the relationship between our emotions and our wants, we become less reactive and more capable of responding thoughtfully to life’s challenges.

Every Emotion Begins With Something That Matters

Imagine that two people receive the same criticism from their supervisor. One shrugs it off and continues with the day, while the other feels deeply hurt and anxious. The difference is not necessarily the criticism itself but what it represents. For one person, the criticism may simply be feedback. For the other, it threatens a deeply held desire to be respected, appreciated, or seen as competent.

Our emotions are rarely about events alone. They arise because those events interact with something we want. When we long for acceptance, rejection hurts. When we value fairness, injustice evokes anger. When we cherish a relationship, emotional distance creates sadness. Our feelings reveal where our heart is invested.

This understanding encourages us to ask a different question. Instead of asking, “Why am I feeling this way?” we might ask, “What important desire or value is this emotion pointing toward?”

Emotions Reflect Both Healthy and Unhealthy Wants

Not every want contributes equally to our well-being. Some desires are deeply connected to our emotional health. We all want to love and be loved, to belong, to feel respected, to experience purpose, autonomy, and security. These are fundamental human longings, and our emotions naturally respond when they are fulfilled or frustrated.

Other wants, however, are driven more by fear than by genuine need. We may want constant approval from everyone around us. We may want complete certainty in an uncertain world or expect our partner to always agree with us. We may desperately want to control situations that are ultimately beyond our influence.

When these unrealistic expectations dominate our lives, our emotional reactions often become more intense because reality cannot consistently satisfy them. The goal, therefore, is not to eliminate our wants but to examine them with honesty and compassion. Are they helping us grow, or are they keeping us trapped?

Anger Often Protects an Important Want

As an anger management counselor, I know that one emotion that illustrates this connection particularly well is anger. Many people think anger appears out of nowhere, yet anger almost always emerges when something we value feels threatened.

We become angry when we believe we have been treated unfairly, when our boundaries are violated, when we feel disrespected, or when an important goal is blocked. Beneath the anger often lies a simple want: the desire to be heard, valued, treated fairly, or emotionally safe.

When we focus only on expressing anger, we frequently overlook the deeper message it is trying to communicate. But when we become curious about the unmet want beneath our anger, we gain clarity. Instead of reacting impulsively, we can begin asking, “What is this emotion trying to protect?”

This shift transforms anger from an enemy into a guide.

Emotional Awareness Leads to Better Choices

Recognizing the connection between emotions and wants gives us greater freedom. We no longer have to become prisoners of every feeling that arises. Instead, we can pause long enough to understand what our emotions are communicating before deciding how to respond.

For example, disappointment may reveal that something meaningful did not happen as we had hoped. Anxiety may remind us that we care deeply about an uncertain outcome. Joy often tells us we are living in alignment with our values. Even grief reflects the depth of our love and attachment.

Once we identify the underlying want, we can ask an even more important question: Is this want consistent with the person I want to become?

Sometimes the answer is yes, and the emotion encourages us to act with courage and integrity. Other times, the emotion reveals expectations that need to be softened, unrealistic demands that need to be released, or fears that deserve compassion rather than obedience.

Living With Greater Intention

One of the most meaningful lessons we can learn is that we cannot always control whether our wants are fulfilled, but we can choose how we respond when they are not. Life will inevitably include disappointment, rejection, loss, and uncertainty. If our emotional well-being depends entirely on getting what we want, we will spend much of our lives struggling against reality.

Emotional maturity involves holding our wants with both passion and flexibility. We pursue what matters while accepting that not everything will unfold according to our plans. Rather than demanding that life conform to our expectations, we learn to respond to our emotions with curiosity, wisdom, and self-compassion.

When we understand the relationship between emotions and wants, our feelings stop being confusing interruptions and become trusted companions. They remind us what we value, illuminate what is happening within us, and invite us to live more consciously. Ultimately, emotions are not obstacles on the path to a meaningful life. They are signposts pointing us toward what our heart truly seeks—and offering us the opportunity to choose how we will respond with awareness, integrity, and compassion.

Deeper Look at Emotions and Wants

Aristotle was one of the first to recognize the value of emotion and see it as a positive force. To him, emotions were a manifestation of desire as a motivating factor. Without desire, we would never experience the urge to protect ourselves—or do anything at all, for that matter. Ideally, action should be guided by reason and purpose. Emotions are motivating factors that incite us to action.

Emotions have their origin in the universal human state of wanting (desiring, wishing for, hoping for) something. The level of wanting determines the state of our emotions. Much of what we want is instinctive, and some of it is learned as we grow.

We define success as getting what we want. We think of failure as not getting what we want. As far as causes for want or needs are concerned, one thing seems clear at the outset. As with anything else, we could either start our lives with wants, or we could pick them up along the way – or we could do a bit of both. In other words, some wanting could be instinctive, and the rest would have to be acquired (learned).

Let me explain the difference between learned wanting and instinctive wanting.

Learned Wanting

As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, some of our wants are learned (or acquired). Whenever we experience something pleasurable and enjoyable—going to the beach, eating a hot fudge sundae, making love, learning to ski, playing the piano—we want to experience those things again and again. On the other hand, whenever we experience something unpleasant or painful—being bullied, failing a test, breaking an arm or leg, struggling financially, experiencing rejection—we will do everything possible to avoid those experiences in the future. This is learned wanting. We experience something and we remember the feelings associated with that experience, whether positive or negative.

As we mature, we don’t always have to experience something to know that we want it—or want to steer clear of it. We’re able to combine our past experiences with creativity and reason to make decisions.

That last type of wanting can also be influenced by anything that affects our conditioning. Anything from the past behavior of our parents to the recent effects of advertising might contribute to the direction and intensity of our wanting.

Instinctive Wanting

Some of our desires and wants are instinctive. We’re usually aware of our learned wants and desires, but we may not be aware of instinctive desires consciously, at least not at first. They come from a deeper subconscious place within us. Because we’re not aware of them, they can catch us off guard and feel overwhelming when they do make themselves known.

In terms of defining these instinctive wants, psychologists and psychiatrists have not been able to come up with a definitive list. The most we can say with assurance is that human instincts exist. In this book, we’ll focus on some basic instincts: self-preservation, sex/reproduction, family, and society.

Sometimes urges are used interchangeably with instincts. For instance, we all have a basic need for air, water, food, and shelter. For our purposes, though, these urges can all fit under the umbrella of self-preservation. Sometimes aggression is referred to as an instinct, but I prefer to see it as a behavior, not an instinct. When we’re threatened physically in some way and respond with aggression, we are operating from an instinct of self-preservation. But if someone rejects us and we respond with aggression, this isn’t coming from the same place. Instead, it might be from a learned desire to avoid being hurt that stems from an experience we had as a teenager.

Emotional Intelligence

Regardless if the wanting is instinctive or learned, our ability to connect emotions to wants and specifically define our wants is key to our well-being and serves as a manifestation of our emotional intelligence.

As such, Emotional Intelligence is the ability to recognize your emotions, understand what message they are trying to provide us, and realize how our emotions affect other people. In other words, when we understand how we feel and are able to translate it to our needs, it allows us to attend to ourselves while being able to manage relationships more effectively.