The difference between feeling, emotion, desire, and reactivity

They're not the same thing! Sometimes an "emotion problem" isn't about emotion.

Recently I had the honor of being on the Bare Marriage podcast with Sheila Wray Gregoire. I’ve followed and supported her team’s work for several years. I appreciate the way they debunk damaging but popular Christian teaching about marriage and relationships, and I seek to do the same thing about bad teaching on emotion.

The most consistent feedback I got from the interview was people saying how helpful it was when I distinguished between feeling, emotion, desire, and reactivity. So many people think they have a problem with their emotions because they are experiencing overwhelming sensations in their bodies, when actually, what they are feeling might not be an emotion at all. In this newsletter, I’ll share those differences with you.

If you want to listen to the whole interview, you can watch the episode on YouTube here:

Bare Marriage Podcast

Or listen on your fave podcast app.

In US American English, we use the words feeling and emotion interchangeably. (Sheila confirmed this is also true in Canadian English.) But they are not the same word!

Feeling

A feeling is a physical sensation. You can feel cold, you can feel hungry, you can feel your heart beating faster, you can feel your stomach churning, but that's not an emotion.

Emotion

An emotion, according to the theory of constructed emotion from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, is the meaning that your mind makes from your feelings, your circumstances, your history, your language, your predictions, and your concepts. So you can have the same feeling like your heart fluttering or beating faster, but depending on your circumstances and how you've been trained by your culture to construct emotion, you might construct the emotion of nervousness or you might construct infatuation or you might construct excitement. So it can be the same feeling, but you might construct a different emotion from it based on a number of factors.

An emotion is feeling PLUS meaning-making based on many factors, all happening quickly in your mind.

Desire

I find, especially when talking to Christians, we also have to disambiguate emotion from desire. I hear so many messages from Christians that our desires can't be trusted, and desire is often equated with emotion, which they also think cannot be trusted. A desire is not an emotion. A desire is wanting something, with intensity. There might be emotions involved in desire, there might be feelings involved, but emotion, desire, and feeling are three different things. And none of the three is inherently evil or not to be trusted.

Reactivity

Furthermore, reactivity is not emotion. Reactivity is feeling spiked in your body and instinctually wanting to respond.

We all have a window of tolerance, which describes our comfortable range of ups and downs. When we are functioning within our window, we can stay pretty steady in our bodies, in our sensations, in our interactions with people when normal daily occurrences happen. Different people have differently sized windows of tolerance. Various experiences can impact our window of tolerance like stress, illness, PTSD, and neurodivergence. So your window of tolerance may be smaller or bigger. And when you suddenly feel like you just spike and your body’s going haywire and you start to have a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response, that's a reaction to something that's happening, but there might not be a clear emotion tied to it.

We often feel more reactive when we’re overwhelmed, when we’re flooded, and we need to go let our bodies calm down so that we can reengage the prefrontal cortex and make good decisions. Reactivity can often come from our minds trying to protect us from the pain of unhealed wounds. When those wounded parts of us are touched by something that just happened, we can feel like we are suddenly being pulled into our pasts. We end up reacting out of something that happened not in the present moment, but a long time ago.

But none of that is necessarily emotion.

I often see women, who are rightfully and understandably reactive because of unhealed wounds or difficult circumstances, labeled as overly emotional… when it's not an emotion problem. Maybe it’s an abuse problem or it’s a trauma problem or it’s a no one helps with the housework problem.

An important starting point in the conversation about emotional health is understanding that there’s a difference between feeling, emotion, desire, and reactivity.

What do you think about these differences in meaning? Leave a comment on the post.

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