How Needs, Wants, Values, and Traits Shape Our Lives
Have you ever found yourself achieving something you thought you wanted, only to feel strangely empty afterward? Or perhaps you've struggled to live according to values you genuinely believe in, yet keep falling back into patterns that contradict them? These common experiences point to a deeper psychological architecture that influences our choices and wellbeing in profound ways.
The Four Forces That Drive Us
Our internal landscape is shaped by four distinct yet interconnected forces:
Needs: The fundamental requirements for our psychological and physical wellbeing
Wants: The specific strategies we develop to satisfy these needs
Values: The principles and qualities we consciously choose to guide our lives
Traits: Our natural tendencies and characteristic ways of engaging with the world
Understanding how these forces interact can transform how we approach personal growth, decision-making, and fulfillment.
Wants as Strategies for Unconscious Needs
One of the most powerful insights from modern psychology is that our conscious desires often function as strategies to meet deeper, often unconscious needs. When we say "I want a promotion," the specific position is the want, but the underlying need might be recognition, security, or impact.
These needs are universal human requirements—connection, autonomy, competence, security, meaning—though how we experience and prioritize them varies individually. They operate largely beneath our awareness, yet profoundly influence our motivations and satisfaction.
The challenge is that we often become fixated on particular strategies (our wants) without recognizing or examining the needs they're meant to satisfy. This leads to several common problems:
Pursuing wants that ineffectively address our actual needs
Continuing to feel empty even after getting what we thought we wanted
Creating rigid attachments to specific outcomes rather than remaining flexible about how needs can be met
Failing to recognize when different wants are attempting to satisfy the same underlying need
As psychologist Marshall Rosenberg noted in his work on Nonviolent Communication, connecting with our fundamental needs rather than fixating on specific strategies dramatically increases our flexibility and satisfaction.
The Limiting Role of Expressed Traits
Our wants don't emerge in a vacuum—they're shaped by the traits and tendencies we habitually express. If you've always identified as "not creative," you're unlikely to develop wants that involve artistic expression, even if creativity would deeply satisfy your need for meaning and self-expression.
Our traits—whether innate tendencies or developed patterns—create the boundaries within which our strategies typically operate. Someone high in conscientiousness naturally develops different strategies than someone high in spontaneity, even when addressing the same fundamental needs.
The Conditioning of Our Expressed Traits
It's crucial to recognize that many of our expressed traits weren't freely chosen, nor genetically programmed—they were conditioned by our early environments and experiences. As children, we were incredibly vulnerable and dependent on our caregivers for survival. We intuitively learned which aspects of ourselves were safe to express and which were dangerous.
The child whose emotional expression was met with dismissal or punishment learned to suppress their feelings and develop a trait of stoicism
The child whose independence triggered abandonment anxiety in a parent learned to cultivate pleasing behaviors and suppress autonomy
The child whose family valued achievement above all else learned to express traits of perfectionism while suppressing playfulness
These adaptations were brilliant survival strategies in their original context. The problems arise when we continue operating from these conditioned traits long after leaving the environments that necessitated them. What once protected us now constrains us.
As psychologist Gabor Maté observes, "The personality traits that helped us fit into a dysfunctional environment as children can prevent us from finding a fulfilling balance as adults." Many of our most limiting expressed traits represent what was safe to be when we were vulnerable, not who we truly are or could become.
However, we often confuse the traits we habitually express with the totality of who we are. Carl Jung's concept of the "persona" (the socially acceptable aspects of ourselves that we identify with) versus the "shadow" (the aspects we repress or deny) offers a useful framework here. We all contain multitudes but often limit ourselves to a narrow range of our full capacities.
The Clash with Conscious Values
Perhaps the most common source of inner conflict comes when our habitual strategies clash with our conscious values. This manifests in statements like:
"I value health but keep engaging in behaviors that undermine it."
"I believe in honesty but find myself being manipulative to get what I want."
"I care about connection but prioritize work over relationships."
These conflicts aren't merely failures of willpower. They often indicate that unconscious needs are being addressed through strategies that violate our values. The need itself isn't wrong—it's essential—but the strategy needs reconsideration.
The Path to Inner Alignment
Achieving greater inner cohesion means developing strategies (wants) that satisfy our fundamental needs while honoring our conscious values and potentially expanding beyond our habitual traits. This process involves several key steps:
1. Need Awareness
Begin by developing greater sensitivity to your fundamental needs. When you feel a strong desire or emotion, ask yourself: "What need might be seeking fulfillment here?"
Common universal needs include:
Connection and belonging
Self Worth and Dignity
Autonomy and choice
Novelty and stimulation
Competence and mastery
Security and safety
Meaning and purpose
Physical wellbeing
Learning to identify these needs beneath your specific wants creates immediate flexibility. There are many ways to meet a need for connection beyond the particular relationship or social approval you might be fixated on.
2. Strategy Evaluation
Examine your habitual strategies (wants) with curiosity rather than judgment. Ask:
"How effectively does this strategy meet my underlying need?"
"Does this strategy align with my values?"
"What are the short and long-term consequences of this approach?"
This evaluation isn't about labeling strategies as "good" or "bad" but about assessing their effectiveness and alignment with your broader goals and principles.
3. Trait Integration
Perhaps most challenging is recognizing when you need to access traits or capacities you've historically repressed or denied. This often requires understanding which parts of yourself were unsafe to express in your formative environments:
The person raised in a family where anger was dangerous may need to reclaim healthy assertion
Someone who learned that vulnerability led to exploitation may need to rediscover their capacity for openness
A person who was only valued for achievements may need to embrace their playful, non-productive side
Someone who learned that their needs overwhelmed others might need to practice asking for support
As therapist Pete Walker notes, "We were not born with these emotional management deficits. We were forced to create them to survive scary and overwhelming circumstances." Reclaiming these disowned traits involves both compassion for why you developed your adaptations and courage to move beyond them when they no longer serve you.
This integration work often involves:
The habitually compliant person accessing their capacity for healthy assertion
The chronically busy achiever embracing stillness and receptivity
The intellectual acknowledging and expressing emotions
The perpetual caregiver allowing themselves to receive care
Often, our most transformative growth comes not from becoming someone new but from integrating disowned aspects of ourselves—what Jung called "individuation."
4. Value-Aligned Strategy Development
The culmination of this work is developing new strategies that:
Effectively meet your fundamental needs
Honor your conscious values
May draw on previously unexpressed traits
This often requires creativity and experimentation. For instance, someone with a need for recognition who previously used manipulation might discover that authentic contribution yields more sustainable satisfaction while aligning with their value of integrity.
A Practical Example
Consider someone who finds themselves constantly seeking approval on social media, despite valuing authenticity and deep connection.
The Want: Regular validation through likes and comments
The Underlying Need: Belonging and recognition
The Habitual Trait: External validation seeking
The Conflicting Value: Authenticity
Their path to alignment might involve:
Recognizing the legitimate need for belonging and recognition
Acknowledging that their current strategy provides only fleeting satisfaction
Exploring their capacity for vulnerability and self-validation (previously repressed traits)
Developing new strategies like cultivating fewer but deeper friendships where they can be fully seen and appreciated
The Reward: Authentic Fulfillment
When our strategies for meeting needs align with our values and integrate more of our full range of traits, we experience a profound sense of coherence and authenticity. We no longer feel pulled in different directions by competing internal forces.
This alignment doesn't mean eliminating all internal tension—some creative tension is essential for growth. But it does mean that our actions emerge from a more integrated place. We experience less internal resistance to living according to our values because we've found ways to honor our needs that don't require compromising what matters most to us.
The psychologist Carl Rogers described this state as "congruence"—when our self-concept, our experience, and our expression align. It's a state of psychological wellbeing that goes beyond momentary happiness to encompass a sense of wholeness and integrity.
The Ongoing Journey
This inner alignment isn't achieved once and for all. As we grow and our circumstances change, we continually discover new needs, develop new values, and uncover aspects of ourselves that have remained in shadow.
The process is less about reaching a final destination than about developing the ongoing capacity to recognize when we've fallen out of alignment and the tools to restore coherence. With practice, we become more adept at noticing when a particular want is no longer serving its underlying need or when we're relying on strategies that conflict with our deeper values.
Through this continuous process of discovery and integration, we create lives that are not only more effective but more authentic—lives where our actions naturally express our values because we've found ways to meet our needs that honor who we truly are and who we aspire to become.
Comments