Getting Free Of Your “Buttons”
How often have you heard the expression: “I can’t help it. S/he pushes my buttons.” How often have you said it yourself? If you are like 99.9% of the humans walking around on the planet, you live your life at the mercy of any number of strong emotional triggers that you have been carrying around with you since childhood. These emotions are most commonly activated in the context of your closest relationships. You may even find yourself helpless in the face of your internal programming, and unable to creatively manage your response to the emotion. Your “button” has been “pushed”.
Our responses to strong internal emotion generally take the form of irrational reactions, impulsive behaviors, distortions of our perceptions, and sometimes even sensations in our bodies. These states impair our ability to think clearly and remain flexible in our response to our partners, our children and sometimes even the random people we encounter in the regular course of our lives. When emotions are triggered, we lose the ability to clearly hear or “see” the other person or situation for what it is, because our own internal experience is so powerful that it hijacks most of our awareness. Even when you want to choose a different response, even when you have sworn to yourself, “Next time I am going to do it differently!”, you find yourself coming back with a thoughtless or knee-jerk response, when one of your “buttons” is pushed.
Response flexibility is the ability of the rational mind to sort through a wide variety of mental processes, like ideas, impulses, and feelings, to come up with a thoughtful, non-automatic response. This capacity for having your actions arise out of intention is the opposite of being ruled by knee-jerk, emotional reactions and internal programming. Being able to respond in ways that are creative and flexible, ways that are based on a vision of the life you want to create, rather than out of internal programming from your own childhood, is one of the greatest challenges of the human existence. Response flexibility is the cornerstone of emotional maturity and compassionate relationship. It allows us to be the intentional sculptor of not only relationships, but our lives.
So where do “buttons” come from? How do we start to free ourselves from them and develop the response flexibility we need to create the lives we want?
Your “buttons” come with you from childhood. Though not the only source of the emotions that overrule your reason, the interactions we had with parents and siblings were likely the greatest source of them. The experience you had in the family you came from shaped your brain from the time you were born by structuring the connections among the neurons (ie. Your parents were the active sculptors of your growing brain through the way in which they interacted with you, and the kind of attachment you developed with them.) No matter how skillfully and tenderly we were parented, just about everyone of us periodically has the experience of being a puppet, with our emotions at the strings. Babies are born with a powerful innate drive to be pleasing in the eyes of their caregivers, while caregivers are not always pleased. The most common buttons, carried in some form by most people regardless of the strength of the attachment they had with their parents, stem from feelings of unworthiness, rejection, blame, shame, and judgment. And some kinds of family interactions predispose children to emotional triggers that are more deeply ingrained than those carried by people who were raised within emotionally consistent and appropriately responsive families.
If your caregivers were not responsive to you when you communicated your needs to them, if they were emotionally distant, and/or had a difficult time responding in a compassionate way to your emotions, it is likely that you are an adult prone to depression. You may have a hard time “putting yourself in the shoes” of another, and even getting deep enough inside yourself to understand and name what is going on with you. You may also have a hard time reading other people’s nonverbal communication and social cues. Adult children of low-response parents are likely to have triggers that are amplified by a world view based on scarcity: You believe there is not enough to go around; or the world never meets your needs; or you will never have the life you really want.
If, on the other hand, you were raised by caregivers who were sometimes responsive to you when you communicated your need for them, and sometimes not, creating no reliable pattern of response, then you have likely developed a brain wired to experience a lack of safe and solid ground in your world. Individuals from families in which the response from parents was inconsistent or random, tend to be prone to anxiety. They grew up in a universe that did not make sense. If you came from a family like the one I am describing, you may be more reactive and emotional when you feel powerless than the average person. You may have a sense that nothing you do ever makes a difference because you are at the mercy of any random higher authority. You may tend to drop into a fight or flight response rapidly. You likely have a strong need to please other people, and a stronger than average need not to experience negative outside judgment.
Finally, if you come from a family system that was abusive, and were punished as a child for even trying to communicate your needs, you are likely carrying strong and deeply ingrained triggers sourced from the crazy violent and chaotic environment in which you were raised. You may even experience chronic mental health issues like post-traumatic stress, or disassociation, which are simply other names for huge triggers that have grown so immobilizing that they make day to day functioning difficult.
There is good news! It’s never too late to heal your brain!
Scientists used to believe that by the time you were in your teens you basically had the brain you would be stuck with for life. Contrary to old research, recent finding indicate that early experience does not seal your fate. Research from the last ten years demonstrates that while you may not actually make new neurons, it is possible to rewire the ones you already have so they relate to one another in a new and healthier ways, literally reshaping the pathways of your brain.
Which brings us back to Response Flexibility!
Experiences from childhood that are not fully processed create unresolved internal issues, the “buttons” that influence how we manage our lives and react to each other now. The key to freeing yourself from your childhood programming and gaining proactive flexibility in your responses, is reintegrating your brain by making sense of the life experiences you have had. As Daniel Seigel, author of Parenting From the Inside Out puts it: “If you had a difficult childhood, but have come to make sense of those experiences, you are not bound to re-create the same negative interactions with your own kids <partner, friends>. Without such self understanding, science has shown history will likely repeat itself.”
We can’t change what happened to us as children, but we can change how we think about those events. That is where our power as adults lies. You hold the ability to restructure your own brain, disconnecting your “buttons” in the process. Coming to an understanding of the story of your life, and the roots of why you behave and feel the way you do, gets the two hemispheres of your brain (emotion and logic) talking to each other. This process reintegrates your brain in a new way so you have more control over your capacity for making your actions match up with your intentions. When we are kids, our parents seem like Gods. Developing an understanding of your caregivers as people who were at the mercy of their own triggers, and did the best they could given what they knew, begins to undermine negative beliefs about yourself that developed in response to the way they reacted to you. Getting a handle on why your childhood was the way it was dwarfs it into perspective as just a small fraction of your life experience, stuff that happened long ago that no longer needs to define you as it once did.
Following is a list of response flexibility-building ideas, tools for helping you rewire old buttons, and begin to make sense of the life that you have had. For best results, I recommend taking the time to journal about these questions and issues.
1. Start watching yourself in situations when you get so hijacked by your emotions that you lose your response flexibility. Ask yourself, “In what way is this a pattern for me?” “When has this happened before?” Then start start giving each of your “buttons” it’s own name.
2. See if you can connect your adult “buttons” with the life you had as a child. Ask yourself, “What things were happening when kid-me felt the way I feel when high emotions are triggered now?”
3. Your life has been an interesting story, even if it was less than perfect. Make meaning for yourself out of your experiences, and tell yourself new stories with added perspective about old things that happened to you. As yourself: “Why did my experiences happen to me?” “What was going on inside my parents and my family that contributed to my experience of childhood?” “What do my experiences mean to me now?” “What are the gifts I received from being born into my family as well as the challenges?”
4. We often try to control other people’s feelings and behavior in an attempt to keep them from pushing our “buttons”. Not only is it not the responsibility of anyone else to keep from doing so, but trying to control other people does not work very well. Moreover, it continues to leave you at the mercy of the rest of the world outside of you, and you can’t control the whole world! You only really have the power to change you. Your best bet is to work on expanding your ability to soothe yourself on the inside in the face of the experiences that trigger the emotions that steal your power and flexibility. People have successfully used all of the following to undermine the power of their emotions over time: breathing consciously, mantras and affirmations, taking a time-out, talking compassionately to the self, and recognizing and naming the “button” as it is happening thus bringing to consciousness in the moment why you are starting to feel the way you do.
5. Finally, beating yourself up for having the “buttons” you have does not weaken their power over you. It does, in fact, make them further entrenched. Offering yourself compassionate understanding for why you are the way you are, and developing an appreciation for the gift you are to the world, is one of the most powerful tools for dissolving the power that other people and your emotions have over you, freeing you up to reach your full potential as the person you were born to be.
How often have you heard the expression: “I can’t help it. S/he pushes my buttons.” How often have you said it yourself? If you are like 99.9% of the humans walking around on the planet, you live your life at the mercy of any number of strong emotional triggers that you have been carrying around with you since childhood. These emotions are most commonly activated in the context of your closest relationships. You may even find yourself helpless in the face of your internal programming, and unable to creatively manage your response to the emotion. Your “button” has been “pushed”.
Our responses to strong internal emotion generally take the form of irrational reactions, impulsive behaviors, distortions of our perceptions, and sometimes even sensations in our bodies. These states impair our ability to think clearly and remain flexible in our response to our partners, our children and sometimes even the random people we encounter in the regular course of our lives. When emotions are triggered, we lose the ability to clearly hear or “see” the other person or situation for what it is, because our own internal experience is so powerful that it hijacks most of our awareness. Even when you want to choose a different response, even when you have sworn to yourself, “Next time I am going to do it differently!”, you find yourself coming back with a thoughtless or knee-jerk response, when one of your “buttons” is pushed.
Response flexibility is the ability of the rational mind to sort through a wide variety of mental processes, like ideas, impulses, and feelings, to come up with a thoughtful, non-automatic response. This capacity for having your actions arise out of intention is the opposite of being ruled by knee-jerk, emotional reactions and internal programming. Being able to respond in ways that are creative and flexible, ways that are based on a vision of the life you want to create, rather than out of internal programming from your own childhood, is one of the greatest challenges of the human existence. Response flexibility is the cornerstone of emotional maturity and compassionate relationship. It allows us to be the intentional sculptor of not only relationships, but our lives.
So where do “buttons” come from? How do we start to free ourselves from them and develop the response flexibility we need to create the lives we want?
Your “buttons” come with you from childhood. Though not the only source of the emotions that overrule your reason, the interactions we had with parents and siblings were likely the greatest source of them. The experience you had in the family you came from shaped your brain from the time you were born by structuring the connections among the neurons (ie. Your parents were the active sculptors of your growing brain through the way in which they interacted with you, and the kind of attachment you developed with them.) No matter how skillfully and tenderly we were parented, just about everyone of us periodically has the experience of being a puppet, with our emotions at the strings. Babies are born with a powerful innate drive to be pleasing in the eyes of their caregivers, while caregivers are not always pleased. The most common buttons, carried in some form by most people regardless of the strength of the attachment they had with their parents, stem from feelings of unworthiness, rejection, blame, shame, and judgment. And some kinds of family interactions predispose children to emotional triggers that are more deeply ingrained than those carried by people who were raised within emotionally consistent and appropriately responsive families.
If your caregivers were not responsive to you when you communicated your needs to them, if they were emotionally distant, and/or had a difficult time responding in a compassionate way to your emotions, it is likely that you are an adult prone to depression. You may have a hard time “putting yourself in the shoes” of another, and even getting deep enough inside yourself to understand and name what is going on with you. You may also have a hard time reading other people’s nonverbal communication and social cues. Adult children of low-response parents are likely to have triggers that are amplified by a world view based on scarcity: You believe there is not enough to go around; or the world never meets your needs; or you will never have the life you really want.
If, on the other hand, you were raised by caregivers who were sometimes responsive to you when you communicated your need for them, and sometimes not, creating no reliable pattern of response, then you have likely developed a brain wired to experience a lack of safe and solid ground in your world. Individuals from families in which the response from parents was inconsistent or random, tend to be prone to anxiety. They grew up in a universe that did not make sense. If you came from a family like the one I am describing, you may be more reactive and emotional when you feel powerless than the average person. You may have a sense that nothing you do ever makes a difference because you are at the mercy of any random higher authority. You may tend to drop into a fight or flight response rapidly. You likely have a strong need to please other people, and a stronger than average need not to experience negative outside judgment.
Finally, if you come from a family system that was abusive, and were punished as a child for even trying to communicate your needs, you are likely carrying strong and deeply ingrained triggers sourced from the crazy violent and chaotic environment in which you were raised. You may even experience chronic mental health issues like post-traumatic stress, or disassociation, which are simply other names for huge triggers that have grown so immobilizing that they make day to day functioning difficult.
There is good news! It’s never too late to heal your brain!
Scientists used to believe that by the time you were in your teens you basically had the brain you would be stuck with for life. Contrary to old research, recent finding indicate that early experience does not seal your fate. Research from the last ten years demonstrates that while you may not actually make new neurons, it is possible to rewire the ones you already have so they relate to one another in a new and healthier ways, literally reshaping the pathways of your brain.
Which brings us back to Response Flexibility!
Experiences from childhood that are not fully processed create unresolved internal issues, the “buttons” that influence how we manage our lives and react to each other now. The key to freeing yourself from your childhood programming and gaining proactive flexibility in your responses, is reintegrating your brain by making sense of the life experiences you have had. As Daniel Seigel, author of Parenting From the Inside Out puts it: “If you had a difficult childhood, but have come to make sense of those experiences, you are not bound to re-create the same negative interactions with your own kids <partner, friends>. Without such self understanding, science has shown history will likely repeat itself.”
We can’t change what happened to us as children, but we can change how we think about those events. That is where our power as adults lies. You hold the ability to restructure your own brain, disconnecting your “buttons” in the process. Coming to an understanding of the story of your life, and the roots of why you behave and feel the way you do, gets the two hemispheres of your brain (emotion and logic) talking to each other. This process reintegrates your brain in a new way so you have more control over your capacity for making your actions match up with your intentions. When we are kids, our parents seem like Gods. Developing an understanding of your caregivers as people who were at the mercy of their own triggers, and did the best they could given what they knew, begins to undermine negative beliefs about yourself that developed in response to the way they reacted to you. Getting a handle on why your childhood was the way it was dwarfs it into perspective as just a small fraction of your life experience, stuff that happened long ago that no longer needs to define you as it once did.
Following is a list of response flexibility-building ideas, tools for helping you rewire old buttons, and begin to make sense of the life that you have had. For best results, I recommend taking the time to journal about these questions and issues.
1. Start watching yourself in situations when you get so hijacked by your emotions that you lose your response flexibility. Ask yourself, “In what way is this a pattern for me?” “When has this happened before?” Then start start giving each of your “buttons” it’s own name.
2. See if you can connect your adult “buttons” with the life you had as a child. Ask yourself, “What things were happening when kid-me felt the way I feel when high emotions are triggered now?”
3. Your life has been an interesting story, even if it was less than perfect. Make meaning for yourself out of your experiences, and tell yourself new stories with added perspective about old things that happened to you. As yourself: “Why did my experiences happen to me?” “What was going on inside my parents and my family that contributed to my experience of childhood?” “What do my experiences mean to me now?” “What are the gifts I received from being born into my family as well as the challenges?”
4. We often try to control other people’s feelings and behavior in an attempt to keep them from pushing our “buttons”. Not only is it not the responsibility of anyone else to keep from doing so, but trying to control other people does not work very well. Moreover, it continues to leave you at the mercy of the rest of the world outside of you, and you can’t control the whole world! You only really have the power to change you. Your best bet is to work on expanding your ability to soothe yourself on the inside in the face of the experiences that trigger the emotions that steal your power and flexibility. People have successfully used all of the following to undermine the power of their emotions over time: breathing consciously, mantras and affirmations, taking a time-out, talking compassionately to the self, and recognizing and naming the “button” as it is happening thus bringing to consciousness in the moment why you are starting to feel the way you do.
5. Finally, beating yourself up for having the “buttons” you have does not weaken their power over you. It does, in fact, make them further entrenched. Offering yourself compassionate understanding for why you are the way you are, and developing an appreciation for the gift you are to the world, is one of the most powerful tools for dissolving the power that other people and your emotions have over you, freeing you up to reach your full potential as the person you were born to be.
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