- aseamster1996
- May 11
- 10 min read
"Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames." - Rumi
I'm sure we all have those people in our lives who never fail to push our buttons. These professional button pushers come in all varieties - the difficult client, the rebelling child, the untrainable dog/spouse - and if you're like me, it's easy to default to the thinking that life would be much easier and run much smoother if they would just leave us alone.
If we stop to think about it, all kinds of people and situations push our buttons. Examples range from the mundane like being cut off in traffic or having to constantly clean up after our untidy partner/spouse/kids, to more "serious" issues like never getting credit at work or it raining on our wedding day. What's ironic here is that while we hate to have our buttons pushed, it's sometimes enjoyable to push other people's buttons to get a rile out of them. We also know the people we have to walk on eggshells around because we don't want to deal with the aftershocks of their buttons being pushed.
These stored buttons are exactly why we may have told growing up, "You know we don't talk about those things around your [insert family member here]." We can't talk about it because mommy/daddy/grandpa/grandma have buttons, and it's much easier to stay quiet than to risk upsetting them. It's equally fascinating and scary how quickly we and those around us can change when our buttons are pushed. Gone is the person who is generally gentle and patient in their response, and in its place we find a tornado of reaction that will take out anything in its path to try to get its way.
While I'm sure we'd all wish for "that side" of ourselves and others to never show, it's REALLY REALLY hard not to react when a button is pushed. It's all happening so fast, and our reaction is so immediate that before we know it, we are acting like a toddler who was just told they couldn't buy the overpriced toy in the checkout line. "Grown," now our tantrums include slamming on the horn at the awful driver, yelling at the incompetent spouse, or getting upset when it rains during the weekend we were supposed to go camping.
Or, if you're like Riley from Inside Out, you get super upset and take out your frustration on a deck of cards...
We'll give Riley a pass on her freakout because she is a child, but I'm sure we've all been there. We probably are still there with a lot of situations if we are completely honest with ourselves. Unlike other "childish" habits we eventually out grow (sucking our thumbs, carrying a "blankie" around with us everywhere, etc.), it turns out that buttons aren't something that just go away with age but proliferate as we get older.
Anatomy of a Button
So what exactly are our buttons, and why are they there in the first place? Put simply, our buttons are the collection of our past experiences that we resisted because they were uncomfortable. As is shown in the clip above, Riley has various buttons on her "motherboard" that all join to comprise her programming. Similar to the programming in a computer, the button that is pressed determines how we re-act based on the data coming in from the outside.
While there are a lot of buttons on Riley's main circuit, it's vital to note that there isn't a button for every experience she has had. As it turns out, most of the things we experience daily, more than 99%, make it right through without being stored - the white lines on the road, the trees you pass driving, the random email on a Tuesday, what you had for lunch, whatever you see scrolling on social media, on and on and on. These neutral experiences make it right through without leaving an impression and needing a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth...) thought.
A button gets created when the usually neutral experience takes an unexpected turn and causes an uncomfortable emotion inside - like when the random email turns out to include a termination attachment, your scrolling on social media is suddenly halted by seeing your ex with their hot new fling, or the lunch from your favorite spot leaves you on the toilet for a few days with a bad case of food poisoning. The button, impression, we create for ourselves in all of these situations is not from the initial emotion - the anger/disgust/sadness/pain are all completely natural and we should feel them - but because we put up armor to protect ourselves from feeling these uncomfortable feelings.
Armor is a great tool for protecting us from blows from the outside environment, and our body comes equipped with an almost incomprehensible defense system that includes innate biological reactions to protect us from outside physical dangers. But the angry text? The nasty email? The house of cards falling? I can't speak for you, but I can't say that I've ever been physically attacked by a text message. But the negative feelings associated with unexpected situations leave us FEELING attacked inside. So the walls go up, we react, and the uncomfortable feeling we think we are blocking out ends up stored within.
I guess this would be fine if we were locking away feelings of peace, joy, bliss, and happiness (although the positive things we store can cause us a lot of trouble as well - but that's for a different day), but we end up filling ourselves with impressions, buttons, of the things we most want to escape. As one of my favorite authors, Michael Singer, says, "If you stored everything inside of you that ever bothered you, what's it going to be like inside? Bothered!" And that's exactly how it is for most of us.
Once an impression is stored inside, it creates inner scars, called Samskaras (Sanskrit for mental impressions left from previous past experiences). As these buttons are hit more and more, these "inner scars" (they aren't physical scars but are pockets of stored energy) add up, like scar tissue, and create buttons (hang nails) that constantly get hit by outside situations. Once a button is hit, we are hit with a similar uncomfortable feeling that caused us to resist it in the first place.
The Suffering Button
Although Riley's control panel in Inside Out looks quite innocent, don't let the Pixar animators fool you; these aren't cute little animated buttons. These buttons are inner wounds that will continue to fester as more situations hit them (like an open scab that is constantly getting picked and reopened). The longer it goes untreated, the more painful it gets, and the more painful it gets, the more we have to protect it in efforts not to feel the pain. A terrible cycle, right?
But it's a cycle that could have been completely prevented if we dared to sit with the pain of the unexpected event in the first place. Unfortunately, now that the button (wound) is stored, it begins to infect other areas of our lives. We're at lunch with a friend, and they let us know they were recently fired and that their boss took them to dinner to break the news. Seemingly out of nowhere, anger and resentment start to bubble up inside. "My boss didn't even have the decency to do that! All I got was an email attachment. Why do I always have to work for the worst bosses?" Or we're enjoying a quiet evening at home and glance at our phone to see a work email notification pop up. All we can see of the subject line is "Termi..." Our heart drops. "They can't be serious. I've already been fired once, and here we are in the same situation?!?! How am I going to pay the mortgage?" We finally muster the courage to actually open the email a few hours later, after completely catastrophizing and pouring lighter fluid on our immense emotions, and see that the full subject reads, "Termite problem in the work room resolved." You got fired 3 years ago, but because the impression of that experience is still there, aka the wound is not healed, the body reacts as if the original situation is happening again (because that original wound is being poked at). In those three years, the event that was initially completely out of our control is now completely controlling our lives.
What's insidious about our buttons is that when one of our stored buttons is hit, it's easy to shift the blame to the outside world and take the stance that the outside world is hurting us. We must slow this usually automatic reaction of defense and "they're hurting me" down to see that the outside world is doing what the outside world does. The pain resurfaces because the randomness of the outside world happens to hit one of our buttons (wounds) that we've stored.
We must confront the hard fact that we have turned what could have been one painful experience into the main reason for psychological suffering. Once we wake up to this, we have a huge decision to make; either we live a life where painful experiences come and go, or we live a life of suffering (simply defined as resisting what is) where we can never fully relax in the present moment because reality continually hits an experience we've trapped inside.
To illustrate the difference between pain and suffering, imagine that you're hiking and encounter a fence you need to get over to continue your journey. You step up to the fence, and as you start to climb over, you're suddenly zapped. Shocked, you automatically shout a few expletives and check for signs of physical damage. After the initial pain wears off, you look around and see that there is a gate in the fence not too far away that you can simply walk through. You opt for that route and continue on your journey. You felt the pain fully and continued your journey. Nothing is stored. You aren't suddenly scared of every fence you come across, you don't make a story about it, and you're fine.
The difference between how we handle stored buttons and how we handled the fence is that instead of getting shocked once and moving on, we hold onto the electric fence. Imagine that someone walks up and sees us in pain, and yet still holding on to the fence. "Uh, is everything alright? You know, you don't have to hang on to that anymore, right?" Quietly we we would respond, "But I have to. I need to hang on to this pain so it doesn't happen again..."
On top of that, after holding on for so long, we forget we initially stored the button and start believing that the fence/outside world is the one hurting us. As shocking as it may be, we are hurting ourselves by hanging on to the fence. We are the ones hurting ourselves by hanging on to our buttons and saying that the people and situations outside are hurting us when it's only hitting something that we stored in the first place.
We must remember that we don't suffer because our buttons are pushed; we suffer because we have buttons in the first place.
Fortunately for us, these buttons don't carry with them a terminal diagnosis, and it is actually within our power to nurture our inner wounds. It may even turn out that the exact people we blamed for pushing our buttons are the same people who may lead us to inner freedom.
Seek those who push your buttons
As with trying to acquire any new skill, one of the earliest ways to catalyze success is to start where you are. There's no reason to go down the rabbit hole of thinking, "Why didn't anyone tell me about these buttons when I was growing up. See, this is the problem with our education system." Or, "Austin, you haven't seen my life. There are so many buttons it would take a lifetime to even make a dent in what I've stored." It turns out that both of these are delay tactics the mind offers up to avoid getting near our buttons. They are delays in our growing up.
As Pema Chödrön states in her book, Start Where You Are, "If you're going to be fully mature, you will no longer be imprisoned in the childhood feelings that you always need to protect yourself or shield yourself because things are too harsh. If you're going to be a grown-up -- which I define as being completely at home in your world no matter how difficult the situation [no matter what button is being pushed] -- it's because you will allow something that's already in you to be nurtured."So, how exactly do we nurture these inner wounds that are running and ruining our lives?
As a reminder, this is how we create buttons:
This is the process by which we heal the buttons we have already stored:
This is not going to be an overnight process, but one that is going to be the work of a lifetime. What we are doing as we rid ourselves of these buttons is learning to be ok in the face of whatever happens. Are buttons still going to get pushed and lead to us reacting in silly and unproductive ways? Absolutely! But each time we see a reaction, we can compassionately remember to go inside and notice which button is getting hit so we can heal ourselves.
If these buttons were something physical we could see inside, we would go to a medical professional ASAP to get them removed. But they aren't. So, how in the world would we ever know where a button is so we can try to heal it? That's where the pesky button pushers come in.
The people we thought were singularly put on this planet to drive us crazy are actually there to show us the insane way we are living. To show us our insane ways of reacting and defending ourselves from every little thing that happens. As we do this work more and more, we will start to embrace this challenge from Pronoia, "Try this: Act as if your adversaries are great teachers. Thank them for how crucial they've been in your education." (Pronoia p. 111).
The lessons our perceived adversaries are teaching us won't be easy to learn, but the important thing is that we can learn. As we start watching, we'll begin to see just how reactive we are, and we can start healing ourselves. As we begin/continue that process, here are three easy steps you can remember that I've adapted from Anne Lamott's book titled "Help. Thanks. Wow."
Help: When a situation/person hits our button, take a breath and pause because this person is helping us see a trapped wound that needs to be healed
Thanks: Remember to thank yourself for doing the hard work of sitting with something uncomfortable. Most of the time, it will feel like the hardest workout of your life, but it will lead to the best life you could imagine for yourself—one of freedom (from inside constraints).
Wow: If we sit with the uncomfortable feeling long enough and don't cover it up or use a distraction to get away from it, it will feel like an internal cramp is releasing. Once that happens the first time, we will never be the same because it will become the best game of your life. We should and will be in awe of learning to heal ourselves (with the help of others).
Wow. What an opportunity we have in front of us. The opportunity to live a life where less bothers us, and so we have less of a need to react and defend ourselves constantly. As we embark on this journey together, it's vital to remember that we suffer not because our buttons are pushed but because we have buttons in the first place. Let's get to work healing them!
