Emotional Buttons: Why One Sentence Can Sting So Much

If our family of origin was badly broken, there will be a lot of trauma inside us, and we'll need to walk a road of healing. The first step is to recognize our own "repetition compulsion" and "emotional buttons."

Repetition Compulsion

Repetition compulsion means that in our relationships, especially close ones, we unknowingly repeat over and over the wounds or situations that left the deepest mark on us in childhood.

My younger sister is a real perfectionist; that's her repetition compulsion. Ever since she was little she felt she had to do everything perfectly to be loved, so she demanded that of herself, her husband and her kids. On top of that, she didn't know how to express herself. When she had feelings, she held them down. She often had headaches, kept having to take more painkillers, and in the end none of them worked. Later we discovered that whenever she had feelings inside that she didn't speak out, her body reacted in her head.

She learned to put her feelings into words and ask the other person, "Did I hurt you?" And very often it turned out to be just a misunderstanding. She was a perfectionist with her kids, too. When the two children played together, the moment she saw the slightest thing wrong she stepped in to discipline them. My brother-in-law said, "Let the kids be themselves. It's fine." But she felt he didn't care about anything. Actually, that was the repetition compulsion inside her.

Emotional Buttons

Emotional buttons, also called emotional allergies, are needs that went unmet as we grew up, which make us especially easy to hurt in certain kinds of situations. My sister's button is "unfairness." She was often treated unfairly as a child, so later, even when people were just following normal procedure, she'd worry: are you going to treat me unfairly again? That button made her put on tinted glasses without realizing it.

Once we recognize our own repetition compulsion and emotional buttons, we can be more objective when something happens: it isn't entirely this person in front of me hurting me; it's a feeling I've brought with me from my family of origin. We can adjust our "B," that is, how we see things, and respond more positively to what's in front of us, so that we don't suffer for nothing and the people around us aren't wronged either.

Don't Make Demands on Others Because You've Been Hurt

The second step is to come out of a wounded mindset and not make demands on others because we've been hurt. Our demands on the people around us, and the way we see them, are often colored by tinted glasses; they come out of a wounded heart. As a result, we hurt others without realizing it, and we ourselves stay stuck in a victim's feelings.

More than ten years ago, our eldest sister (Ruby老师) said to our younger sister, "The child is this big already. Why are you still spoon-feeding him?" Our eldest sister meant well, because she knew how to raise kids. But the low self-esteem inside our younger sister was acting up, and she felt "I really am no good," or "I don't want you telling me what to do." So she shut herself off completely and stopped talking to our eldest sister.

More than ten years later, they went on vacation together again. This time it was our younger sister who asked first: "Sis, is there anything you see my kids not doing well, or anything I need to change to do better? I can learn." Our eldest sister said, "There's one thing: you need to let your kids do for themselves what they ought to do." Our younger sister said, "That's great, I'll go and change that." Our eldest sister said, "You really are different now. You truly don't get offended anymore."

Because she knew her older sister loved her, she no longer looked at her through tinted glasses.