It is very likely that you have ever noticed how certain people or behaviors evoke in you a variety of emotions, mainly unpleasant. Maybe you can't stand it when your partner interrupts you when you talk, while for her it doesn't matter and what really infuriates her is the mess. In other cases, a person may be annoyed by personal questions and, conversely, their best friend may feel abandoned when they are not interested in her. So, these types of situations or people that seem to trigger emotions without warning make us feel as if someone “pressed” the button and a heightened emotional response kicked in, as in an act reflection.
In this Psychology-Online article we will explain what are emotional buttons, types and effects that cause in relationships.
Index
- What are emotional buttons in psychology
- Types of emotional buttons
- How Emotional Buttons Affect Relationships
- Examples of emotional buttons
What are emotional buttons in psychology.
emotional buttons
Due to this intense emotional connection between the present and the past, the reaction is usually disproportionate relative to the reality of the situation. Emotional buttons are different for each person and can be seen in cases such as, for For example, when you get very nervous and scold someone who is late or interrupt you when speak.
Another person could consider these attitudes as minor and not give them importance and act in another way. In all these cases, it is very useful to ask yourself the origin of this answer.
Why emotional buttons are harmful
One very important aspect to keep in mind is that the volatile nature of our emotional buttons has detrimental implications for our lives. They can be very harmful as most reactions occur in an unconstructive and healthy way.
If our emotional buttons are frequently pressed they can sabotage all aspects of our lives, from our vision of ourselves, our academic and work efforts to our relationships. However, once we are calmer and try to approach the situation from another point of view, we are generally not proud of having reacted out of anger, impulsiveness, etc.
For this reason, it is very important to know and pay attention to our emotional buttons, since they They inform us about the aspects of our life in which we feel frustrated or dissatisfied and that we must improve.
How to suppress emotional buttons
The main characteristic of emotional buttons is that the current situation or person that "presses" them is very similar to a past experience of suffering. These painful memories trigger your survival instinct to try to protect yourself in the present, although the responses may vary from person to person.
On a neurological level, our emotional buttons are governed by the amygdala, which acts as a filter through which information about our world is processed and evaluated. The function of the amygdala is to identify any threat to our survival and to produce our fight or flight reaction. However, it fails to recognize the difference between a threat to our physical existence and a perceived threat on a psychological level.
Luckily, we also have another brain structure called the prefrontal cortex that gives us the ability to weigh risks and rewards, recognize consequences, identify options, develop plans, and ultimately make conscious and deliberate decisions about how we want to reply. When you respond to an emotional situation calmly and using logic instead of overflowing, you will be suppressing the activity of your amygdala and, therefore, your emotional buttons.
Types of emotional buttons.
Emotional buttons can vary from person to person and depend on personal history and past experiences. Some common examples of emotional button types include:
- Words or themes that touch a wound or a past trauma.
- Comments that question self-esteem or personal worth.
- Actionswhat makes someone feel ignored or excluded.
- critics about the physical appearance or intellectual capacity of a person.
- threats more or less explicit on individual physical integrity.
How to identify emotional buttons
Sometimes it can be difficult to recognize what our emotional buttons are. However, here are some questions that can help you identify them:
- good news announcements: When someone shares good news about their life with you and you can't help but be envious, what is the news about? Is it a job promotion? A new car? Is getting married? Do you have a new relationship? Are you expecting a child?
- Social networks: Have you noticed that there is someone you follow on social networks with whom you constantly compare yourself? What annoys you the most about their posts? How do you manage it?
- Sensitive topics of conversation: Have you noticed that there is a topic of conversation that upsets you when your friends and/or family mention it?
As we have already mentioned, emotional buttons are often difficult for the person experiencing them to identify. For this reason, partners, family members, and close friends are often the best at identifying our triggers. For example, your brother may know that if he corrects your driving, you will be extremely angry with him. Or that your partner avoids making suggestions that you can take as criticism.
Likewise, being aware of the emotional buttons of our loved ones can prevent us from hurting each other. However, this knowledge can become dangerousif used to press buttons that hurt the other when we are angry and defensive. In this article you will find information about How to control anger and aggression.
How emotional buttons affect relationships.
Many conflicts in a relationship escalate and go unresolved because one or both parties push the other's emotional buttons. For example, one person feels left out in a conversation and accuses the other of not caring about her feelings, getting the response that she is being dramatic. Consequently, this makes him even more angry because he associates the word "dramatic" with all kinds of negative attitudes such as "irrational", "overly emotional" and "manipulative”.
In this sense, emotional buttons play a particularly important role in relationships, since nothing activates us emotionally as much as our relationships with other people. The closer the relationship, the more likely it is to generate intense emotions in us. In some cases, we may be upset by words, tone of voice, or facial expressions of our partner, trying to read between the lines and attach all sorts of meaning to their behavior.
How is it possible that the closest relationships become a battlefield full of mutual provocations? Why do we end up hurting our relationships if they are important to us? The answer is found in the automatic nature of emotional buttons. When we “press” them, the most rational decisions go to the background and responses become more impulsive, primitive, poorly thought out and, often, exacerbated in comparison to the situation that generates them.
How emotional buttons distort reality
In this context of high volatility and instability in which we let ourselves be carried away by fear and not by logic, we can fall into distorted approaches. We do not see reality with all its nuances, but we interpret situations in an exaggerated and biased way through the intensity of the buttons. In turn, because emotional buttons connect the present with the past, especially painful experiences, we project old wounds onto our current relationships.
For this reason, our emotional buttons can lead us to distort our relationship and fit our partner into a box of the past. This happens, for example, when we project onto our partner attributes from previous relationships Or we intuit that he treats us as a family member did in childhood.
That is, we feel all the old and painful emotions that we experienced when our previous relationship ended or when we were children. In this way, it gives way to an oversized reaction that, in turn, causes intense emotions in our partner. If this situation is not addressed, in the long run it can affect the relationship and make us act unconsciously.
Examples of emotional buttons.
If a person has had an absent, uncaring or even cold father, it is likely that the predominant emotional button in him is related to the avoidance of intimacy because he learned that being in touch with his emotional needs was painful, frustrating, and even shameful. In these cases, it is likely that as adults they feel emotionally distant from your partner and come to conclusions like “why is my partner so focused on me? I need space, I can't deal with such an emotional person. He asks me too much, I need to escape.
Emotional buttons in couple relationships
An example of how a "pressed" emotional button affects our relationships is presented when we are in a situation where we may be rejected. Nobody likes to be ignored or talked about behind their back, but when our emotional button is acting does not tell us to calmly communicate with our fears so they can be heard and recognized. On the contrary, by pressing this button we interpret any behavior as a slight or rejection.
In this sense, in a situation where our partner is not paying attention to us (perhaps because we are busy or distracted), our emotional button interprets that our partner finds us uninteresting, that they will soon get tired of us and that they will reject and abandon us. If our reaction is to talk to her, we probably do it in an unassertive and exacerbated way, which can trigger their emotional buttons and enter a cycle in which one person provokes the other without anything happening. resolve.
These types of dynamics are known and familiar to us because we have learned them during childhood and our first love experiences. In this sense, other examples of how emotional buttons affect our relationships are the following:
- A person who has been cheated on in the past and she is afraid that they will be unfaithful again. When she realizes that her partner is looking at someone else, she remembers and feels all the anguish and pain associated with betrayal. Her emotional button “pressed” will direct her: “If I loved you, I wouldn't look at other people, so she wants to be with others and she's going to leave you. You have to confront her right now or she will trick you."
- On the other hand, a person with a history of emotional dependence may not tolerate the space between her and her partner. When you text her and her partner doesn't reply right away, your emotional button related to the fear of abandonment will direct her thoughts: "My partner is upset with me and that's why I don't answer me. I have to call him quickly to apologize and fix things."
How to manage emotional buttons in relationships
In many cases, people assume that these overreactions are because their partner or relationship is not right and that to change their reaction they have to change partners. The idea is not to run away from situations and people that generate emotions in us, however uncomfortable they may be, but rather take practical steps to care for ourselves, take care of our relationships and develop a strong inner voice that helps us manage uncomfortable situations.
When we understand the way in which our wounds from the past limit our present and “infiltrate” our thoughts and behaviors, we will be able to choose another way that better reflects who we really are and what we really feel.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to What are emotional buttons, types and effects, we recommend that you enter our category of Emotions.
Bibliography
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- Greenberg, L. S., & Bolger, E. (2001). An emotion‐focused approach to the overregulation of emotion and emotional pain. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 57(2), 197-211.
- Greenberg, L. S., & Safran, J. d. (1989). Emotion in psychotherapy. American psychologist, 44(1), 19.
- Greenberg, L. S. (2002). Integrating an emotion-focused approach to treatment into psychotherapy integration. Journal of Psychotherapy integration, 12(2), 154.
