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 if your partner interrupts you when you talk, while for him this is unimportant and what really infuriates him is the disorder. In other cases, a person may be bothered by personal questions, and their best friend may feel abandoned when they are not interested in her. Thus, these types of situations or people that seem to trigger emotions without prior warning make us feel as if someone “pressed” the button and a high emotional response came into action, as occurs in a reflex act.
In this PsychologyFor article we will explain What are emotional buttons, types and effects that they cause in relationships.
The emotional buttons They are very intense emotional reactions that occur when faced with certain people, situations or topics related to deep wounds from the past. Due to the high emotional charge they carry, when they are “pulsed” they trigger anguish, irritation, frustration, anger, sadness, despair or a feeling of loss of control in the person who experiences them.
Because of this intense emotional connection between the present and the past, the reaction is usually disproportionate in relation to the reality of the situation. Emotional buttons are different for each person and can be seen in cases such as, for example, when you get very nervous and scold someone who arrives late or interrupts you when you speak.
Another person could consider these attitudes as minor and not give them importance and act differently. In all these cases, it is very useful to ask the origin of this response.
Why emotional buttons are harmful
A very important aspect to keep in mind is that the volatile nature of our emotional buttons has detrimental implications on our lives. They can be very harmful since most reactions occur in an unconstructive and unhealthy way
If our emotional buttons are frequently pressed They can sabotage every aspect 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, impulsivity, etc.
For this reason, it is very important to know and pay attention to our emotional buttons, since they inform us of 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 an experience of suffering in the past. These painful memories trigger your survival instinct to try to protect yourself in the present, although responses may vary depending on the 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 produce our fight or flight reaction. However, it does not recognize the difference between a threat to our physical existence and a threat perceived 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, deliberate decisions about how we want to respond. When you respond to an emotional situation calmly and using logic instead of overwhelm you will be suppressing the activity of your amygdala and, therefore, your emotional buttons.
Types of emotional button
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.
Actions that make someone feel ignored or excluded.
critics about the physical appearance or intellectual capacity of a person.
Threats more or less explicit about 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 with you about their life and you can’t help but feel 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 media who you constantly compare yourself to? What bothers you most about their posts? How do you manage it?
Delicate conversation topics: 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, emotion buttons are usually difficult to identify for the person who experiences them. For this reason, partners, family 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 very angry with him. Or your partner should avoid making suggestions that you might take as criticism.
Likewise, being aware of our loved ones’ emotional buttons can prevent us from hurting each other. However, this knowledge can be dangerous if used to press buttons who hurt others when we are angry and defensive. In this article you will find information on How to control anger and aggression.
How emotional buttons affect relationship
Many conflicts in a relationship escalate and are not resolved because one or both parties push the other’s emotional buttons. For example, a person feels excluded in a conversation and accuses the other person of not caring about their feelings, getting the response that they are being dramatic. Consequently, this makes him even more angry because he associates the word “dramatic” with all kinds of negative attitudes such as “irrational”, “too 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 feel upset by words, tone of voice, or facial expressions of our partner, trying to read between the lines and attribute all kinds 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 damaging 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 take a backseat 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 allow ourselves to 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 rather we interpret situations in an exaggerated and biased way through the intensity of the buttons. In turn, because emotional buttons connect the present to 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 from the past. This occurs, for example, when We project attributes from previous relationships onto our partner or we sense that he treats us like a family member did in childhood.
That is, we feel all the old, painful emotions 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, provokes intense emotions in our partner. If this situation is not addressed, it can affect the relationship in the long run and cause us to act unconsciously.
Examples of emotional button
If a person has had an absent, unloving, or even cold father, it is likely that their predominant emotional button is related to avoiding intimacy because they learned that being in touch with their emotional needs was painful, frustrating, and even embarrassing. In these cases, it is likely that as adults they feel emotionally distant from their 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. It asks too much of me, I need to escape.”
Emotional buttons in 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 No one likes to be ignored or talked about behind his or her back, but when our emotional button is acting it doesn’t tell us to calmly communicate with our fears so they can be heard and acknowledged. On the contrary, by pressing this button we interpret any behavior as a slight or a 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 he will soon get tired of us and that he will reject and abandon us. If our reaction is to talk to her, we will probably do so in an unassertive and exacerbated way, which can trigger her emotional buttons and enter a cycle in which one person provokes the other without anything being resolved.
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 deceived in the past and he is afraid that they will be unfaithful to him again. When he notices that his partner is looking at someone else, he remembers and feels all the anguish and pain associated with betrayal. His emotional button “pressed” will direct him: “If he loved you he wouldn’t look at other people, so he wants to be with others and he’s going to leave you. You have to confront him right now or he will cheat on you.”
On the other hand, a person with a history of emotional dependence She may not tolerate space between herself and her partner. When she writes him a text message and her partner does not answer her immediately, her emotional button related to her fear of abandonment will direct her thoughts: “my partner is upset with me and that’s why he doesn’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 excessive reactions are due to the fact that their partner or the relationship is not right and that to change their reaction they have to change partners. The idea is not to flee from situations and people that generate emotions in us, no matter how uncomfortable they may be, but take practical steps to take care of ourselves take care of our relationships and develop a strong inner voice that helps us manage uncomfortable situations.
When we understand the way our past wounds limit our present and “infiltrate” our thoughts and behaviors, we can choose another way that better reflects who we really are and what we really feel.
This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor 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 Emotions category.
Bibliography
Brown, B. (2018). Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. Random House.
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.
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This article has been reviewed by our editorial team at PsychologyFor to ensure accuracy, clarity, and adherence to evidence-based research. The content is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice.
