Don't Let People Push Your Buttons

In the last lesson, we talked all about primary feelings and emotions. And the reason why I really want you to have a good handle on this understanding your feelings thing is because if you've been stuck in any kind of addictive type pattern, a lot of times when our emotions get really charged, our immediate response is to engage in that addictive behavior again. It's an automatic, I'm mad, I want to do it. I'm sad, I want to do it. I'm happy and excited about something good in my life. I want to go back to that addictive behavior. So when we have those emotional feelings, we have to really stop. It's not going to be automatic for us until we retrain it and say, what's really going on? Why do I feel this way? What's it really telling me? Right? And then make those strategic decisions. And today's lesson really adds on to that because I want to go a little deeper and talk about understanding maybe or identifying your childhood wounds. Now, I know that sounds super counselory. It's not going to be that bad. We're not going to dig up anything too crazy. I just want you to, in general, know what your hot buttons are, okay? And because you're gonna have to be extra protective around your hot buttons. Because I like to think of it almost like one of those war movies where there's like a big red button if you push it, like blows up a country or something, and they always have like a plastic box on top of it and two people have to insert the key to hit the button. That's what we want to do. We want to build a box around your button, and we want to make it where two people have to put a key in, right? Because we don't want button just to be out there where it can just be pushed anytime, right? In order to do that, you got to know what your buttons are and where they are so you can protect them better. Now, just because you have some kind of childhood wound doesn't mean you had giant trauma. I mean, you might have had giant trauma, right? But we all had some negative experiences in childhood, which stay with us for various reasons. And we're not trying to dig up trauma. This is not trauma therapy. What we want to do is identify, like I said, those sticking buttons, those hot topics for each of you. So let me give you an example of some other, like, common hot topic emotions that are related to childhood wounds. Like guilt might be a hot topic for you. Rejection might be one for you. Anger. And these emotional hotspots are connected to specific childhood experiences. And I've actually made a chart for you that you can actually download and take look at. And so it's all in writing, you can download it. But I want to go over for you briefly here what some of the really common ones are, where they come from, and what to do about them. So a really common childhood wound that turns into an adult hotspot emotional button is abandonment. If in your childhood you felt extremely lonely, left behind or left out, or maybe you had deep fears about being left alone, you may have a hot button around abandonment. Symptoms that you may have a hot button around abandonment would be being clingy, needy, insecure, maybe struggling with codependency. And having kind of a general can be almost like a to a level of sort of feeling a little paranoid that your relationships are going to leave you, whether it's a friendship, a romantic relationship, or even a family or work relationship. For people that have this as a hot button, typical self sabotaging things might be to constantly be suspicious of your partner and accusatory or even to quit relationships too soon kind of this I'm going to leave you first because I know you're eventually going to leave me type philosophy. If you really want to heal from this, if this is your button, you're going to have to work really hard on reminding yourself that others are not abandoning you. You're going to have to look objectively at the situation and you may even want to do some attachment work, which we can talk about in a later lesson. Now our next big hot button is betrayal. This comes from early experiences where you felt lied to, che misled, or there were a lot of broken promises. Symptoms that this might be a hot button for you are you have difficulty trusting others, you're often suspicious of others, and you need lots of external validation. A sabotage tendency. If you have this as a hot button, it can lead into being kind of a controlling person or struggling with perfectionism, and a tendency to see things as black or white, right or wrong, and no gray. And in the middle, the healing work to be done around this button is all about learning how to practice patience and tolerance, learning how to be comfortable with being alone, and learning how to delegate. Now our next hot button topic is guilt. If this is your button, somewhere in your childhood or early life experiences, you may have felt like you had to or needed to take care of others. You may have felt bad for asking for things that you needed or wanted. And these things may have led you to being sort of overly good, like the perfect Child doing everything that's asked of them, not having any needs, not causing any problems. Symptoms that this might be your hot button in adulthood would be feeling guilty when you ask for things. Using guilt as a way to get other people to do the things that you want, and having real difficulty setting and keeping boundaries. Now sabotage tendencies that you might have if guilt is your big button would be putting yourself around other people that tend to make you feel guilty, or using guilt trips on other people when you feel unappreciated. To get to a healing place on this, you got to avoid that instinct to feel like you've got to rescue or help others all the time. And you got to focus on setting healthy boundaries. Now our next hot topic button is neglect. If in your childhood you felt unsupported or unseen a lot, then neglect might be your button. Symptoms of this in adulthood would be low self worth, feeling vulnerable and repressing your feelings. A sabotage tendency might be to frequently put yourself in situations where you feel unseen, or maybe even keeping your yourself in the background too much. If you want to do some healing work around this, then you have to acknowledge what happened in your childhood and learn to differentiate whether or not that's really happening in your adulthood. Or do you have an overreaction when you feel that way? Or do you have an overreaction when something happens that brings up that feeling? Another childhood wound that creates a big old button is rejection. If somewhere in your early developmental stages you felt rejected by your family or peers, that can result in you not developing a healthy sense of self esteem. Now, some signs that this could be your button in adulthood would be being overly agreeable people pleasing, being scared to state your own opinions or your own needs, or overly sensitive ways that you could fall into sabotaging yourself if you have a big rejection button would be being overly sensitive to feedback which can lead to blowing up at others, or avoiding relationships and experiences because you're afraid of the rejection. Now, if you want to do some healing around the hot button of rejection, then you got to work on your independence and freedom, understanding your own needs, feelings and priorities. Basically, you got to kind of accept yourself first. I know that sounds cheesy, right? But it's true. Now the last hot button topic that we're going to talk about in this video is the button around injustice. If you had caregivers that were cold or authoritarian, or you were made to feel powerless as a child, you may have big buttons around justice symptoms that you might have a button around, this would be black and white Thinking an over focus on becoming important or powerful, finding yourself being upset pretty frequently at something someone else has done wrong or that you see as unfair, and having a pretty deep rooted fear of being controlled. Now ways that you might sabotage yourself. If you have a justice button, you might have a tendency to become perfectionistic or intolerant of others, even rigid. If you want to do some healing around justice as a hot button, then you're going to have to work on your tendency to be rigid and inflexible. You're going to have to allow more flexibility and understanding for other people. Now, there are other big hot buttons and I'm going to put some additional resources for you to download so you can take a look at these and some other ones. And if you want to go deeper into this, you can also look at Recoveryu, which you should have access to because you're a member of this program. It. It goes into the Enneagram, which is goes into nine personality types. And what's nice about the Enneagram is once you can identify what your personality type is, it kind of tells you what your childhood wound is very likely. So that's a good way to fast track the process and find out what it is pretty quickly. And there's a ton of information also in the enneagram and in RecoveryU about how to do some healing around that so that it doesn't control you. These are your big buttons. These are the button that are most likely to get you in a reactive state. In fact, these buttons might be so big that they kind of control your life a lot more than you want it to. So once you identify yours, then we can put that like plastic case over the top of it, right? We can know what it is so that we're not so easily reactive to it.