Relationship Button Pushing Dynamics: Navigating Triggers

Couples therapy is similar to and yet very different from individual talk therapy in my therapy practice. Seeing clients as individuals, we focus on their specific issues. Seeing a couple means that the client isn’t one person or the other, but the two of them together. The couple is the client. Issues that come up often have their roots in one person’s or the other’s emotional material, but the work in couples therapy is in examining how that material affects and is reacted to by each member of the couple. Something I hear often in this scenario is one person saying that the other person “really knows how to push my buttons.”

Ah, the buttons! The activators of anxiety. The ignitors of anger. Who are we in our relationships if not for our buttons? Understanding relationship button pushing dynamics helps us realize that often times the things the other person does that push our buttons are normal, everyday, acceptable things. Most often the actions that push buttons are mundane: being late, not making the bed, leaving dishes in the sink, interrupting you in conversation, etc. This makes me think that the control and responsibility over button pushing and its effects lies not with our partners but with ourselves. To try to get your partner to change the way they act to avoid pushing our buttons is a common reaction, but not the most effective one long term. It’s up to us to take responsibility for our own button pushing. So how do we typically respond to this?

Unpacking Common Reactions to Relationship Triggers

1. Disconnection: We realize that when our partner doesn’t clean the grounds out of the coffee maker, this pushes our buttons. It triggers a rage in us disproportionate to the action that caused it. We take a deep breath, and try to disconnect the wires behind the buttons. We say to ourselves “That’s okay, so what, it’s just some coffee grounds, I’ll clean them out and get on with my life.” This usually works in the short term, but the effects don’t last. The moment after we disconnect the wires behind our buttons they start growing back, and the anger starts to seep in again, until eventually we’re back at square one.
2. Rewiring: We decide to take more control over the wiring of our buttons. We decide that instead of anger, when this button gets pushed we’re going to feel a different emotion. We’re going to remind ourselves that sure, we gotta deal with these coffee grounds, but instead of getting angry, why not remind ourselves that if this is the biggest problem in our relationship, we’re doing pretty good! We tell ourselves that this is a totally acceptable situation, but this doesn’t last either. The reserve of anger from the button pushing is just getting stored up until we can’t take it any more and we grab that coffee maker and throw it against the wall where it breaks into a million pieces and the glass shatters and it feels good for a moment, but then we realize all we did was break our coffee maker.
3. Muting: This involves burying the wires behind our buttons underneath insulation. This usually involves drugs or alcohol, so that the reaction to seeing the coffee grounds waiting for us to clean them is initially anger, but then quickly replaced by the welcomed knowledge that at least we have that drug or alcohol that will make everything easier to deal with. This can work, but the better it works the worse off our relationship will actually get. Sort of like killing a fly with a machine gun, it solves the problem but the collateral damage only makes things worse.
4. Button Pusher Removal: The breakup. Removal of the person who we think is responsible for pushing our buttons. We might feel better about this at first, because now our buttons are not being pushed. But the buttons still exist! They might get dusty from misuse, but eventually we are likely to find ourselves in another relationship that eventually gets to a point where our buttons are pushed all over again, so in the long term this is not really a solution at all.

Moving From Blame to Personal Responsibility

Couples often come into therapy with a list of grievances about their partners. They account for all the ways their partners push their buttons, and how it’s making their relationships unbearable. By viewing this situation through the lens of relationship button pushing dynamics, I guide them to focus less on their partners and more on themselves.

One couple in particular had an issue that involved parking. When they’d be looking for a parking space on the way to dinner, the driver would get angry when the passenger would point out parking spaces that were available. He felt like she was being controlling, and he resented it. So the driver would reply in a passive aggressive way, feelings would be hurt, and by the time they sat down to dinner this couple was miserable.

In an effort to break this pattern, the next time they went out to dinner the passenger tried not pointing out parking spots, holding her tongue even if she spotted the perfect one. However, this only made her even angrier, as she started to resent the idea that she should have to hold her tongue over something that seemed so innocent to her. Much like dealing with chronic anxious thoughts—as discussed in our post on anxiety therapy for chronic worry—trying to forcefully suppress our reactions often just stores up resentment. This resulted in a similar pattern of snarky remarks and passive aggressive behavior, leaving them sitting down to dinner in the same miserable place.

Tracing Triggers to Their Root Cause

Through a discussion of the situation, and an exploration of the driver’s relationship with his own parents, we realized the suggestions about where to park triggered the driver’s emotions associated with being in the back seat as his own parents drove. His parents were an argumentative couple, and after a session talking about this we identified how, when the passenger suggested a parking spot, the driver fell right back into the relationship pattern he saw growing up. He saw this exact situation handled with anger, resentment, and passive aggressiveness, and realized he was following this playbook in his own life.

Research on healthy relationship communication and conflict patterns confirms that identifying family-of-origin triggers is a vital component in changing current relational dynamics. We developed a strategy for this, where the next time they drove to dinner the passenger was encouraged to point out a parking spot again, and this time the driver was instructed to take a deep breath and remind himself it’s just a parking spot. He worked to let the feelings of anger and resentment he saw in his parents’ relationship go, to flow through him and out into the night, leaving him able to park without anger. It took some work, but soon enough they were able to enjoy going out to dinner again. The driver’s desires to have the passenger change her behavior transformed into the realization the driver had the power to change his own.

What this demonstrates is that the more we know about our buttons the better prepared we can be when they are pushed. The more aware we are of their existence and reason for being, the more we can learn to change our reactions, and the more we can understand the root cause of the issues the buttons represent. By engaging in relationship button pushing dynamics awareness, over time we will find that our wiring can be modified, and that the buttons we once resented our partner for pushing are within our own power to disconnect.