The Monster That Bears Our Name

Who are the people who really know how to push our buttons? Our kids, of course. And our parents. Maybe our siblings, too. And don’t forget that person at work who always knows exactly how to piss us off.

What do these people have in common? Proximity is probably a big one. They’re around us a lot, so they get on our nerves. And then there’s intimacy. They’ve learned things about us that most people haven’t, so they know exactly how to poke us in the most sensitive spots.

Those reasons make perfect sense, and they’re the ones we usually think of when we’re irritated at them. There’s another one, though, that has a much bigger impact than we realize. These people push our buttons because they’re like us. Not in every way, of course, but in specific ways that we find particularly irritating, because they confront us with something that we’re trying really hard to ignore.

Here’s a thought experiment. Think of some tendency or  part of your personality that you’re not very proud of. It may have been part of you for a long, long time. Maybe you were criticized for it when you were a kid. Or maybe it’s a defense mechanism that comes out reflexively, whenever you’re feeling scared or insecure. In any case, you know it’s not the best version of you, and you’ve wished more than once that it wasn’t there. As a matter of fact, most of the time you pretend that it isn’t there. You convince yourself that you’ve overcome it, or that it’s not so bad, or that other people can’t really see it. Then, in some moment of stress or anxiety, it suddenly comes to the surface, and you feel embarrassed and ashamed. 

Now, think of times when you’ve seen that same character trait or behavior in someone else—especially someone you love. How did you react? How did it feel to confront the thing you like the least about yourself in someone else? Did your emotional gatekeeper quickly reroute your self-irritation and contempt onto that other person? Did you react much more strongly than you should have? Did they push your buttons?

We share a lot of things with our families--some welcome, and some not so much. Sometimes we try to distance ourselves from them by choosing partners who aren’t like them, but our partners just point out all the weird stuff we inherited, and that pisses us off even more.

Shame is the monster we keep locked in our attics. It’s the thing that lurks there, waiting to escape as soon as we let down our guard. Until we acknowledge it, and bring it out into the light, we’ll be seeing its shadow in all the people we love, and coming after it with pitchforks and knives.