Years ago I remember hearing John Gottman say something about childhood experiences that has stayed with me for almost a decade and a half:
“None of us gets out of childhood without a few crazy buttons.”
Now, before anyone sends me an email, I realize “crazy” isn’t a clinical term. In fact, this concept is probably closer to what relationship researchers have described as enduring vulnerabilities. These are things like old wounds, sensitivities, and experiences that make certain situations hit harder than others.
There are lots of names for these by this point, but I’ve been using the phrase crazy buttons in my work for years because people seem to immediately understand it. I don’t have to explain attachment theory. I don’t have to define emotional triggers. And we don’t have to unpack decades of experiences.
I can simply say, “We all have some crazy buttons. Maybe this is one of yours.” And most people know exactly what I’m talking about.
A crazy button is one of those places where your emotional reaction seems bigger, faster, or more intense than the situation alone would explain. Maybe it’s criticism. Maybe it’s rejection. Maybe it’s being ignored, controlled, misunderstood, embarrassed, abandoned, or left out.
Whatever the reaction, it tends to elicit something that feels out of proportion to the moment itself. This isn’t due to being irrational or overly sensitive, but because a button that got pressed may have a much longer, deeper history than the situation that activated it.
And that’s often where friction in relationships begins. Rarely because of the thing we’re conversing about on the surface, and more often because of everything that surface-level moment happened to touch underneath.
A forgotten text message might brush up against years of feeling unimportant. A critical comment might land on top of old experiences of rejection. A disagreement that seems relatively small to one person can feel much larger to the other because it has connected itself to something older, something with a longer history.
That’s part of what makes crazy buttons so interesting. They remind us that our reactions are rarely occurring in a vacuum.
Most of us pick up our first crazy buttons in childhood. We gain them through our experiences, relationships, disappointments, fears, and losses. Sometimes they develop because something happened. Sometimes they develop because something didn’t happen.
Maybe we didn’t feel protected. Maybe we didn’t feel seen. Maybe we didn’t feel chosen. Or perhaps we learned early on that certain needs, feelings, or parts of ourselves weren’t particularly welcome.
But I don’t think childhood should get all the credit. Adulthood adds a few more for most people. Heartbreak has a way of installing one. Betrayal certainly can. Grief, failure, illness, divorce, loss, and all the other experiences that come with being human.
In fact, the longer we live, the more opportunities life seems to provide for collecting a few additional buttons. Which feels a little unfair, honestly.
You would think there would come a point where life says, “That’s probably enough emotional material for one person.” Instead, it tends to keep offering new experiences, and occasionally a few new buttons to go with them.
Something I very much like about this metaphor is that it can help people release some of the shame that’s attached to these buttons and accompanying reactions. We’re no longer talking about flaws, weaknesses, or something that’s “wrong” with us. We’re talking about the places where life left a mark.
And honestly, I think that’s a very important distinction.
Most people already know they have reactions they’d like to handle differently. They don’t need more evidence that they’re imperfect. What they often need is a framework that helps them become curious instead of critical.
A crazy button isn’t proof that you’ve failed somehow. It’s simply evidence that you’ve lived. And if you’ve lived long enough, you’ve probably accumulated a few experiences that still carry some emotional weight. Most of us have.
That’s part of being human. We move through life collecting experiences, and some of those experiences stay with us longer than others. They shape what we notice, what we expect, what we fear, and sometimes what we protect.
Understanding those influences doesn’t excuse every reaction we have. But it can help us understand where some of those reactions came from in the first place.
And as we discover the places where life has left marks, we learn more about ourselves, which in turn helps us teach other people about us.
I’ve talked a lot about context across my writing, and it comes up here again.
Familiarizing yourself with your own crazy buttons gives context to your feelings and reactions. It creates an opportunity to move beyond simply experiencing a reaction to understanding it. And it creates the opportunity for the people around you to understand as well.
I’ve lost track of how many conflicts I’ve watched soften when someone moved from, “What’s wrong with me?” to, “I think I know what this reaction is about.”
The feelings don’t disappear. The hurt doesn’t magically evaporate. But the reaction starts to have context, and context often changes the conversation.
Something I’ve noticed, though, is that people tend to approach these buttons as though the goal is to get rid of them completely. We tend to think, “Okay, cool. I’ll figure out what they are and then they’re gone.” That if we do enough work, heal enough, read enough books, or attend enough therapy sessions, maybe we can remove them altogether.
I don’t know that that’s how it works. And it’s certainly not what I’ve seen happen in fifteen years of this job.
What seems more realistic, at least to me, is simply learning them.
Learning what tends to press them, when they’re especially sensitive, and what helps settle them down after they get pushed. Learning how to recognize when a reaction belongs mostly to the present moment and when something older may have gotten involved.
Because while we may not be able to eliminate every crazy button, we can reduce the intensity and the sensitivity. We can turn the volume down, if you will. We can become less reactive and more aware of what’s happening inside us when one gets pressed.
We might learn that criticism isn’t always rejection. That conflict isn’t always abandonment. That disappointment isn’t always failure. And that being misunderstood doesn’t mean we’re unlovable.
The work here really is to develop a relationship with our crazy buttons because, like it or not, they’re here for the duration. They’re going into our friendships, our romantic relationships, our workplaces, our family gatherings, and all the other places where human beings inevitably bump into one another.
And because they’re coming with us anyway, it makes sense to get to know them.
The better we know them, the less likely they are to hijack a conversation, an argument, or an entire relationship. And because relationships are often where many of our crazy buttons were formed, relationships tend to be where they show up. Which means that if you love someone, they have crazy buttons too. Sorry to state the obvious here, but everyone has a few. Me. You. Them. All of us.
Something I'd like to point to very directly is that part of loving people well involves becoming curious about their crazy buttons and learning how to protect them. It's important to familiarize yourself with your own, but relationships also require us to learn the other person's and to treat those vulnerable places with the same care we'd hope they would show ours.
The goal isn’t perfection, because nobody gets it right all the time. The goal is intentionality. It’s taking the time to learn what tends to hurt the people you care about, what helps them feel understood, and where their tender places are so those places can be treated with care.
It also means not using that knowledge to weaponize them. It means not deciding someone should be over something by now, and not continuing to press on a tender spot after they’ve trusted you enough to show you where it is.
The reality is that we’re all going to accidentally step on one another’s sore spots from time to time. That’s part of being in relationship with other human beings. But there’s a meaningful difference between accidentally bumping into a wound and continuing to poke it after someone has shown you where it hurts.
This is part of the deal in any meaningful relationship. We learn our own vulnerabilities, and we learn the vulnerabilities of the people we care about.
Sadly, sometimes our crazy buttons become attracted to another person’s crazy buttons, and then we have to do a little more work to ensure that we aren’t inadvertently creating a feedback loop where each person’s vulnerabilities keep activating the other’s. That’s probably a topic for an entirely different essay, but it might look something like my fear of rejection bumping into your fear of criticism, or your fear of being controlled colliding with my fear of being abandoned.
In these situations, neither person is trying to hurt the other, but both people end up feeling hurt anyway.
This is one of the reasons I think getting curious about our crazy buttons is so powerful. The more we understand about them, the easier it becomes to recognize these patterns when they emerge. And the more we understand about the people we care about, the better chance we have of responding to what’s actually taking place instead of reacting to what an old wound is telling us is taking place.
Essentially more you know, the more choices you have.
So, none of us gets out of childhood without a few crazy buttons. Most of us collect a few more along the way. And the question isn’t whether you have them. The question is whether you know enough about them to understand, manage, and keep them from running the show.
And whether the people who love you know enough about them to handle them with care.
Until next time...
I’m Jenn — Ordinary Therapist is where I explore the layered, often messy work of being human — things like emotional maturity, relationships, burnout, and healing — through story, reflection, and a creative lens.
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I love this! Whew! I have some crazy buttons from childhood (don’t we all?) and, despite all the therapy and work, one got pushed big time last week!
This is a genuinely excellent read!! 🙌🧡
“Learning what tends to press them, when they’re especially sensitive, and what helps settle them down after they get pushed.”
This is what therapy has actually been teaching me, not how to stop reacting, but how to recognize my own crazy buttons quickly enough to ask whether the present moment actually warrants this size of reaction, or whether something much older just got touched.
The reframe from “what’s wrong with me” to “I know what this is about” has changed more for me than almost anything else in this process.
DK, The Unraveling 🤍