My Kid Pushes My Buttons, Thank God
By: Anthony Martino
Tags: Jung, Relationships, Shadow, Teens, Parenting

Do your kids trigger you? Do they say or do something that instantly drives you crazy?

My son does. He triggers me all too often.

I would hit the roof, a conflict would ensue, and nothing got resolved until the day I realized its not his fault. It is something else. Something so profoundly intimate and raw it pierced my heart and opened my soul to the love my son was trying to share.



This is what happened…



“Dad, I want to go to Disney World.”



Every muscle in my body tightened, “You know we can’t afford it.”



“Yes, you can, Dad; I really want to go. You love it as much as I do.”



He was right; I do love Disney. The whole family does. We have many fond memories and yearn to go back for another vacation.



For the last four years, my son would make the Disney request every few months or so, triggering me each time. Whenever my son asked to go to Disney, I would lay into him about the money we spend to get his master’s degree, and I would detail the sacrifices me and his mother make to send him and his twin sister to college. Nothing I said seemed to matter; he did not seem to care.



Ultimately, I concluded he was a selfish kid who enjoyed pushing my buttons.



As time passed, I began to notice that my reactions and anger got more and more intense each time he asked. My responses escalated beyond my control, and it became obvious to me that my reactions were disproportionate to the circumstance.



Eventually, I realized that my anger was not about him; it was about me. The button he was pushing was triggering something deep within my unconscious. Something hidden and repressed that was unknown to me.



My father died when I was a little boy. I grew up with little beyond the necessities of life in a single-mother household. At 11, I got my first job at the local drug store and have had a job almost every day of my life since. By the age of 16, I was responsible for most of my living expenses. I also paid for my college education without the benefit of financial aid.



As a parent, I provided my children with the things I desperately wanted but never got. Yet my son wanted more than I could give. He was eating away at my financial security, and his Disney request was a direct reminder of my financial vulnerability.



I concluded that the Disney trigger was somehow related to financial vulnerability, working for everything I have ever had, and my lost childhood. This is a significant conclusion that required open, honest self-analysis on my part (I followed a process called ‘shadow identification’).



The term ‘shadow’ describes the repressed traits and beliefs we have hidden deep within our unconscious mind. The Disney request was a trigger because it poked at my hidden and repressed thoughts about financial security and not having a normal childhood. It opened a portal into my unconscious and had the potential of exposing that shadow to me. My anger was in direct proportion to the degree to which I did not want to confront that reality.



Identifying this shadow allowed me to see my reaction to the Disney trigger in a very different light. I now understood what was going on, and that trigger no longer has power over me.



I had done other shadow work before and knew that uncovering this shadow was a significant accomplishment, but my work was not done. I had to figure out why my son repeatedly asked to go to Disney when he knew he would suffer my wrath with each request. What is it about our Disney experiences that my son wanted to relive?



We are Disney fans and have been fortunate enough to have vacationed at Disney many times. It is a place of fond memories with lots of joy, love, and connection for us all. It is also the only place where I am able to relax and be truly present with my wife and kids. My son and I share many great memories.



As I reviewed these memories, I realized my son was not asking to go to Disney; he was asking for the intimacy and connection we experience when we are at Disney. My son wanted to connect and share his love in a way that did not taint his masculinity, so he pushed my buttons instead.



That realization pierced my heart. The pain was deep. For years, I had maligned my son. I blamed him for my anger, invalidated his request, and rejected him. We were headed for a life of discontent and separation.



Our shadows reside in our unconscious minds and are unknown to us. Yet, they impact our lives in fundamental ways with life-long implications. If I hadn’t found this shadow, my relationship with my son would have continued to deteriorate. Finding this shadow and understanding its effect on us was a blessing. I thank God that my son had the courage and hope to push that button one more time.



Parents and children learn of each other’s shadows as a natural consequence of the parent-child relationship. Pushing buttons is typical behavior associated with the shadow dance we experience as both parent and child. We know each other’s buttons, but we don’t know their origin nor their impact on our lives. We won’t know any of this unless we spend the time and effort to find out. Uncovering these insights is called shadow work, and it is what happened between my son and me.



Although the shadow dance between parent and child is normal, we are often blind to it, and it becomes the basis for conflict and disharmony. Learning to recognize when you are being triggered and accepting the possibility that it is about you is the first step to healing your relationships. The work is difficult and painful, but the rewards are life-changing.



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