Picture yourself as having a telephone punch pad on your forehead. 

Each button is a statement or subject that can make you go crazy  (EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM  in charge). 

Which buttons in your system are just waiting to be pushed and you will lose charge of yourself?   For me CRITICISM (real or imagined) is hardest for me to not respond to.  Yep, fling me a criticism and I FUSE with the anxiety of the person doing the flinging.

Yoda Note:  When someone says something ugly about you, it isn’t about you.   It isn’t about you even when it is about you.  Meaning, the other person wouldn’t be pointing out your weak suits if she wasn’t anxious.  So even when the criticism is the truth, the criticism is about the person pointing out your less than perfect parts.

Statements about the right religion or right political party don’t get me going.  I can accept that people, even family members, have the right (the “right,” cute, huh? like I’m running the world) to choose their religion or politics.  No, my buttons have more to do with personal unsteadiness.

  CRITICISM, mostly imagind, gets lead billing on my punch pad.  I can get worked up if some movie star on television makes a crack I don’t agree with, but whoa– I’m much more vulnerable to a “tone” in the voice of my spouse.  I get hooked because, while he’s backing up saying he was joking–I know what his tone meant. He’s really saying I‘m a horrible wife and he should have seen this before we married.

Right…    This is the guy who said, “Hey, you’d look great in a string bikini!”