Become Fascinated by Your Reactions

My student told me that he was going to approach the problem with a new mindset. Instead of thinking of home as the place to relax after work, he was going to steel himself on the way home as though he was going into battle.

This didn’t sound to me like a recipe for success, so I made some suggestions about how to relate to his wife more compassionately.

When we talked again a couple of months later, he reported that the problem had totally been solved; the marriage had become harmonious and even delightful. I was ready to hear how my wonderful advice had helped him, but it turned out that he had found his own solution, and it was my turn to learn from him.

He said that when his wife complained about his behavior, he would get quiet and look inside himself. And the words he said next are what stuck with me:

“I became fascinated by my own reaction.”

Of course! I thought. That’s the best advice. Become fascinated by your own reaction. Take a breath, close your eyes, and see what’s going on inside.

When he looked inside, he could sense his physical reaction, the clench in his belly, the visceral urge to defend himself. He witnessed how the feeling of “seeing red” swelled up behind his eyes. As he observed more closely, he noticed that the process started with a sense of panic, and that after the crest of the anger, there was a feeling of helplessness and sadness.

He watched the stream of verbiage that went through his mind, the instantaneous self-justifications and the copious airtight arguments that his wife was the one at fault. Resonant moments from previous fights flashed past like a slideshow, each one adding to the case against her. He could also hear her voice in his head and anticipate how the whole dialogue would go.

And after this whole inner journey played out, he said, “by the time I came back to the room, the whole thing had blown over.”

The socks were still on the floor, and the objection had been lodged, but the fight never happened. The self-defense that had seemed so necessary hadn’t been necessary.

Let yourself be fascinated by your reaction. This has become a central teaching for me.

Years later, when another student came to me with worries that she was developing a dependence on alcohol, I repurposed the learning. I said: observe the urge to drink. Sit with it and see how it arises inside, and what happens next. Be curious. Be fascinated.

There’s amazing healing potential in simply paying attention to ourselves.

Sometimes people envision themselves as having triggers, or they say that someone “pushes their buttons.” I think these mechanical analogies sell us short. They portray our reactions as automatic, beyond our control.

But as psychologist Victor Frankl reminds us, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

The trick is to be present in that space, to show up there with attention. If someone is “pushing your buttons,” the key is to be there behind the button, before it makes contact with the circuit. Or better yet, discard the analogy of triggers and buttons; we are not guns, and we are not machines.

Frankl was commenting on his experience in the Nazi death camps, an experience of terror and anguish beyond what most of us can imagine. Even in these extreme circumstances, some people were able to find the freedom to choose their own reaction.

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread,” Frankl writes. “They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Reacting well to a remark about our sloppy sock habits should be easy by comparison.

Make a list of your “buttons” and choose one to concentrate on. Let yourself be curious, fascinated by your inner reaction. Look for the space, the freedom between the stimulus and the reaction. It’s there.

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