How We Make
the Same Mistakes Over and Over
If you sometimes feel like you make the same mistakes over and over, you’re definitely not alone. Everyone on Earth is capable of repeating the same mistakes again and again. Everyone can react to a jerk like a jerk. We can all fall into relationships filled with cold shoulders, boredom, or high conflict. And we’re all sadly capable of turning pain into suffering.
We repeatedly shoot ourselves in the foot for one simple reason. Under stress, we tend to retreat to habits of emotion regulation formed as far back as toddlerhood. Our thought processes become self-obsessed, and our feelings veer toward the volatile, if not a full-blown roller-coaster. We’re likely to act impulsively, with little foresight. The only available solutions seem like “No!” and “Mine!” (“My way!”)
Why We Repeat Mistakes
The Toddler brain is dominated by feelings rather than analysis of facts. (If the feelings are negative, they seem like alarms.) Not surprising, habits formed in the Toddler brain are activated by feelings rather than analysis of the conditional context of past mistakes and their consequences. When we feel that way again, for any reason, past behavioral impulses grow stronger, increasing the likelihood of repeating the mistake. We’re likely to eat the whole cake and then realize that we should have had a V8 instead. We’ll throw a temper tantrum (or repress one) before remembering the resolution to take a time-out. We’ll pout, criticize, or devalue others instead of seeking to improve and repair. The dominance of feelings—over judgment, analysis, foresight, and sensitivity to other perspectives—is why diets don’t work, addicts relapse, projects fail, marriages falter, and Mr. Hyde can’t remember what Dr. Jekyll learned in anger management class.
Virtually all the people I’ve had the honor to treat in more than thirty years of clinical practice have presented with entrenched habits of retreating to the Toddler brain when things get tough. Unlike personality, genetics, and temperament, habits are readily changeable, although the change process is often tedious and repetitious. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that once habits are formed, they are not changed by insight or understanding of how they started. They can be changed only by establishing new habits.
The Toddler Brain Is Self-Obsessed, Volatile, All-or-Nothing
Toddlers are incapable of seeing any perspective other than their own. (Perspective-taking—understanding how other people experience the world—is a higher-order operation of the Adult brain.) Toddlers use imagination to fill in the huge gaps in their knowledge of other people’s perspectives. But their imaginations are dominated by how they feel at the moment, and how they feel at this moment is unlikely to be how they felt a few moments ago, as feelings in the Toddler brain are highly volatile. Their attributions about other people tend to vacillate between the very positive and very negative. This subjects them to what psychologists call “splitting,” the wellspring of adult “all-or-nothing” thinking. You’re either all good or all bad; they love you or hate you; they think the best or the worst about you. You probably know adults who put you on a pedestal when they feel good and cast you as a demon when they feel bad. They become needy or aloof. They cling or pout. If their feelings are hostile, they’re prone to passive aggression and even violence.
It doesn’t take much experience with a toddler to recognize periods of neediness and bouts of pouting. Less obvious is passive-aggressive behavior, which is a toddler way of asserting autonomy. Video studies of toddlers show them doing things like intentionally dropping objects as a way of saying “No,” purposely making noise when their parents are on the phone, telling fibs about other kids, using one parent against the other, and faking injuries—or actually hurting themselves—to get rewarded or avoid a reprimand. Adults in their Toddler brains try to feel more autonomous by moralizing, preaching, lecturing, psychoanalyzing, acting like martyrs, or devaluing and demeaning others. And then there’s violence.
Take the following violence-prone quiz, in which you identify the family member to whom the question or statement most likely refers.
1. Who are the most violent people in the vast majority of families? _______________________________________
2. This family member often uses anger as a defense. ___________
3. If this family member doesn’t get his/her way, violence is likely. ____________________
4. If hurt or offended, this family member wants to hit or throw something. _____________
Did you guess that the correct answer for each question is not “father” or “mother,” but a child under three? The trick of the quiz is in the word “violence,” which makes us think of damage. Most toddlers do little or no damage with their violence—they’ll hit you with a tissue or stomp their feet, scream, or flail at the air—so we tend not to think of their behavior as violent, although it is. The point is that aggressive anger and violence (when not protecting life, limb, or other people) is not adult; it’s childish. It comes from the Toddler brain and needs regulation by the Adult brain.
How Can I Be Me When They’re Being Them?
Emotional reactivity is an automatic response to specific events, situations, or people. Sometimes this is a great thing. While falling in love, the mere presence of the beloved fills us with fascination and joy. We thrill at the smiles of our infants and revel in the excitement of new friends. But under stress, emotional reactivity is almost entirely negative. The environment seems more threatening or fraught with uncertainty. Our buttons get pushed more easily. We’re more likely to lash out or, if we hold it in, emotionally shut down. In families afflicted with high emotional reactivity, a negative feeling in one causes chaos or withdrawal in the others.
All animals are subject to high emotional reactivity when the environment is perceived as dangerous. The hair-trigger response that shoots adrenaline and cortisol into their bloodstreams keeps them ever prepared for flight or fight. The problem with fight-or-flight reactions for modern humans living in much safer environments than our ancestors is that the brain is a better-safe-than-sorry system. It would rather be wrong 999 times thinking your spouse is a saber-toothed tiger than be wrong once thinking a saber-toothed tiger is your spouse.
Toddler Brain Reactaholism
Just about anyone or anything can stimulate painful emotional reactions when stress triggers a habit of retreating to the Toddler brain—the alarm-driven limbic system. Then the only certainty we can have is saying, “No!” or “Mine!” In the worst case, we can turn into reactaholics, feeling that we have to react negatively to others to maintain a sense of self. Toddler brain reactaholism is the number-one addiction of our times. The other addictions tend to start as attempts to ease the chronic powerlessness and frequent ill feelings of reactaholism.
The aspect of emotional reactivity that makes it difficult to see, let alone change, is its illusion of free will. We think that we’re acting of our own volition when we’re merely reacting to someone else’s negativity. We’ve all uttered, or at least thought, the most ironic of all statements, “You’re not going to bring me down!” As long as we’re in the Toddler brain, we’re already down, reacting to negativity with negativity.
To lower their anxiety about getting their buttons pushed, Toddler brain reactaholics try hard to control the behavior of others. My client Celine, like the vast majority of controlling people I have known, constantly told her beleaguered husband what to do and when and where to do it. From her perspective, she had to, because it felt as if his behavior entirely controlled her emotions. If he left the towel on the bathroom floor, she felt overwhelmed with resentment and anger. “I get tense walking down the hall, because I know when I get to the bathroom, I’ll see that he’s left the toilet seat up again,” she told me. Of course, Celine’s attempts to control her husband made him less cooperative. In case you haven’t noticed, human beings hate to feel controlled and will rarely cooperate when they do. The couple regularly got into Toddler brain standoffs of “Mine!” and “No!”
In the Toddler brain, thinking about the future is nearly impossible. When Celine considered making plans, she inevitably imagined her husband refusing to cooperate and could feel the anger surging through her body in response. To avoid such unpleasant thoughts, she stopped thinking about the future altogether. This habitual avoidance of goal setting is one reason that Toddler brain reactaholics never achieve their full potential in life. Instead of setting goals and planning how to reach them, they try to avoid certain kinds of situations and people. Because so many people and situations have the power to push their buttons, Toddler brain reactaholics never know how they’ll feel from one moment to the next. They can scarcely develop a consistent sense of self because they’re different with each person who “makes” them react differently. If I’m one person with you and another with him and yet another with her, pretty soon I won’t know who the hell I am. The Toddler brain’s struggle for autonomy rages on, at the cost of connections to others and with the failure to feel authentic. Toddler brain reactaholism makes it seem that your feelings are not about you; they’re about whoever is causing the reaction at the moment. This alienation from internal experience undermines a sense of autonomy and exacerbates the feelings of powerlessness inherent in reactaholism.
A quick way to tell if you’re a reactaholic is to notice how you approach a workplace meeting. You may well be a reactaholic if you don’t know what you will do until someone else gives you something to which you can react in a definite (usually ego-defensive) way. I once witnessed just such a circumstance while giving a lecture to a group of managers about resentment in the workplace. Many of the participants were not sure why the presentation was on the agenda. While most were open to whatever new ideas might be put forth, a couple of reactaholics were in the room. When introducing me, the company’s owner joked about having never heard of resentment in the workplace.
“We don’t have resentment in my division,” one of the supervisors said dismissively after the owner’s comment. I had been observing the body language and facial expressions of the participants during the opening remarks. This guy was one of the two who had no opinion about the topic, until he misconstrued his boss’s joke to be a criticism of the HR manager who had engaged me. Then he became convinced that my presentation would be a waste of time. Reacting to him, the other participant whose body language was indecisive about the presentation became just as convinced that his colleague was wrong.
“You sound awfully resentful in saying that,” he said to his colleague, only half-joking. “You’re living proof that we need this material.”
The next time you go into any kind of meeting, at work or in the community, note how you feel about the issues on the agenda and then see if they change or become more intense in reaction to someone at the meeting.
Here’s another little test of reactaholism:
1. Are you concerned about getting your buttons pushed? ___________________
2. Do you ever worry about how you’re going to react at work or at home? ______________
3. Do you brace yourself before you walk in to the house? ________________________When you’re home, do you tense up when you hear your partner close the front door? ______
4. Do you tense up when you get near certain people at work?________________________
5. Do you not bring up certain things because you don’t want to think about the response you might get? ____________
6. Do you find it hard to think about the future? __________
The only way to triumph over Toddler brain reactivity is to hold on to your self-value under stress so you don’t feel devalued by the behavior or attitudes of other people. That requires switching into the Adult brain when you most need it. It’s a skill anyone can learn and everyone must master to have any chance at a consistently happy life. The goal of this book is to help you develop that skill. The alternative turns the pain of life into suffering, which is the topic of the next chapter.