Push My Buttons!

When Life Shows You the Movie You Need to See

The moment my mother commented that she liked my hair better when it was shorter and asked if I’d put on a few pounds, I felt that familiar pang of inadequacy—I’m not good enough. But then I caught myself. What if this wasn’t really about her at all?

This is where your starring role of inner authority begins.

In Spiritual Psychology, we operate with a powerful premise: Everything that is unfolding in life is beautifully designed for our growth, learning, and evolution. In every moment, we are being given opportunities for our own inner expansion and growth. This innovative technology was pioneered and taught at the University of Santa Monica by Co-Faculty Drs Ron and Mary Hulnick.

One of their most transformative principles is this: “outer experience is a reflection of inner reality. How I like to sum it up is: your world is your mirror. In other words, life reflects what consciousness holds. Everything happening around you is mirroring back material within your own consciousness. The healing opportunity in this is profound, especially when you find your buttons being pushed; it’s a clear sign that an opportunity for growth AND HEALING is being offered.

Think of it this way: you’re living in your own movie, and everyone you encounter is playing a role that reflects something back to you. The people who trigger you? They’re showing you the scenes you need to see for your healing.

The Positive Side of the Mirror

Let me show you how this works in a way your ego can more easily embrace.

Think of someone who truly inspires you—someone who lights you up, fills you with enthusiasm, maybe even moves you to tears. You feel admiration, maybe even love, toward this person. You can quickly recognize all their amazing qualities and attributes.

Here’s the truth: You have within you the same qualities and traits you’re inspired by in them. If you didn’t have them, you wouldn’t even be able to recognize them.

This is your world mirroring back your own magnificence, your own potential, your own divine essence. Beautiful, right?

The Shadow Side of the Mirror

Now here’s where it gets interesting—and where the real opportunity for transformation lives.

On the flip side, when someone pushes your buttons and triggers a negative emotional response, they’re likely reflecting back a pattern of how you’re treating yourself. The upset you feel is a key to uncovering how you are being with yourself.

Most people find this notion unpleasant—it’s uncomfortable to look at ourselves this honestly. The part of us that resists is our ego, the learned part of ourselves that wants to appear as having it all together. Some of you may even feel triggered simply by reading this. Here’s why: the ego likes to be right and look perfect, while this principle asks us to take 100% responsibility for our inner perceptions and reactions to everything happening in our lives. The ego excels at the blame game and wants to stay on its high horse of judgment, which makes this one of the more challenging growth concepts to work with

But here’s what I’ve discovered through my own journey and working with countless clients: this is where your freedom lives.

Real-Life Examples

When you are triggered, the other person is simply playing their role in your movie. A role perfectly cast to show you exactly what you need to see. They’re not doing this TO you; they’re doing it FOR you.
For instance:

• If you’re emotionally charged by those who refuse to cooperate, what you may actually be dealing with is your own reluctance to cooperate with some aspect of yourself.
• Do you get particularly fired up by betrayal? It could be revealing where you tend to abandon yourself or self-betray through people pleasing.
• If you’re judgmental about how hard the boss is driving the team, turn the mirror toward yourself and inquire within—how hard are you on yourself?

My Mother, My Mirror

Let’s go deeper with my earlier example about my mother’s comments.

When my mother tries to be helpful in what sometimes seems like a clumsy way—commenting on my hair or my weight—I have a choice in how I respond. If I allow the trigger to “fire up” my psyche, I’ll get a rush of “my mother doesn’t approve of the way I look” and therefore “she doesn’t approve of me.” Even deeper still, my younger self might conclude “she doesn’t love me.” A completely disempowering train of thought and deep misunderstandings that may have been formed when I wasn’t old enough to recognize she was just stating her own preference!
But here’s the good news: this reactive pattern isn’t our natural state. It was inherited—passed down through generations, absorbed from our environment, conditioned into us. Can it be healed? A resounding yes!

Where do we start?

Being honest about the judgments we have of others can support us in owning the subtle judgments we have of ourselves. This isn’t an opportunity to beat yourself up or make yourself wrong about having them. They are actually the key to freeing ourselves of these limiting interpretations that block our original wisdom from radiating out into the world and allowing the return of the abundance the universe has to give.

If I let my mother’s good intentions (and maybe even some programming she inherited) ruin my day with a deep feeling of “I’m not good enough,” this can expand into other areas of not accepting myself. The path to healing this is to move into that loving place in our hearts and bring that love to the places inside that are in pain—this is a process I guide my clients through in a safe, loving container, where they are held in a judgment-free space.

As one moves into a space of compassion and gentleness for oneself, a courageous and heart-centered way of being emerges.

The Practice: Moving from Re-Action to Re-Sponse

Is this difficult to do? It depends on your level of commitment to living a life with this kind of freedom.

Let’s face it, most of us feel like we are living “in the blender”—work, home life, children, relationships—where the constant swirl prevents us from calm, grounded perceptions. We all tend to get caught up in the drama and allow it to be fueled by emotion.

This produces a tendency to react rather than respond. But here’s the truth: we must evolve to survive and continue to evolve to thrive. You can choose intentional evolution by healing the emotional triggers that keep you enslaved in reactionary patterns. When you pull the weeds at the root—when you heal your misunderstandings—you’ll marvel at the ease with which you’re able to respond. The garden of your life can finally flourish.

When you can take the seat of the observer and step back from the spinning blender—when you can see your upset as a behavior apart from your true self, rather than being pulled into it—you create space for healing. This is where the support of a Spiritual Psychology Coach can help you generate meaningful inner inquiry that gets to the root.
One of my clients, a VP at a tech company, found herself constantly triggered by a colleague who would interrupt her in meetings. Through our inquiry work, she discovered she was doing the exact same thing to herself—constantly interrupting her own intuition and second-guessing her decisions. Once she saw the mirror, she began trusting her own voice, and as if by magic, the interruptions from her colleague stopped.

This is the mirror in your movie. Once you understand that everyone in your life is reflecting something back to you—that you’ve essentially cast them in roles that serve your awakening—everything shifts. You’re no longer a victim of your circumstances. You become the conscious creator of your experience.

Soul Perspective: Beyond Right and Wrong

From the soul’s perspective, everyone is on their own path. We are all given perfectly designed experiences that present us with the opportunities to learn the lessons we took embodiment to learn.

Remember, the soul does not make judgments about what is right or wrong, good or bad. Only our ego does that because Earth is a school, and we live in a world of duality. The soul is here, in your body, for the experience only. We forget we are divine Beings making our way through an epic human adventure. And like any great movie, the drama, the conflicts, the villains—they’re all part of the story designed for the hero’s transformation. You are that hero. This is your holographic playground, perfectly designed for your evolution. Learning to heal our individual triggers is a contribution we can each make to more peace in the world.

The higher we raise our consciousness, the more we naturally reside in the love that we are. Our soul essence is pure divine love. The unresolved issues you carry with you are what blocks you from knowing the love that you are. Your judgments are the keys to unlocking and dissolving these issues within you.

You have an Original Wisdom—the inherent intelligence in all beings, rooted in unconditional love. This is your true essence. It lives within you, beyond conditioning, beyond inherited patterns, beyond the ego’s protective mechanisms.

When we learn to live from our Original Wisdom, what is mirrored back in our movie is love, compassion, acceptance, understanding, aliveness, inspiration, and joy. Just name a few of the qualities that are the derivatives of that Original Wisdom.

The Vibrational Shift

The more you can free yourself from your unresolved issues and transform your judgments into acceptance, the more you will naturally rise upward on the scale of consciousness. Dr. David Hawkins created a similar scale in which her measured the vibratory frequency of all emotions and proved (through kinesiology) that emotions of love, joy, and peace vibrate at a much higher level than emotions of shame, guilt, or hate.

When we are walking around in the world, steeped in lower frequency emotions—which are activated through being triggered—the natural byproduct is that we feel bad. This occurs on all levels: mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual. When we clear this debris and live from the place of our Original Wisdom, we feel great.

This is the incentive to do the work to have enough courage to own our projections, giving ourselves the chance to heal our unresolved material.

A Simple Practice for When You’re Triggered

Here’s a three-step process you can use the next time someone pushes your buttons:

1. PAUSE & NOTICE
   Take a breath. Recognize you’re triggered. Simply acknowledging, “I’m having a reaction right now.” Know, you have the power to create space between stimulus and response.
2. GET CLOSER TO THE MIRROR
   Ask yourself: “How might I be behaving similarly or doing this same thing to myself?” or “What is this situation reflecting to me about me? Get curious instead of defensive.
3. BRING COMPASSION
   Move into your heart. Bring loving awareness to the part of you that’s in pain. This is where the healing happens when you can call upon the self-compassion and acceptance of your higher wisdom-filled self and bring that to all your human parts.

Through your willingness to take full responsibility for your emotional state, you begin to build inner trust by showing up for yourself as a compassionate witness to your own pain and inner upset. When you learn to allow yourself to move into compassion and forgive yourself for making the judgment in the first place, it’s truly beautiful. From the soul’s perspective, all is neutral. All has value. All is for learning.

Reclaiming Your Inner Authority

Earth is a school for Learning. You are given the chance for healing each time you find yourself upset. When someone pushes your buttons, it’s the perfect opportunity for healing and self-reflection. Your life is mirroring what you have going on inside of you. The quality of your relationships with others is a direct mirror of the relationship you have with yourself.

Bringing your conscious awareness to the idea that your world is your mirror has profound benefits:

• You recognize when you find yourself in upset and emotional reactivity, this is an opportunity for your healing.
• You can use your life as a feedback mechanism for your emotional healing by releasing conditioned patterns within your psyche (check out my Gene Key Soul Mapping session for a deep dive on this!)
• You’re given the opportunity to move into higher quality emotions, such as empathy and acceptance for yourself and others.
• Your life is the platform by which you can empower yourself through accepting 100% responsibility for your interpretation of everything happening in your life.

By reclaiming your inner authority and by taking dominion of your own consciousness in this way, you heal yourself and, in turn, heal the world.

Every trigger is an invitation. Every upset is a doorway. You are not only the leading role in your own movie—you’re also the director. Your world is your mirror, and that mirror is showing you exactly where your next breakthrough lives. The question is: are you willing to look? Are you ready to reclaim your power and rewrite the script?

TAKE ACTION: Join Donna for California Women’s Retreat, May 2-3, 2026, The Healing Powers of Projections, where you will be guided to heal your inner upsets and the triggers that have been held in place, the recurring emotional bondage.