Raise your hand if you get angry at your kids sometimes and then feel totally crappy afterward. Raise your other hand if you are finding this happening more often since we started sheltering in place.
Ok, I can’t see you, but I’m willing to bet many of you hoisted both hands in the air. I did.
Most of us have the experience of feeling very angry at our kids at least occasionally. And, more than any other feeling we experience—in parenting or in other aspects of our lives—anger seems to evoke the most shame in us.
Since most of us are several weeks into being locked into our homes with our kids, with very little time or opportunity to practice self-care or even just spend time away from our children, I’m hearing about (and feeling) a lot more anger spilling over.
Helping people work with anger is some people’s life’s work, so it can’t be addressed in one post. But because it’s such a big topic, I also feel it can be helpful to take small steps toward it, like with so many things related to parenting.
With that framework, here are a few thoughts about this particularly intense feeling, and how you might begin (or continue) to work with it, especially now.
How We Were Raised to See Anger
Once in a while, I meet someone who tells me that anger was A-OK in their original family. They had parents who fought, showed their anger, and then also let the family see their attempts at repairing any ruptures that might have come from the anger being expressed.
But it is far more common for me to hear from parents in my classes or coaching sessions that anger was seen as something to be avoided. Usually people report seeing anger in their own parents in one of two ways (and sometimes both) when they were children:
Anger was all-too-frequent—blazing like a fire at unexpected moments, and painful whenever it showed up;
Anger was suppressed or compressed into passive aggressive behaviors, teeth gritting, or strange, unexplained silences.
In either scenario, anger was clearly seen as something bad, shameful, and to be avoided.
How about in your family? Was it one of these? Or even both?
How to Work with Anger
1. Let it Be a Feeling, Rather Than a State
Anger is a human feeling.
Just like joy. Just like sadness. Just like fear, vulnerability, insecurity, excitement… the list goes on.
It’s no worse, or better, than any of our other feelings. It’s not a “negative” emotion, nor does it need to be contrasted with joy, or happiness, or calm.
But when we’ve grown up in a family—and, let’s face it, a culture—that sees anger as a problem to be avoided, it’s hard to remember that it’s just one of our human emotions.
Of course, what we DO when we feel angry is another matter—more on that below. But at its pure essence, anger is just a feeling.
If anger is one of your “no-no” feelings—meaning you, for example, do everything you can to stay away from it (until you explode) or you refuse to acknowledge that it even exists, or you find yourself in a state of anger more often than you’d like—one first step to working with it more constructively is to practice recognizing it as a simple feeling when it arises.
One way to do this is to start changing the way you talk to yourself about anger:
Instead of saying to yourself:
“I’m angry” or “I’m mad”
Try this:
“I feel angry right now.”
This subtle shift can remind you that a) it’s a feeling and b) it will eventually pass, like all human feelings.
2. Notice the Warning Signs
Anger has always been a big challenge for me. And parenting brings it on like nothing else.
One thing I have noticed is that I will be going along, working calmly (so I think) through a difficult experience with my son, and then suddenly—BAM!—I’m furious.
To make matters worse, by the time I realize that I’m furious, the damage has already been done. I’ve said something I regret, or grabbed my son too roughly. And I’m flooded with not only the fury but also the underlying shame, sadness, and regret that so often hitch a ride with it.
This experience of being blindsided by anger is common in the parents I work with, too. Parents often tell me, “I really thought I had it under control, and then…”
As real as this experience is for many of us, it is also true that there are always warning signs.
Often though, we’re already too flooded by the anger to notice them.
As I’ve worked with anger over the years, I have come to see what my warning signs are. Fortunately, there’s usually only a handful of them, so once you get to know what yours are, this dicey situation becomes a tiny bit easier to work with.
It is vulnerable to even see our warning signs, because often they are so profoundly at odds with how we want to parent. But if we refuse to see them, we cannot pay attention to what they have to teach us.
In the spirit of opening to vulnerability, I will share mine with you:
I feel a tightness in my chest and my jaw
Playfulness feels about 100 miles from possible
I have a feeling of internal heat, a lot like seeing red, or what Kim John Payne refers to as a “red mist rising” (Being at Your Best When Your Kids Are at Their Worst)
I start to imagine slapping my son
Because anger can be such a consuming emotion, these warning signs often flash by at top speed. I find that if I fail to heed the first warning, there will only be one or two more (even quicker) ones before it’s too late and I’ve done or said something I regret.
Next time you get flooded by anger, take a minute then—if you can—or after to check it out. What were the warning signs?
3. Find Someone to Listen to You
This shelter-in-place time has really brought me face-to-face with how detrimental accumulation can be. In other words, with each passing week I feel the cumulative effect of not enough emotional space, not enough exercise, and so on—for each member of our family.
Feelings are like this, too. We’ve all experienced that feeling of sadness that goes unexpressed for too long; the tears can only hover behind our eyes for so long before they spill over.
Similarly, if we let anger accumulate without being heard or moved, it tends to sit right below the surface of our interactions with our kids, ready to pounce.
One effective way to clear the cache, if you will—beyond exploding, which does it too, but at a cost—is to express our hurt and frustration and anger with someone who can just listen openly and without judgment.
One way to do this is to trade listening time with a partner or close friend—someone you trust to believe in you and your goodness as a parent, and to just hold space for you to talk, cry, vent, or even rage, without advice or criticism.
Another way is to set up a Listening Partnership, where you trade listening time with another parent who you may not even know. Here’s some more information on how this practice can be helpful, from Hand in Hand Parenting.
What I Believe
Whatever you do, know this:
I believe in your essential goodness as a parent.
I know how hard this is, and I’m with you on this journey.
I am confident that you can shift your relationship with anger.
