- Do you ever get angry at your kids?
Good, then I'm not alone.
And so does Melanie.
Let me read you an email from here.
She wrote, "Dear Avital,
"thank you so much for all that you do.
"Your work has changed our family life forever.
"I'm wondering about feeling angry.
"I know that we're not supposed to yell at our kids,
"but do you think it's okay to say 'you're making me so mad'
"or 'I'm so mad at you'?
"If not, why not?
"I think authenticity is incredibly important,
"and I think not saying I'm mad when I am
"or pretending I'm not is like silencing myself
"and suppressing my feelings.
"That can't be a good model for my kids, can it?
"isn't feeling angry just a human emotion
"that children need to witness as well?
"Looking forward to hearing your perspective on this.
"Melanie."
(upbeat music)
Welcome to The Parenting Junkie Show.
I'm Avital, and this is the place to be
to love parenting and parent from love.
Today we're talking about managing our adult tantrums,
whether our anger is justified,
and what to do about it.
Here's my thinking on this.
And I invite you to watch my video all about anger.
But basically I think that anger is a natural thing
that all of us are gonna feel from time to time,
and depending on your temperament and how you were raised,
your body and your words are gonna
come out differently when you're angry.
And it might be something that you
really struggle with like I do.
I really struggle with a temper
and with reactive angry emotions.
Anger is a natural feeling and you
do have the right to feel your feelings.
Your feelings are justified.
It is okay for you to be angry,
and beating yourself up about it
or feeling guilty about it certainly won't help.
But, let's differentiate between what you feel
and how you behave.
If we feel angry, that's okay and justified.
However, acting out our anger,
unleashing it on someone else,
vomiting whatever we have inside us
when we're angry on our children, not okay.
The same goes for children as well, right?
We wanna teach our children that
it's okay for them to be mad or sad or jealous.
But it's not okay for them
to hit or grab or yell at someone.
The other thing to know about feelings
is that we have to take responsibility for them.
Other people don't make us angry.
And we don't get mad at other people.
We get mad within ourselves.
There was an external trigger for it,
something stimulated our anger.
But it's our own interpretation of that external situation
that made us angry.
However, the fact that we're feeling angry
and that we get angry doesn't give us license
to blame or shame someone else's behavior.
You can disagree with your children's behavior,
you can think that they need guidance or consequences,
or a lot of teaching around what they've done,
that it wasn't okay.
But they are still not responsible
for your emotional reaction.
So, no, we wanna try and shy away
from telling our children that they made us mad
or that we're mad at them.
We need to start taking responsibility for our feelings
and saying I'm feeling very angry right now
is very different from saying you're making me very angry.
It might sound like just a semantical difference,
but I think it's actually quite an essential difference
in how we're treating the other person
and what we're putting on them versus
what we're putting on ourselves.
Anger is a growth opportunity.
Anger is that moment that we can step into being
the peaceful person that we want to be.
It's very easy on the yoga mat or in meditation
or when you're on a retreat.
It's very hard and very meaningful
when we can rise above and become peaceful
in a moment of being triggered.
When our prefrontal cortex is actually offline
and our body is actually being driven
by our reptilian brains, by a reactive brain,
that's when we want to rise above.
The moment that anger wants us to get really, really loud
is the moment that we get really quiet.
It's in the resistance to the tyranny of anger
that we can grow into the peaceful people
that we want to be.
It's in distancing ourselves from the anger
and realizing that it's not true to say I am angry.
It's not that I am anger.
We don't allow it to be come us.
We in fact, differentiate from it
and realize oh, this is anger trying to control me.
This is anger trying to give me a message.
So how about we allow ourselves to become the recipient
of anger's message but not the messenger for anger.
In other words, we allow anger
to speak to us but not for us.
When we allow anger to speak to us we listen,
and we say, huh, why did anger come to visit
just at that moment?
What boundaries were being crossed?
What story was I telling myself?
How was I allowing for myself to be treated in a way
that I don't want to be treated?
How was I disrespecting myself
and trespassing over my own limits and boundaries?
That's listening for anger and understanding
and drawing important conclusions for the future.
Have you ever found yourself in the throws of anger?
Do you find managing your temper a challenge?
If so, I would love to hear.
Let me know at theparentingjunkie.com/blog,
just in the comments section there,
let's have a conversation around
the role of anger in parenting and
what it feels like for you.
So if you find yourself in that very moment
that anger has come to visit,
you're super triggered,
you're so angry you want to hurt someone,
your children probably, and you wanna hurt them bad,
you wanna yell at them.
You wanna tell them how bad they are.
You want to cause them pain.
You wanna unleash your anger.
What can you do in that moment?
How can you calm yourself down?
How can you stop yourself from releasing that venom?
That poison?
That vomit onto someone else?
Here are some ideas.
The first step is that we have to stop ourselves somehow.
And Dr. Laura Markham recognizes this as a first step
in her Stop, Drop, and Breathe sequence.
And I'll link to the video about that below.
But the first step of stopping ourselves,
we wanna gag ourselves, we wanna hold back our arms,
we wanna kind of be a limitation for ourselves.
My three-year-old son once said to me,
"I really wanted to hit but my skin stopped me."
And it was such a great analogy of having your skin
actually pull you back.
He actually succeeded in self regulating.
Regulating his emotions so that
he wasn't unleashing them on his baby brother.
His skin was stopping him.
How can you help your skin to stop you?
In that very moment you can redirect your anger
and rather than saying words that are hurtful and toxic
and that you can't take back later,
how about you say something
that doesn't make any sense whatsoever?
Just yelling or making noises that express that energy
without saying something hurtful.
How about you excuse yourself, you pull yourself back
and you say, "I need a break."
Or you say,
"I'm too upset right now.
"I need to go and calm down.
"Please go and play in the playroom until I'm calm.
"I need a few minutes to myself,
"and we will talk about this later.
"This isn't your fault but I can't handle this right now.
"I need to calm down.
"I'll see you soon."
If you have another adult at home or even an older child,
you can ask them for help.
You can say, "I really need a break.
"Can you guys play together?
"I need to go calm down."
Try to inhibit yourself the way you would
if you had guests over or you were being on camera
or if you were bing watched by strangers in the street.
Is this about suppressing your emotions?
Not at all.
It's about listening to them but not acting on them.
You're allowed to feel angry.
Remember, you're not allowed
to unleash toxicity on other people, right?
And I do, too.
I do it the whole time.
So let's give ourselves compassion for that
because of course, there is always repair,
and there's always apologizing.
Step number two is to wait for the feelings to pass.
And this is very hard if you are a hurricane like me.
Harville Hendrix talks about hurricanes and turtles.
Hurricanes, when they're angry,
they blow really big and really loud
and they sweep everybody up around them
in that tantrum that they're having.
Turtles retreat to their shells,
and they actually close off and ignore and stonewall
and gaslight and do all sorts of behaviors
that stop other people from allowing any kind of engagement
or penetration into their emotions.
So, if you are a turtle, this is a good phase for you.
You wanna retreat from the anger
and you want to wait it out.
But if you're a hurricane this is very challenging.
This is the place where we actually
don't act on our feelings.
We don't say what we wanted to say.
Instead, we wait.
Now, what can you do during this incubation period?
Well, you can express your anger in a healthy way,
through art, through journaling, through dance.
Let it out definitely, just not on your children, hey?
And not on yourself.
Let it out by talking to a friend or a therapist,
calling your spouse, writing it down.
Do something to let it out,
but don't let it out on your children.
Now if you're stuck with your children
and you can't leave them alone because they're little
then change up the atmosphere.
Go watch a movie.
Go on a walk, get outside, go upside down,
literally changing perspective and changing atmosphere
is going to really really help you
to let your emotions move through you.
Now, what you need to realize is that
all emotions pass.
All emotions are transient.
So the fact that it feels like you have to act on it now,
that's just the urgency of that triggered state.
But it's not true when you don't have to listen to it.
You can say to yourself, yes, this is important,
and no I won't let it go,
but I'm only going to talk about it when I'm calm.
When I'm calm I'll be able to choose my words wisely,
and I'll be so much more effective.
Sometimes we think that parenting is like dog training,
that if your dog pees on your couch
you immediately have to respond or they'll never learn.
You can't sit the dog down for a conversation
two hours later when you're calm and say,
"You know what, that peeing on the couch really has to stop.
"I don't like that."
Right?
But with children you can.
It's really a wonderful thing.
Furthermore, if you are angry when you respond,
you're not gonna respond effectively.
Your children are gonna get defensive, scared,
and their brains will shut down
and they'll go into survival mode
and they won't hear you anyway.
It's simply not a teachable moment.
It's well worth the wait.
And finally, you get to express yourself.
Number three is express.
Express what was making you angry,
but not about saying I'm so angry
and you made me mad and it's your fault
and you're not okay,
but saying,
"You know, I got really upset
"when I saw this and this happen,
"and here's why, here's what I feel about it."
It's about getting close and cuddling and feeling calm
and having a bit of a laugh.
It's about holding your child's goodness to light
and saying, "I know that you're such a good kid,
"and I know you don't mean any harm by this,
"but this didn't feel quite right to me.
"Can we have a conversation about that?
"Let's talk about it."
And it's about listening to their side
and understanding that we may
have missed an entire perspective.
In fact, by definition we missed
an entire perspective on what happened.
So we wanna express ourselves in a mindful way,
through nonviolent communication and real connection
and at a time and place and in a way
that feels good, close, and connected with our child.
This would also be the time to apologize,
because probably, if you got really triggered and angry,
you made a violent face or you hurt your child
or you said something that you do regret,
and this is the time to take responsibility
for our behavior, saying, "That wasn't okay, and I'm sorry."
"I'm really sorry for losing my cool with you
"and yelling at you and I do not mean what I said.
"It was not okay what I said.
"And I'm gonna work very hard to teach myself to calm down
"when I'm angry and to speak respectfully."
That sense of pride when you've managed
to navigate a situation that used to trigger you,
and today, for some reason, you managed
to rally your resources and navigate it peacefully,
that sense of pride is growth.
That's where we become really
the peaceful people we wanna be.
The peaceful ninjas we are.
And that's what our children deserve, too.
They deserve to see a model of leadership
that takes responsibility for emotional outbursts
and for bad behavior that takes responsibility
and it takes action in trying to make changes
and really reform.
So if we bring in remorse and we bring in reform
and show our children we're taking that two-pronged approach
to our anger problems, then I think that we're doing
the very best that we can.
- If this spoke to you, I would love for you
to tag me over on Instagram @PARENTINGJUNKIE.
You could also slam the like button on this video
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And I'd love to hear from you,
how anger plays a part in your parenting over on the blog.
Meanwhile, you can dive deeper into this topic
at The Parenting Junkie Show podcast
anywhere you get your podcasts
and share this episode with anyone you think
might find it helpful.
You just grab the link and send them
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Keep on loving parenting and parenting from love.
(light music)