Hmm. I should check old post titles - that one sounds kind of familiar. It wouldn't surprise me to find I'd written about anger before. Probably wouldn't surprise you, either.
Anger is such a strange issue. One side of our family hides it, stuffs it down deep inside and lets it out as passive aggression, and the other lets it just explode in your face at the most unexpected of times. And now, as parents, M and I are having to navigate what is appropriate with a child. For us (what does acceptable behavior look like when you're angry) and for A (how much is she allowed to vent and in what ways?).
I'm bumbling through this issue kind of blindly. My first instinct is that anger is bad - I was taught to think that - and so the point is never to get angry. Or, if you have gotten angry, to deny that you were and to say it was sadness or something else. But that's not how life works, so I'm having to redefine how I "do" anger. Don't think I've gotten far - I haven't, really. I'm at the "it is okay for me to be angry" self-affirmation stage, at which point my brain just kind of turns off. Crickets. Silence. I have no idea how to be angry next.
If I'm not okay with A hitting when she's angry, then obviously that's off the table for me, too. I don't actually get that far, but the point is that I'm totally at sea with this and even extreme boundary conditions are helpful. Okay, so no hitting.
Yelling? Also not great. We don't want her to yell, and yet we get to the point where we do it. But I get there every other time I'm furious. (I also tend to put my foot down earlier than M so that I don't actually get as furious in certain situations. Don't worry, in others I'm way more unreasonable than him).
Walking out? Hmm. That one is a tougher call because it feels either like defeat or surrender instead of taking time to cool down. But as I write this and think how would I like it if A walked out and cooled down every time she was angry, I realize I'd be pretty happy with that. So maybe that is a new way to think about that option.
What I'd love to be is the person who can express verbally what I'm angry about in a way that vents it but doesn't (and my kid has just messed up some tape she's playing with at this instant, started making upset sounds, and I'm wondering should I duck lest the tape dispenser come flying my way) hurt the feelings of another person. And in a way that gets it out of my system.
I guess that last part is the other problem I have with my anger. I don't purge it very quickly. If I don't get an apology I have a hard time letting things go.
There is no neat bow to tie up this post and end with some epiphany. Just something I was thinking about. What is anger good for?
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On my first visit to a new therapist, they took five minutes and said I was full of rage. I got so mad at being labeled like that, I never went back. True story.
ReplyDeleteYears and years later, I have started being able to actually stop in the middle of being angry, recognize that something is causing me emotional pain, and think about what that thing might be. This process seems to convert the anger into either sadness or a sort of intense reflective moment. I qualify this as small success even if I'm still a little pissed off.
Anger is a lifelong problem for me, so I hear you. It's brave to post about it, and maybe that's what it's good for. Hmph.
Thanks for writing that, Christopher. I get stuck the most in parenting right now by not knowing what to do with my anger (I've also got a fair bit of it), but also to appropriately feel angry in certain situations. No clue. My default can be to just take something very personally and not know how to brush it off in an authentic way that I see others being able to do. When I get angry, I just kind of grind to a mental halt and have no clue how to proceed.
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