Anger is a difficult emotion. It’s one of the one’s that is readily labelled as “negative” and as you’ll get used to my thoughts on this, emotions are neither negative or positive, but rather appropriate or inappropriate for the situation. Or to call upon someone much smarter than myself and arguably the father of philosophy - Aristotle:
Anybody can become angry; that is easy. But to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.
If your child is experiencing anger, chances are they are not taking it out on the right person, to the right degree at the right time, they are taking it out on you, in a degree that to you is utterly baffling and at a time that is usually it’s most inconvenient.
Your child will often have reasons for being angry and these reasons will often be quite meaningful to them. As parents or carers, what we are seeing is the symptom, the way the anger is being expressed and because this is being expressed towards us, it’s all too easy to fall into a defensive or even combative position. We fight fire with fire.
This leads us into one of the biggest problems with anger cycles in families. It creates a situation where it is “you vs the angry person” and the only solution to managing this is to switch things into “you and the person vs the cause of their anger”.
The video below talks about many ways to help with the symptoms of anger at various levels of intensity. But if we don’t adopt this mindset shift we will always just be putting out fires and never getting to the reason behind them.
To do this takes a big old dollop of “being a bigger person” and as a parent of two teen boys myself I know you probably already feel stretched thin in that department! If we want our children to choose better reactions to their problems, then we need to choose better reactions to their reactions… still with me?
So when that anger comes in our direction, the first step is to take a nice deep breath and remind ourselves “this isn’t about me, it’s me and the child vs the anger, not me vs the angry child”. There’s rarely a situation where doubling down on compassion isn’t a good choice; and if instead of fighting their anger with more anger of your own, you instead show patience and kindness you’re almost guaranteed a better outcome.
One final note, I say almost guaranteed a better outcome because breaking cycles doesn’t always work on the first try. It took repetition to create the cycle and it may take repetition to break it. In fact at first your child may just end up confused wondering what on earth has gotten into you, they’ll need some consistency if this is going to stick.
This technique of “me and you vs the problem” as opposed to “me vs you” works in all relationships, so give it a whirl!