In recent weeks, I’ve listened to several moms talking about their fear of showing anger around their teenager or young adult.
“I don’t want to set her off… It’ll just escalate… I’m never sure what would happen… It feels too risky.”
We’ve all felt like this. And when you’re building an open, trusting relationship with your big kid, stuffing down your emotions is denying a part of yourself and, ultimately, it blocks true connection.
Anger is a complicated experience. It’s an essential part of our emotional landscape and, at the same time, we have been socialized to swallow and silence it.
But that doesn’t make it disappear. It builds and festers. It turns into resentment or rage. It becomes heavy and unwieldy. Then, you’re stuck because you don’t know how to process something that big but you also don’t know how to parse it out in a healthy way. It just hovers below the surface, waiting to overflow.
Suppressing your anger can also create a boomerang effect: in which you turn your anger on yourself. That is, if, when you were angry as a youngster, you were met with comments like “calm down, don’t be dramatic, don’t cause a scene, it’s not a big deal, there’s nothing to fume about,” this kind of dismissing and shaming may have turned into self-dismissing and self-shaming. You get the feeling that the anger response you’re having is ‘wrong’ or ‘unreasonable.’
You have thoughts like, “I couldn’t be angry, I’m the adult, I should be able to control my temper, it’s my fault that we argued, etc.” And the more you experience anger, the more you feel you have to suppress what’s ‘wrong’ with you.
And of course, that doesn’t make the anger go away either. It’s still there, entwined with self-judgement and even more complex.
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It’s ok to be angry with your teenager. If you can see that your fear of anger is blocking the possibility for deeper connection with them, I can offer you some approaches to removing that barrier:
Acknowledge what produces your fear
When some of us hear the word anger, we are transported back to what we learned in our youth — that anger is scary. We witnessed the anger of our caregivers, yelling, exploding, smashing things, spanking, abandoning, name-calling and physical violence. Big energy flew around us and it was frightening.
We learned that anger is unsafe. And since safety was our little brain’s top priority, it figured out a code for staying as physically, emotionally and energetically safe as possible. “Steer clear of mom when she uses that tone of voice.” “Be silent if Chris arrives late.”
Whether those were daily experiences for you or few and far between, they were imprinted upon you. They reside in your memory, in your heart and in your body. And even now, they may be at play when you choose to avoid hard conversations, divert potential conflicts, remain silent about your values or suppress any objections that could spark chaos.
And then there were your experiences of your own anger when you were young. Did your caregivers allow your anger, support you as you felt it and encourage you to express it? For many people, the answer is No. Because if your caregivers hadn’t learned to allow and experience their own anger, they simply weren’t capable of doing the same for you.
Added to that generational imprinting is the fact that women also carry a long legacy of condemnation for their anger, being considered physically and mentally defective or under the influence of demons, being stoned, burned, banished and institutionalized. Even today, an angry woman is called ‘crazy.’ This is part of you in some way and it can, from somewhere deep inside, influence your interactions with your kids.
Self-compassion
If your auto-pilot reaction to anger is fear, what’s called for is not self-berating but self-compassion.
Repeat after me: It makes sense that I looked for ways to numb the tension of anger. It makes sense that I developed a way to move rapidly when there was a sense of danger (without pausing to determine if it was real or urgent). And it makes sense that this turned into a pattern over the years.
Dear one, you were taking care of yourself the best way you knew how. It’s ok. That was then. And now you’re learning how to recreate and enhance your sense of safety and connection.
Allow your body to feel it
Stuffing down emotions over a number of years diminishes your awareness of how anger moves in our bodies. And that requires us to re-learn and strengthen our ability to detect what’s happening internally.
So, get curious and get better at noticing it. “There’s that tension in my jaw, that iciness in my hands, that clenching in my stomach, etc.”
Acknowledge it. “I feel anger coming into me. This anger is allowed to be here.”
Resist the urge to suppress it. “I feel like running but I can stay.”
Open to it and ride the wave. It won’t last long. It won’t drown you. Let it flow into you and tighten your muscles and redden your face.
Let it get big and, wait, hang on, wait… then watch it weaken and disperse.
Explore emotions as a source of information.
Like all emotions, anger carries wisdom for you. When you fall into the old habit of suppressing it, you miss out on that information. What could this inner experience and bodily sensations be telling you? Is one of your values being compromised or your needs being ignored?
Anger says, Stop right there. Something’s not right! And when we stop and listen, it gives us information that elicits change. It brings about hard conversations and truths. In the big picture, it clears space for more understanding and connection.
“Not all storms come to disrupt your life. Some come to clear your path.”~ Paulo Coelho
When you are self-compassionate and allow yourself to experience anger, you develop compassion for others who are experiencing anger. And as you gain confidence in riding the waves of your own anger, you increase your capacity to let your son or daughter ride theirs. This too is love.
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Photo by Laura Hope on Unsplash