Anger and anxiety is one of my favorite topics to talk about because so often people don’t understand that anger is actually a result of anxiety or the fear response.
Anger is the Secondary Emotion:
Anger is a secondary emotion. There’s always something else that’s behind anger. It can be shame, guilt, hurt, frustration, and so many more emotions that come up alongside anger.
Managing Anger:
Remember when we are angry that unless we address the anxiety element (or shame, guilt, fear, or other emotion tied to the anger), we can’t address the anger.
Anger is the fight element of the fight-flight-freeze-fawn response. If we try to rationalize with someone who is in the fight response, we’re not going to get anywhere because the prefrontal cortex shuts down when a perceived threat is registered.
What to Do First:
Our ability to calm down our fight-flight-freeze-fawn response is the single most helpful thing we can do before we can figure out why we are angry or why our kid is angry.
It’s not going to be a conversation (it just won’t happen!) until your body is in that not so elevated place where you can take a moment to think. Calm your body down and move your body into safety first.
Anger and Kids:
It’s really important that kids understand it is okay to feel angry, but not okay to hurt themselves or others. Respond with something along the lines of, “I’m sorry that this is so hard for you. I can see that sharing this activity is really challenging you. It’s not okay to hit your brother. If you feel calm enough to talk, can you help me understand what made you so angry.”
Anger in Adults:
Remember that even as adults, we don’t know how to handle our anger. When we are angry, irritable, tired, frustrated, hurt, ashamed, you name it, we often pass it on to the person sitting next to us. Racist remarks, xenophobic behavior, sexist “jokes”, you name it, we do it.
We don’t always cope with anger and discomfort in the most adaptive ways. What we are trying to do is teach your kid how to manage their anger in an adaptive way by role modeling it. And we are also retraining the adult (that’s you!) to manage their anger too.
You might be projecting it onto the person sitting next to you or internally seething as you get more and more mad about a situation. What we are trying to do first is bring that brain and body back to safety by helping you really calm down first, before you think it through.
You’re looking to breathe or walk it out instead of projecting it onto the person next to you. To understand what the emotion is behind the anger and to listen to the signal that it is trying to send you. E.g. If you feel hurt, can you let the person know this vs retaliating in hurtful ways to really “let them know.” How else can you manage your own emotion vs take action that might end up hurting you?
