How Anger Helps You See Your Problem Spots

Written By: Kristen Mehn, LCSW.

I screeched at my husband a few days ago. Pure rage erupted from my mouth. I sounded like a howler monkey at the zoo. And then I dove into an ocean of shame, because I know, deep down, that anger is not okay. Maybe this idea came from my parents. My dad was cool and calm and collected, and was respected for this. Especially by my mother, who would say “your father is just so patient.” And though this was a quality she would like to have, she did not seem to beat herself up too much about it. Dad was dad, and she was who she was. It was kind of like saying “wouldn’t it be fun to be able to run as fast as a cheetah?”

So my dad was quiet and handled things and my mom would explode like a fireworks show in our living room, and was judged for it. She was crazy, irrational, said my dad’s attitude, and sometimes also his words. Her explosions were something we could laugh about later. Tease her about, silly mom, going around having emotions. These were my choices then: you can be born without the anger gene like dad (cool) or be a silly explosive ninny like mom (not cool). I chose to be cool. Cool as a cucumber. So easy. My sisters could cry and scream during family arguments, I did not. The children that I worked with could throw computers across the room, I observed. I worked with inmates in a county jail and taught anger management (cringe for an unwelcome mental image of 23 year old me talking like I knew anything about anything) Cool and easy. That’s me.

And then, I had children of my own. Ka-Booshhhhh. I didn’t feel much anger while they were babies, but the toddler phase. Man. This period when they still need you so much but they also need to assert themselves endlessly. “Come to the bathroom with me mama. No DON’T sit there mama. Close the door mama. I want privacy....no DON’T GO, DON’T GO TO THE KITCHEN!!”

I am a grown woman (and, ahem, a therapist) and all of the sudden I have all this anger, and no idea what to do with it. No practice at handling it at all. Some of my worst ideas about what to do with it have been: scream at the children. Smack myself in the forehead repeatedly, quite hard, while the children watch spellbound. Kick a hole in the wall, just once, but the kids still talk about it. Some of my better ideas have been to forgive myself, recognize that parenting is hard, and make small goals to model good angry behavior for my kids that I want them to act out: deep breaths, some alone time, et cetera. That shit is hard, though.

Back to the moment when I screeched at my husband, in front of my children, on the day before Valentine’s day.
It was a long quarantine day, in the middle of a long weekend. We were headed into tantrum territory with the three year old and I didn’t want to do it anymore. I’d been dancing him back from the edge of a full meltdown for hours: negotiating the end of screen time, committing myself to play dough and eating pretend spaghetti and playing blocks and impersonating a monster with a blow up dinosaur while I cooked dinner. My husband was in the bedroom working and I stuck my head in and asked if he could relieve me, confident he could already hear the escalation and knew where things were heading.
He said he was coming. But then he didn’t. Another couple of minutes went by, my son dug his little fingers into everyone of my buttons and held them there and I returned to the bedroom, telling my husband to come out NOW. So he did and then said what I THOUGHT was something very close to “well if I have to be the enforcer…” and then this terrible shrieking burst from my body.

This is what Gottman would call, perhaps, an unsolvable problem: I don’t like to ask for things, and my husband doesn’t like to BE asked for things (Gottman, 1995). Which on the surface sort of sounds like a great match, but of course isn’t, in a marriage that includes all the things that a marriage does, plus three children and a year long quarantine in the middle of Los Angeles with no yard, and no (real) school. We have to be able to ask each other for things we need.

Which brings me to the things my husband and I are being asked to do together. We are stretching the limits of marriage to the absolute max. We are co-teachers “did you take a picture of her math yet?” and technical support for each other “what is wrong with the printer? Why can’t we just have a CORD?” We are office (and desk) mates, and each other’s only childcare relief. Also, of course, we share regular parenting and cleaning and finances and emotional support and some kind of physical intimacy thrown in there too. AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH.

I have a very wonderful friend who lives in Wilmington Delaware who excels at this version of validation: “of COURSE you are sad. It’s Wednesday and you don’t like Wednesdays, and you just had that fight with your sister, and you’ve been working non-stop.” She did this for me all the time in my single days, and retroactively, I see how mindful it is, this attempt to get me to accept my feelings and not judge them. You feel what you feel. You are allowed to. Stop second guessing yourself, stop trying to shoo away or invalidate what you feel. So yes, my friend, anger makes sense on this day before Valentine’s day (or any day really), anger is here, and it is allowed to be. My challenge when it comes to my anger, this emotion that I am so ashamed of I often don’t have access to it: I have to notice it, accept it and appreciate it. Even love it if I can, so that I can get to know it. It was hiding from me for the first part of my life, or I was hiding from it. Probably I sacrificed quite a bit, to be able to get through life without feeling anger. But now, I’ve got it. Thank you, toddlers, couldn’t have done it without you. I would like to have more control over my yelling, I don’t want it to explode out of me like fireworks lit by accident. I would like to the limit the number of times I demonstrate my head smacking trick for my kids. But there is a difference between the feelings I have and the behaviors that I exhibit, and I want to focus on understanding the feeling first, before I try to wrangle my behaviors and words to where I want them to be. Without the road map of understanding my anger, I don’t fully know what I want those behaviors and words to be anyway.

Here’s what I like about my relatively newfound rage: it helps me connect better to others who are struggling with their anger. Before this gift of self knowledge from my toddlers, I did not understand what it felt like to be inside of an anger that caused me to lose control of my body, to get to a spot where I couldn’t with some presence of mind choose the behavior I wanted. Now I know.

Here is another wonderful thing about the newfound rage: it lets me know more about me. What are my boundaries, my triggers, what are my hopes and dreams and when do I feel like they are being trampled on? At what point are quarantine days home with 3 children too long and too hard? If knowing myself were the same as making a drawing of me, then each incident of my anger would be a new line drawn, there is the outline of my little toe, there is a strand of hair. And so when I feel the anger and frustration rising, I want to acknowledge it, greet it, welcome it in. So glad you are here anger, with the gift of new information to give me.

All this time I have been proud of my quiet and controlled relationship with anger, and now that relationship has changed. I don’t like it that. It makes me not like me. But as Adriene from Yoga With Adriene reminded me today: "If you are working with a problem spot right now that's just a spot that's in the process of transforming and healing." I have some childhood teaching to unlearn, or relearn. My dad had anger but decided it was not safe to express it. Someone might make fun of him about it. His control, though, showed me that you can choose what to do with anger. My mother expressed her anger with aplomb, but demonstrated that there was no way to control the magic of it. So I aim for this, to both recognize and understand my anger, and to choose how to show it. It’s my magic, my problem spot, and I am transforming and healing.

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Website: kristenmehnlcsw.com

Los Feliz Therapy: Russell Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90027, United States

Email: kristensuze@gmail.com

Phone: 323-714-4949

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