Parenting Strategy 7:
Manage Your Emotions Even When You're Upset
BY ARLENE F. HARDER, MA, MFT
"Keep cool; anger is not an argument."
—Daniel Webster
"Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained."
—Arthur Somers Roche
"No one can drive us crazy unless we give them the keys."
—Doug Horton
A teacher once told me that many families major in one emotion and minor in others. What she meant was that in one family it can be okay to express anger, accompanied with yelling and door-slamming, but exhibiting fear is not acceptable. In another family, there is a pervasive sense of anxiety, with activities curtailed to prevent anything remotely risky, but you dare not raise your voice or tell anyone you're angry. In still other families, which is frequently true of alcoholic homes, emotions are distorted by being either extreme or denied.
As I look back on my own childhood, I can't remember a single time when we children, or our parents, raised our voices in anger. That doesn't mean we weren't angry. It's just that I didn't learn to recognize when I was angry, or how to express my anger appropriately. Consequently, when I became an adult, I had a hard time learning to deal with both my own anger and the anger of others.
We learn how to manage our emotions in large part by observing how our parents manage their emotions. If parents blow a gasket when their child misbehaves, it's not surprising when that child gets into fights on the playground. If parents tell a child to ignore her disappointment in being excluded from a party to which she thought she'd be invited, they lose the chance to show her how to handle life's inevitable disappointments and, as a consequence, she may grow up to hold grudges and allow hurt feelings to fester and grow.
It's fairly clear that how you deal with the whole range of emotions sets the stage for how your children will deal with their disappointments, fears, anxieties, anger, sadness—and their happiness as well. You can best help your child by recognizing that emotions are part and parcel of being human, by being in tune with your own emotions, by labeling your feelings accurately, by expressing them appropriately, by learning to tolerate ambivalent feelings, by calming yourself down when you're upset—and by teaching your child how to do the same.
By paying attention to how you manage your emotions doesn't mean your child will automatically be able to manage his emotions. After all, you've had many years to experience feelings and how to deal with them. But the more you continue to manage your emotions, the better headstart he'll have in managing his—and the better job you'll do in playing The Parenting Game.
A Tale of Two Mothers in Public
Several years ago, I was using the ladies room in a department store when I heard a mother loudly scold her young son, yank him into a booth, and spank him soundly. The demeaning words and many smacks made me cringe. From what I could surmise, this young boy had wandered off because he was bored standing around and waiting while his mother tried on dresses. True, he needed to learn that getting lost could cause his mother to worry (and might create serious problems for him), but it didn't sound as though he deserved the thrashing she was doling out.
What must her childhood have been like, I wondered, for her to take out her anger and fear on her son. And if she used such strong discipline in public, what might she do in private?
Another example of parenting in public occurred not long ago when my assistant, Renee, took her two-year old son to Target and had already chosen a number of items she needed when Nicholas threw a major tantrum. You know the kind. Body thrown on the floor. Arms and legs flailing. Loud cries. Renee's reaction? She picked him up, left the goods she had selected in the shopping cart and carried him out to the car. Calmly she said, "You're too tired and cranky today for me to do shopping. We'll go home and you can take a nap."
In the car he calmed down almost immediately and said quietly, "I'll be good. You can go back to the store. Please?" But Renee knew her son had reached his limit and didn't want to push him farther than he had the emotional strength to manage, so she continued driving and simply repeated, "No, we'll go home now. Later you'll be ready to behave."
We don't want to see ourselves in the first scenario and wish we had the courage to react like the second mother. But for all of us there are times when our emotions get the better of us. It may be that over the course of the afternoon the kids have gradually been driving us crazy and we finally explode. Other times we're moving along quite comfortably when a child, or anyone else, says or does something and suddenly our stomach churns, our head pounds and, whether or not we outwardly display our emotions, inwardly we're a mess.
When this happens, any sense we have of feeling cool, calm and collected vanishes the instant our emotions flare up. It's almost as though something physically prevents us from reacting any other way, like a piece of Velcro that can't resist getting hooked by the barbs on another piece of Velcro. We are knocked off balance, snagged with Velcro barbs, and yanked in a direction we hadn't intended to go. We know we're over-reacting, but can't seem to help it.
Getting Caught by Velcro
We all have this kind of Velcro. In observing my own experience and that of my clients, I suspect it's primarily created by that old nemesis of good parenting and good relations—the ego. In the assumption that our identity is defined by how well our children do and that what we believe is who we are, we can become unglued when our child misbehaves or doesn't see things the way we do. How all this plays out emotionally depends, in part, as I said earlier, on how we learned to handle our feelings in our family of origin.
I would be remiss, however, if I didn't acknowledge the role that personality style and temperament play in building a coat of Velcro. In The Challenging Child, clinical psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan describes five inborn personality traits: highly sensitive, self-absorbed, defiant, inattentive, and active/aggressive. Thus, one child will react to disappointment by falling apart with great sobs and another by throwing things. And while recognizing that you aren't going to change a child's temperament, you can help any child soften the more extreme edges of these inborn traits. You can help a highly sensitive child develop a tougher skin (that is, less Velcro) to protect her against life's disappointments, or when helping an active and aggressive child calm herself down.
In addition to ego, family behavior patterns, and temperament, the Velcro Syndrome is often created by early childhood trauma that was not dealt with properly at the time, which is, essentially, how PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder, works. As Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell note in Parenting From the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive:
"To our role of parenting we bring our own emotional baggage, which can unpredictably interfere in our relationship with our children. Leftover issues or unresolved trauma and loss involve significant themes from the past that stem from repeated experiences early in life that were difficult and emotionally significant. These issues, especially if we have not reflected on them and integrated them into our self-understanding, can continue to affect us in the present."
Consequently, when our rough spots get hooked by the rough places in the personalities and behaviors of children—and of our parents, of our bosses and neighbors, of friends and siblings—we get pulled off-balance. Unfortunately, because we're as flawed as the next person, we also say and do things that unintentionally offend others and can pull any of these people off-balance as well.
Both the good and the bad news about Velcro is that any size piece will stick to another piece of any size. Consequently, no matter what the intensity of the roots of your Velcro reaction and no matter how the Velcro was created in the first place, there's a good chance it will get hooked by another person. On the other hand, the smaller your piece, the easier it is to disengage yourself after you're caught, even if the other person's piece is extremely large.
When I titled this article "Manage Your Emotions Even When You're Upset," I wasn't referring to only shouting matches with your child. You don't have to experience a full-blown rage or paralyzing panic to know that your buttons are being pushed.
Being a Calm and Centered Parent Isn't Easy
Let me be clear about something. When your child's behavior ticks you off, it isn't the action itself that causes your emotional reaction. It's the meaning those actions and words have for your identity as a person and as a parent.
For example, imagine that you have long resented the fact that your mother favored your sister and you got the left-overs. Let's imagine that you made a decision when you were small that you would always bend over backwards to make life fair for your own children. So what happens now when your son says, "You're not being FAIR?" He often gets what he wants.
In your more sane moments, you know that it's impossible to be perfectly fair all the time and that you do your best to not favor one child over another. But your long-running fairness tape is mixed up with the determination-not-to-be-like-my-mother tape. Since that effort is mixed up in other charactertistics of your mother that you don't like, any reference to fairness can feel as though you are being accused of all the things you don't like about your mother. Giving your child what he wants makes you feel better about yourself. Well, it does for a little while, that is, until you realize you've once again given your son something he doesn't really need.
How to disengage your fairness button? You have to pull back the curtain that hides your resentment, like Toto in The Wizard of Oz tugging at the curtain to reveal a wizard without wizarding powers.
This leads me to share an observation I'm sure you've also noticed. Learning to parent well takes time and lots of practice. Learning to untangle your feelings about parenting and expressing your emotions more appropriately than you have in the past isn't something that's done over-night. In The Wizard of Oz, the wizard isn't revealed until Alice has been through many other adventures and difficulties. Before you can get out of a mindset that causes your emotions to go on automatic pilot, you have to do a lot of self-evaluation.
I don't want to leave the impression that if you use the suggestion below, you won't have any more problems. Life is too complex for that. Children are too insistent for that. When writing this article, for example, I asked Renee if I could use her story for the illustration above and she laughed, saying, "Sure. But the same thing happened again today." The point is not that Nicholas won't again throw a tantrum. The point is that Renee continues not to get caught.
Besides, the reasons why we don't parent the way we would like are often buried very deeply. It took me many years of therapy to become a recovering perfectionist. One or two self-help ideas may not be enough for you to disengage the buttons your children love to push and you may get farther faster by seeing a therapist or family counselor.
Regaining Equilibrium By Taking Steps to Reduce Your Velcro
Now let's look at the Velcro Syndrome again.
Being in the midst of an attack is not unlike having an orchestra in which there is no director. If every musician played any way he or she wanted, at any tempo, and at any volume, the audience would clean out fast. Someone must direct the players, for cymbals and drums are supposed to stop their crashing and booming when the score calls for soft violins.
Similarly, an outburst of anger—or frozen panic—is not appropriate when calm control is needed. Unfortunately, when you are jerked off balance, for the first few moments you may only be aware of your anger, your sense of injustice, and other strong emotions. In times like those, it feels as though no one is in charge—your emotions can play any tune they want.
Fortunately, there are several techniques for getting in touch with your calm, nurturing, self-aware center so you can be available to appropriately respond to the current situation and not react out of a blind instinct to protect your ego, or out of habit as you've done thousands of times in the past.
When you learn how to calm down quickly, it becomes much easier to remind yourself that you are able to control your anger, you are loved, you are competent, and you don't have to blindly follow the approach your parents would have taken.
Rather than responding to your child's behavior with a knee-jerk reaction that doesn't help him understand what you mean or change his behavior, here are three things you can do to put yourself in control once again and deactivate the Velcro Syndrome. They include the old count-to-three technique, but add variations you may discover to be more effective in stopping yourself from getting entangled in an emotional reaction when cooler heads should prevail.
1. Peel off the Velcro
The next time you lose your temper—or better yet, when you're about to lose your temper—here's what you do. Imagine you simply peel off the Velcro that has you caught in its grip! That's right. You can just peel it off and throw it away.
You might even physically move your hand across your shoulder just as you would if you were to actually peel off a piece of Velcro. With practice, this thought and simple, but deliberate, action can remind you that you don't have to respond as you have in the past.
2. Focus on your breath
Once you've peeled off the Velcro, the next step is to take several deep breaths. I recommend you do this by inhaling fully through your nose and slowly exhaling through your mouth, as though you are gently blowing on a candle—while counting to three with each deep breath. Then return to your normal, natural way of breathing, continuing to count if you need to.
By focusing on your breath rather than the upset of the moment, you give your brain a chance to disconnect from the neurons that are tightly hooked up to emotional triggers and to discover other neurons that can calm your emotions and allow you to collect your thoughts.
3. Find the calm within the storm
When the Velcro no longer has you in its grip and you have used your calming breath, imagine there is a magic circle drawn on the floor around you. Only you can see it. This circle identifies the area within it as your special place of calm power, peace and self-assurance. You might even want to imagine that the circle is a Teflon shield. Velcro definitely cannot stick to that.
Whenever you are safe within this circle, your child can throw all the tantrums she wants and won't be able to hook you. Okay, you'll still be frustrated that you have to stop and deal with the matter instead of finishing your shopping in quick fashion, or that you have to deal once more with a topic you thought was already settled (in your favor, of course). But at least now you can respond to her with greater calmness and she will learn that her upset doesn't knock you off balance. She can count on you to keep your head when she's losing hers.
If you try this approach, you will notice that when you're in control again, it's like having the orchestra leader walk back on stage, pick up the baton, and take charge. When you become centered and consciously assume a position of decision-maker, you regain your equilibrium and can choose the response that is best for that situation, rather than have your emotion choose for you.
See the sidebar of this article to help you explore how you deal with anxiety, fear, worry, and anger so that you can help your child deal with those emotions. You may also want to see the sidebar of Parenting Strategy 1: Have a Plan and Know Yourself for a sentence I have found extremely helpful in reinforcing your intention to manage your emotions so you can better manage your child's emotions. In that article I also have an example of how unattended childhood traumas can affect one's parenting today.
© Copyright 2005, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT
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