Anger is probably the most important emotion to monitor in conflict because of the potential for aggression. Parents must be able to constructively manage their own anger so they can teach a child to do the same. Anger can be particularly threatening to a very young child because it interrupts the expression of loving feelings—parent to child and child to parent. It can feel alienating, lonely, and frightening.
The child must learn that anger is only temporary. It takes experiencing some normal anger to and from the parent in conflict before the child comes to understand that this is a passing emotional discomfort, not any permanent loss of love. Parents can assure both the strong-willed child and out of control teen: “No matter how angry we may get at each other, our love will be there when the anger has gone away.”
And when correcting a child, never do it in anger, for two reasons. First, the consequence you impose is likely to be so extreme you will have to retract or at least modify it later, showing your child that you don’t mean what you say. “You’re grounded for the next year!” explodes the father whose teenage son has taken out the family car without permission, only to reduce the sentence to a week after he has calmed down. Second, anger can obscure the problem being corrected because the parents’ intense emotion becomes the most salient message the child receives. If you ask her why she was punished, she will say, “Because my parents were angry at me.” Ask her, “What for?” and she will answer, “I don’t know. They were just yelling at me like they always do!”
So the child misses the point about not leaving the back door open and allowing the dog to escape again. In conflict, the issues are often too important to get extremely angry about.Parents can help their child put anger in emotional context by explaining how the basic functions of all emotions are the same: registering the felt awareness of an event (sadness over a loss, for example) and motivating a response (grief, for example) to that event. Each emotion commonly arises in response to a different kind of experience.
For example, frustration is a typical response to the thwarting of desires or needs, fear is a typical response to danger, and surprise is a typical response to the unexpected. The function of anger is to identify violations. Anger is evaluative; it comes into play when we judge that we have been wronged. It then motivates us to make some expressive, protective, or corrective response, sometimes precipitating conflict that is fought to set things right.
Try asking yourself the same question when you feel angry. If the answer is, “I am also feeling sad,” or, “I’m also feeling anxious,” for example, then take the time to reflect on those emotions or talk about what that sadness or anxiety is. The benefit of this exercise is to clarify and amplify what is emotionally going on for yourself and for others. If parent or child thinks that all the other ever gets in conflict is angry, then valuable emotional information will never be revealed or discussed.
Conflict creates an opportunity for more communication if parent and child allow themselves to disclose more, which includes allowing themselves to be more emotionally known.People who feel obliged to please others or entitled to get their way can become angry in conflict for the same reason: their wants are denied. They may become angry when they fail to please, as being in disagreement with the other person implies.
And they can become angry when disagreement opposes their desire to prevail. In both cases, their “sense of should” has been violated. “I ‘should’ have pleased the other person,” says the pleaser. “I ‘should’ have gotten what I wanted,” thinks the entitled person. The only solution to people of either predisposition is to learn to substitute the word “want” for “should,” gradually coming to accept that getting their wants satisfied just some of the time is good enough: “I want to please you all the time, but I know no matter how hard I try, I really can’t.”
If you come under angry attack from your child and are on the receiving end of deliberately hurtful words, it is generally better not to respond in kind because that will just build more anger between you. Instead, pause, create a quiet space in the communication, then make an empathetic response. Beneath violent language there are often vulnerable feelings, so see whether you can shift your focus of concern to those: “I know you wouldn’t say that unless you were feeling really upset with me, can you tell me what those feelings are?”
If you can get the child to share his feelings instead of hurling insults at you, you change his view of you from enemy to concerned, compassionate friend. Then it is your turn to express your feelings, declaring that you need for him not to attack you verbally again. Now you can get back to the original issue and try to resolve it in a calmer way.