How (Not) To Manage Anger: Lessons From My Parents

When we are young, we learn to manage our emotions through the interactions with our immediate caregivers, principally our mother and father. The way our parents manage their emotions leaves a dramatic imprint on our developing nervous system that can last long into adulthood. This is particularly true of strong emotions like anger.

Two common adult reactions to poor emotional management by our parents are to submit or to rebel. We either live the rest of our lives managing our emotions they way they taught us out of fear and submission, or doing the opposite out of anger and rebellion. Neither of these two reactions represent true freedom. A better approach is to make our own choice in each situation but this takes insight and practice, especially if we choose to do things differently from the default programming we got from our parents.

My parents would routinely tear each other apart in front of their own children

So it’s worthwhile analyzing the way our parents managed their anger in order to see if we may still be carrying the residue of any of their dysfunctional anger management patterns.

How My Mother Managed Her Anger

My mother managed her anger when I was a child principally by offloading it onto the people around her. Rather than consciously recognizing and expressing her anger cleanly and directly, she dumped the energy into other people’s nervous systems often overwhelming everyone in the family.

This caused my nervous system to go into freeze mode leaving me shut down and unable to stand up to her; which was convenient for her because it meant that she would always end up getting her way. I was just a child anyway so it was easy for her to run roughshod over me and my wishes.

When I think of childhood instances of my mother being angry, I remember kitchen cupboard doors being slammed, saucepans being banged together in the washing up, loud yelling matches with my father, perpetually unresolved arguments that kept me awake late into the night, and the general feeling of walking on eggshells in the house.

My mother’s anger was expressed in a manner that just didn’t feel safe for me to be around.

Whenever my mother was cranky with someone, she would often criticize, bully, humiliate or shame them. She never used the actual words “I feel angry” directly, because to do so would be too vulnerable for her. Her expressions of anger were aggressive and destructive rather than assertive and constructive. The slamming of doors and the banging of pots may have been passive aggressive, but it was aggressive nonetheless.

She wanted everyone to know when she was angry but didn’t have the skills or wherewithal to express or resolve her anger constructively. I suspect she was addicted to the adrenaline rush of the unresolved conflict with my father that made her otherwise mundane suburban marriage to a relatively passive man much more exciting than it would have otherwise been.

I don’t know whether my mother had any insight into her behavior or the manner in which it was impacting her children, but I suspect not. Her strategy for managing anger, whether conscious or unconscious, bulldozed the people around her into doing what she wanted. Without any effective challenge from my father she had little motivation to change. Later in life she lamented the fact that her children and grandchildren didn’t visit more often, but appeared oblivious to whether her own behavior may have contributed to this situation.

Knowing what I know now about the human nervous system, I can see that her strategy of aggressively expressing anger with loud hurtful yelling overwhelmed my nervous system, putting me into freeze mode that got re-triggered any time I was around conflict. Her expression of anger was traumatic for me. I was helpless to retaliate or stand up for myself because her rage was so forceful and I couldn’t function because my nervous system state was frozen.

This worked well for her at the time because it would stop me in my tracks, so she could have control over whatever situation she was unhappy with. However, it was a complete disaster for my self-esteem and led to me feeling tremendous resentment towards her. The impact went deep into my nervous systems leading to a huge fear of conflict that has taken me many years and a great deal of therapy and assertiveness training to work through.

How My Father Managed His Anger

My father managed his anger when I was a child with a combination of internal rumination and external explosion. He would routinely seethe with anger so loudly that I could hear him audibly muttering to himself while I was playing in the next room. It was quite frightening to be around and also contributed to the feeling of walking on egg shells in the house.

He was like a powder keg ready to go off at any moment. All it took for him to explode with rage was for my mother to walk in, hear him muttering to himself and insult him with her favorite taunt: “Why can’t you just say what’s wrong with you, you stupid creature?”

My father was modestly paid to engage professionally in his passion of designing trains, which were the great love of his life. As a mechanical design engineer he was better qualified than the average guy to perform major repairs to the family cars. Given that he wasn’t earning megabucks and had three children and a housewife to support, he probably wanted to save money on car maintenance.

However, there is a big practical difference between being a mechanical engineer and being an auto mechanic. This led to long Saturday afternoons with dad in the garage in a state of near-constant rage attempting to repair one of my parents’ two modest aging cars. As a kid who naturally loved my father and was fascinated by how machines worked, I wanted nothing more than to be in the garage with my dad learning about car engines. But his state of anger and rage made him so scary to be around that I would keep a wide berth.

Whether he effected the repairs or not, his rage would often morph into terrifying full-blown arguments with my mother when he went back into the house on Saturday evenings.

I generally never knew what my father was so angry about, because he wouldn’t verbalize it directly. Later on as a cost-conscious young adult studying engineering myself I too experienced the frustration of being unable to undo that last bolt on a cylinder head or exhaust manifold while working on my own car. I imagine it was more than just the car that he was annoyed with though. Given the poor conflict resolution skills he shared with his wife, his frustrations with her and other people were always simmering just below the surface. It probably didn’t help that mum referred to one of the family cars as “my car” when she wanted to use it, and “not my car” when it needed repairing.

My father would often come home from work filled with frustration and ready to unleash on his wife and children. Whatever argument was going on between them when he left in the morning would start right back up again the moment he walked in the door. I loved my father and enjoyed hearing the sound of his keys jangling as he came in the back door which meant that dad was home.

But I was also terrified of him. He would slam the back door in rage so hard during their arguments that the door jam started to disintegrate, and he kicked the aluminium screen door behind it to pieces several times. Coming in and out of the damaged door every day on the way to and from school was a constant reminder of the destructive power of my father’s anger and my mother regularly milked it to remind me of his stupidity.

He was simply unwilling or unable to acknowledge and express his anger in any constructive manner. His violence towards inanimate objects like the back door terrified me and he was occasionally violent with my mother, sisters and myself. Even just occasional violence towards people was enough to remind me how quickly his anger could potentially escalate into violence.

One day in the house he flew into a rage at something I had done, stormed into my bedroom, removed his belt and started belting me with it. This wasn’t discipline by any stretch of the imagination: it was a man out of control inflicting his rage on a defenseless child. I only remember this happening to me once, but once was enough to cement my terror at his anger.

I grew up attending the Boy Scouts, which was great fun most of the time. I had mixed feelings when father became a scout leader though. On the positive side I knew someone had to do the job because the group wouldn’t exist without leaders and it meant I had a lift to and from the scout hall for every meeting; but it also made it harder to get time out from my father. One of the boys in the group was particularly challenging for my father and he flew into a rage towards the end of one evening at the scout hall. I seriously thought he was going to kill this other boy. Riding home in the car with my father driving after witnessing his outburst was extremely frightening.

On another occasion my father was driving my mother and sisters to our aunt’s place for our regular Sunday get-together. He and mum were bickering at each other in the front seats when he announced angrily that if she didn’t stop arguing he would drive the car into the next telegraph pole. I though he was serious. As the youngest child seated in between my two older sisters in the back of the car on a busy road, I couldn’t open the doors and felt powerless to escape the car before he killed us all. Perhaps he wasn’t serious but it certainly didn’t sound like he was joking.

Saturday mornings the house would be filled with tension from all the unresolved bickering in the week before and my father would be in a foul mood. In this state I would have to sit in the car on the way to my weekly soccer game. I never knew how to relate to my father when he was angry, and I suspect he didn’t know how to relate to me either because I wasn’t a train. He was frightening to be around and I would welcome the relief when I got to run out on to the soccer field, knowing that he probably still wouldn’t have calmed down by the time we had to drive home again.

As an adult I initially felt sorry for my father having to put up with all the criticism and verbal abuse he experienced from my mother. Later on I came to realize that he was an enabler in the cycle of abuse. He had chosen to marry a woman who managed her anger by dumping it on other people and failed to rise to the challenge of standing up to her abuse; even when it was affecting his/their own children. Plus his own rage attacks and rumination were terrifying to be around in themselves.

When I confronted him as an adult about the impact all of this had on me, he apologized and said that “Your mother changed when we moved into that house”, referring to the home in which I grew up and where they still live. It was a weak excuse from a man who was essentially playing the victim card but it did at least include an apology; something I’ve never heard from my mother.

My father’s rumination and muttering continued long past my childhood. As an adult I took the opportunity to spend some time with my father doing something he loved by accompanying him on a 3-day Railway Historical Society journey across the state. Staying together in a twin hotel room, I once again experienced the angry muttering that I had found so frightening as a child. Now as an adult and without my mother around I was able to inquire about what was going on by asking him “Dad, are you OK?”

His response was to immediately cease muttering but otherwise ignore my question entirely. I know he had heard me because the muttering had stopped, but he appeared to be pretending that nothing had happened. When I pressed the point, he acted as if he didn’t know what I was talking about. Even as an adult this sort of behavior was rather confusing but as a child it was a real mind-fuck.

The effect of my father’s expression of anger and rage when I was a young boy was traumatic for me. To compound the trauma, I had nobody nearby to talk to about it because my sisters lived on a different floor of the house. I was deeply ashamed of sharing the family secrets with other people. Even writing about it now many years later I feel feelings of shame, fear and anger myself.

How My Parents Managed Each Other’s Anger

The primary way my parents dealt with each other’s anger was by getting triggered and then taking their rage out on each other. They did this mostly in the privacy of their own home, in front of their own children. It always confused me that my parents would generally behave much better when they were around strangers than they would in front of their own family.

My parents both played the game of facilitating each other’s dysfunctional expressions of anger.

In the face of constant taunting and humiliation from my mother, my father would eventually explode rather than acknowledging her upset and being assertive with her when she started saying things that he didn’t like.

My mother in turn would oscillate between playing the martyr and verbally abusing my father as circumstances suited her. She often criticized and humiliated my father in front of other people for not meeting up to her unstated expectations.

As I child, I found the ongoing arguments between them tremendously frightening.

In an ideal world my parents would have acknowledged each other’s anger with empathy, stood up to aggression with assertiveness and made it clear when the other person’s behavior was destructive; especially around the children. Taking time-out to allow each other to calm down and then raising unresolved issues to work through constructively later just wasn’t part of their communication skillset. Instead they let unresolved hurts from the past remain unresolved and used them against each other in future arguments stretching out the conflict for years.

Going to church every Sunday didn’t appear to have any moderating impact on the way my parent’s dealt with anger in their relationship. In some ways perhaps it made it worse, or at least more obvious. One Sunday morning after sitting through a sermon on love, my parents had another screaming match after we got home. I can only imagine that my mother’s inner critic was triggered by the obvious discrepancy between what the minister was teaching and the way she treated her husband. Or perhaps it was my father that was triggered. Probably both. Either way, they lacked the basic skills like empathy and assertiveness necessary to deal effectively with each other’s emotional distress.

In my early 20’s when I trained to became a volunteer crisis hotline worker, the topic of domestic violence came up. It was a reasonably common issue and we were trained to deal with callers in domestic violence situations. I was confronted with my own childhood experience as collateral damage around my parent’s verbal abuse and violence.

The dynamic in my parent’s relationship didn’t exactly match the simplistic perpetrator/victim model though. My mother didn’t match the classic battered victim profile and my father didn’t match the classic perpetrator. Often it was the other way around.

My father often internalized his anger until he was taunted by my mother to the point that he would explode with rage. Then she would paint herself as the victim and say things to me like “One day he’ll kill me and then everyone will see what a bastard he is.” I could see from her behavior that she wasn’t really an innocent victim in this scenario but the idea of him killing her in a fit of rage terrified me because I believed it was possible and wondered who would look after me if she was dead and dad ended up in jail.

Both my parents dealt with their own and their partner’s anger destructively and actively participated in their own mutual abuse. Their individual strategies for dealing with anger were a disastrous combination of dysfunctional emotional regulation and poor communication. Either one in isolation would have been challenging to deal with, but put together they easily overwhelmed my childhood nervous system with terror.

In particular they failed to protect their children from the fallout from their dysfunctional patterns of dealing with anger and conflict. It was pretty fucked up and very scary for me as a child to be around.

How I Learned To Manage My Anger

Faced with my father’s explosive rage and my mother’s mix of active and passive aggression, I decided that anger itself was bad. If either one of them had a more effective method for dealing with anger it might not have been so damaging. Having two poor role models led me to feel tremendous shame about my own anger and my rage about being on the receiving end of my mother’s unempathic narcissistic controlling behavior and my father’s oscillation between passivity and explosiveness.

As a result, I learned to suppress and internalize my own anger.

This had negative flow-on effects for me when I turned up at school without access to my anger to protect me, leaving me an easy target for bullying. Down the track as an adult I suffered from tremendous anxiety, especially around conflict fueled by other people’s anger. I also wondered why women weren’t particularly interested in me: I suspect they could sense unconsciously that I wasn’t going to be able to protect them if necessary because my anger/assertiveness system was shut down.

Eventually after a lot of therapy, assertiveness training and anger expression workshops I learned to be assertive with my anger; rather than aggressive or passive-aggressive like my mother, or internally seething and externally explosive like my father.

A major breakthrough for me in expressing my own anger came the day I finally stood up to my mother and father about the way their behavior impacted me. Initially my father acknowledged the destructive manner in which my mother was behaving towards him, but as she got upset he quickly turned his anger towards me for raising the issue. By this time their dysfunctional patterns of anger expression and communication were so entrenched that he would rather defend the wife who routinely verbally bullied him than support me in standing up to her. Whatever respect I may have had for him as a man pretty much disappeared in that moment and I came to realize that he was the co-creator of his own drama acting cowardly in the face of his wife’s anger.

Given that my father was never likely to support me in any conflict with my mother, I realized I would have to learn to stand up to her myself. Surviving the fallout from that encounter and from going no-contact with my mother for over a year to gave myself some time-out to heal and gain perspective, putting me on more of an adult-adult level playing field with both my parents. Now they can no longer shut me down just because they get angry. We have a much better relationship now as a result and I’m more able to stand up for myself when anyone treats me in ways that I don’t like.