Mom Rage

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Show Notes


What to Expect Postpartum Rage

Postpartum Rage and Social Support.

Book Club Book "The Book You wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did)" By Phillippa Perry

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Transcript

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This episode is about mom rage. I think that we can consider this episode about a dark secret, maybe not so secret. Maybe you saw the title of this episode and thought, what's mom rage? Maybe you thought, oh my goodness. Thank you. She's finally talking about it. Maybe you felt seen, maybe you felt shame, relief, fear. All of those things. Maybe this just came up next when you had your podcast playing, so it's all good. Let's dive in. I'm just going to say that Mom Rage is real. Mom rage. It can also be known as maternal anger is exactly what it sounds like. It's being quick tempered, snapping. Feeling angry all the time, or feeling quick to anger. Like it doesn't take a lot to anger you, and it might be not feeling like yourself because you're feeling angrier than usual, or it's easier to make you anger. Rage is often thought of. As uncontrollable anger. So feeling angry and feeling like there is nothing that you can do to change that feeling or control your reaction. What does mom rage look like? It's snapping at your kid when they're saying your name a lot, when they're calling you, even though maybe it's something that normally wouldn't bother you a lot, or you know, maybe you're not usually angered by someone asking to talk to you a lot or tell you about all their Pokemon cards. It's feeling really angry when your child won't eat the dinner that you've prepared. It's yelling at your baby when they won't sleep, when they're not sleeping, waking up too early. These are just some examples. So if you listen to this podcast a lot, you know that I always like to check in with myself. I always like to check my own biases, share my own experiences. And I'm going to say that I've definitely experienced mom reach, which I would say is different than regular anger because it's targeted specifically at things about being a parent. That said, I know that anger is a complicated topic for me, a complicated emotion for me. I'll get back to that in a little bit, but I will say that putting that aside is speaking specifically about what we're thinking of as mom rage. So when we're talking about mom rage, we're talking about the specific feeling of anger or shortness to anger, short mood around the things that involve being a parent. And the rage comes in with how we express that anger. This idea that we feeling angry about something that. Maybe in another time, wouldn't seem like a very big deal, but. We snap, we yell, we scream. We feel like we want to physically. Do something. It can feel like you feel very hot. I think that there's lots of messaging around gentle parenting. This isn't a dig at gentle parenting. It's something that is at least part of my parenting practice. But I think when we think about gentle parenting, there's this idea that there can't be anger. Then if you are feeling anger, you can often feel like a failure. I will also say that I'm a yoga teacher and a yoga therapist, so I know that. I always feel that people are expecting me to be super calm and super zen. I have this podcast, I don't know if that's true, but I'm judging myself like that. I am certainly have this inner voice, and that's coming back maybe to the last episode on mom guilt of how could you be angry? Why are you snapping? Where does Mom rage come from? One of rage is a symptom of anxiety and depression. So when I looked at mom rage, one of the first things that came up on a regular Google search was postpartum mom rage. I could find very little academic research on postpartum rage as its own thing, but I did find a fair bit about postpartum rage as a symptom. Of anxiety and depression. That said, it doesn't get discussed a lot. I know in my prenatal class that I took, they talked about, the signs of anxiety and depression in postpartum new parents, and I don't remember rage being discussed. It's certainly not discussed the way that other things are. have my own theories about this. I think for one, it's a little bit less romantic than someone who just can't get out of bed. It doesn't seem as tangible as like being depressed and not wanting to go outside or being anxious and being scared all the time. And I think probably for the people that are helping you, it's very challenging to help someone who's dealing with depression and anxiety in general. But if that person is also really angry, it makes it really hard to help them because they're probably being really mean to you. So I know that postpartum rage was certainly part of the postpartum anxiety that I experienced with my first child, and it is noted as an aspect of postpartum anxiety. I didn't feel like when I was talking to a therapist, it was being acknowledged as a symptom. It was much later that I discovered that this is. In the writings I did see, so like I said, I went on a Google search on some more lay publications, so in What To Expect's website, which I have some issues with, but I, I thought that this was a pretty good breakdown. They listed the symptoms of postpartum rage, so they said that a woman with postpartum rage might have one or more of the following symptoms. Intense anger, extreme irritability. Feeling of powerlessness, excessive crying anxiety. So they had postpartum rage as its own symptom with anxiety within it, difficulty sleeping, withdrawal from loved ones, negative feelings or little interest in her baby, loss of interest in daily activities, feeling of worthlessness. And so lots of these things overlap, of course, with postpartum anxiety and depression. And they noted that postpartum rage comes from the same place as postpartum anxiety and depression and other postpartum mental health issues. It's from the big hormonal changes that a person experiences after giving birth from lack of sleep, from a whole range of emotions that come with growing your family, welcoming this new human. And along with that, just the mere logistics of a major life change. Postpartum rage is one kind of maternal rage, but maternal rage can happen after the postpartum period as well. I noted that rage can be a symptom of anxiety. Fear can often be expressed as anger, so if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling. Generalized anxiety or anxious about a specific issue that can, for many of us be expressed as anger rage is often a stress response. If you've listened to my stress response episode, I talk about how we all experience fight or flight when we're stressed, and one thing that can happen, especially if you're getting ready to fight, is that you can feel angry. The hormone changes that happen, the physical changes that are happening to your body can produce a sense of anger. So being very stressed can lead to rage maternal rage can be a reflection of the lack of support that we have for ourselves, that our society's giving us, that our family's giving us. If you feel like you're doing everything that can make you feel very angry. If you are feeling like you have all these things to do and your to-do list is just getting longer and nothing's getting checked off of it, that can produce a sense of anger. Rage can be a reflection of how you were treated as a child. I talk about this a bit in my episode on inherited trauma. This is one of the big themes of our book club book, the book you wish your parents had read. So if this sounds interesting to you, it's not too late to check out that book. But if there was something that. You were always getting yelled at about or something that was a source of anger in your family growing up, it can often still produce rage for you as an adult. I noticed for myself that I am very often getting angry at my children when we are getting out of the house. If I, if we are running late, if I feel like we're running late, if things are happening that I know we're going to be running late. And I live in Europe so late, has a different meaning, you know, we'll have people over that will routinely show up. 20 minutes late, 30 minutes late without an issue. And I'm not angry at them, but if I'm showing up late, I'm feel like I'm often yelling at my children about it. Put on your shoes. Hurry up, we gotta go. And then we get to school and we're early, or we're at least not late. And I've been reflecting on this a lot lately, and this was a big issue in my household growing up. There were. I don't know, maybe we were always late. I think we were sort of like the person that the family at family events that was always late, but there was always at least one parent that was yelling at us, and now I'm the yeller. This feeling of being late is bringing up a lot of angry feelings from when I was a child, and I've sort of flipped it. So that's been something I've really been working on. I've been noticing when I'm angry, what's triggering it. I will also say that another cause of rage can be our relationship with anger, how we express anger. So if you were raised as a girl, you were probably often taught that girls don't get angry. There's probably a lower bar for what is expected of anger from a girl than a boy in in many households. And what can often happen like that is that we don't feel like we can be a little bit mad we sort of can feel like we have to push down those feelings until we snap. And that can again, also come from your upbringing. You could have had a household where it was really important to not anger a certain parent. And there can sort of be this fear around anger. And so instead of expressing a little bit of anger when you are the only one doing dishes or a little bit of anger in, having to be the main entertainer of your child, you sort of push it down and push it down until, like, anything that gets pushed down too long, you explode. Okay, so what can we do with this? There are some of the background around mom rage. Maybe you're really feeling like you identify with it. Maybe this is just really interesting to you, but what do we do with all this information? One of the most important things I think, is. To talk about it. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode. I mean, I'm talking about it. It's therapeutic for me to share my own experiences, but also so that you know, this isn't something that's just happening in your household. It doesn't need to be this dirty little secret. You can talk about it with others. You can talk about it with a therapist. Another plug for talk therapy is great. Talk about it in a local parent support group. Knowing your triggers is really important. Like I mentioned that example of always being late, feeling like I'm late. and I mentioned this in my mo in the episode about guilt. I do what I can to make sure that we're always running a few minutes early so that I'm not feeling like we're running late and usually those even out. So knowing your triggers, if you know that. Noise is a major trigger for you, and you have small kids getting some little earplugs. They make really cool earplugs. Now, that might be a way to tone down the triggers. If you know that not sleeping is a major trigger for you doing what you can to get more sleep, whether that's getting extra help, talking to your partner, going to bed earlier, you know, it depends on what is interrupting your sleep and what your resources are. Anticipating it. So that goes with knowing your triggers. If you're feeling angry, maybe that's an opportunity to walk away for a minute or two. Take some of those deep breaths that we've talked about in other episodes, asking for help. We can do some breathing, moving around. I know I've talked about this before, but if you're feeling really angry, going for a walk by yourself or going for a walk with your kids, dancing with your kids can be really, really helpful. Changing the scene, and sometimes that just means. Putting on the tv, I've got a much requested episode on screen time coming up. We'll have a special guest for that, but we are going to be talking about screen time. But this might be a good time for everyone to just, if you are feeling really angry, change the situation. Sometimes it's helpful to reframe your view. So if your child is asking, you know, mom, mom, mom, mom. If you're feeling angry, if you've not quite hit that boiling point, can you take a step back and say, oh, you know, he hasn't seen me all day. Or she's really excited about this new class, or she's really nervous about something. So sometimes if you can catch that, especially early, and it's the kind of practice that the more you do it, the easier it becomes, the more natural it becomes to do that. And like I've said in other episodes, if you do experience mom rage and you do snap. One of the best things to do after is apologize. Apologizing to your kids has so much value Talking to them saying, that I don't like the way I acted. Yelling, when you're angry is not the best way to respond. When someone's annoying you, there's other ways to deal with it. When you're feeling stressed and you can talk it out together, what could I have done instead? What would you have done instead? I noted that I couldn't find very much academic research on maternal reach. I found one brand new article, so from March, 2023, so this was just published in the International Journal of Public Health Science. I will look into the show notes that found an increase in social support, reduced instances of postpartum rage. In new mothers in Indonesia. It was specifically looking at new mothers in Indonesia. But what they found was that having social support when people were had just had their babies, people were experiencing less rage. So they were looking specifically at the social support from families, but they also noted that this could come from. Other sources of social support. So if you have parents nearby, relatives nearby, friends nearby that can support you, it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to receive their help. Depending on where you live, you may have resources, whether that's if you're a brand new parent, some kind of, postpartum doula. In Belgium, we have the amazing CROs orgs that will come and support you. Hiring a babysitter a few hours a week, or even a mother's helper, so a teenager or a college student that can just come and play with your kids for a few hours, leaving your kids in afterschool care, even just one day a week. Doing things to reduce the stress, reduce the triggers, can reduce the reach. I wanna note one more time that you are doing a great job. The maternal rage is common. It is not something that you are the only one that is dealing with. It is very, very common. I want to curse, but I won't. So I will just say this stuff is hard. I don't wanna have my explicit rating, so I will just say this stuff is hard and you're doing a great job. So keep it up. I will leave our episode there for now. I will note that if you want to hear more from me, you can join my newsletter. It is@emilygoldyoga.com. You'll find the popup to sign up for the newsletter. If you are in Brussels, I teach a regular postpartum and prenatal yoga class on Mondays. You can find that info on my website. I mentioned the book club. It's going to be in one of the next few episodes. It is the book you Wish your parents had read and your children will be happy you did. I will put it again in the show notes. If you join my newsletter. You'll also hear about all sorts of other upcoming events, including some events for parents. That are coming up soon. We might have a delay of one week on the next episode because we have school holidays here in Belgium. If you are listening in real time, if you are not, then don't worry you haven't forgotten about a school holiday. Thank you so much for listening.