Anger: The Emotion You're Not Supposed To Feel But Definitely Do

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

There's an emotion most of us are carrying that we don't talk about, because we're pretty sure we're not allowed to feel it. Anger. Anger at where our kid's choices have led our family. Anger at what they're doing to themselves. And underneath it, a heavy layer of guilt for feeling any of it at all.

In this solo episode, I'm getting honest about it, starting with a distinction that changes everything: anger at your child is not the same as anger at the situation. One of them usually isn't anger at all. It's grief wearing a really convincing mask, and it needs a completely different response.

There's a cultural script that says good parents don't get angry at a struggling kid. We're supposed to be endlessly patient, compassionate, calm. I have yet to meet one person who pulls that off all the time. So the anger goes underground, and it leaks out sideways: sarcasm, silence, blowups over nothing, or shame that quietly eats at you while you look perfectly fine on the outside.

I'm also telling you my McDonald's parking lot story, the day my anger completely took the wheel and I said things to my son I never meant. I'm not exempt from any of this. Nobody is.

Then I'll walk you through a different way to see anger entirely, one that turns it from something that owns you into something that informs you, plus real things you can do with it starting today.

If you've been carrying anger and beating yourself up for feeling it, come listen. You are so.not.alone.

YOU'LL LEARN

• The one distinction that determines whether your anger needs a boundary or something much softer
• Where buried anger actually goes, and who ends up paying the price for it
• A reframe that turns anger from a character flaw into useful information
• What happened in a McDonald's parking lot that taught me how emotional reactivity can wreck a moment (or longer)
• How to tell the difference between releasing your anger and just avoiding it

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• The Dance of Anger, Harriet Lerner
• Hopestream Resources
• Episode 174

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Learn about The Stream, our private online community for moms
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Transcript

335 Anger: The Emotion You're Not Allowed To Feel But Definitely Do

[00:00:00] Hey friend, it's so good to be with you here today. I am back for another solo episode. I'm doing a few more of these during the summer this year. And before we jump into our topic of the day, we must breathe right, especially for today's topic because today's topic is all about an emotion that I know you're probably feeling.

You may be feeling some guilt about it, you may not even know what it is. And that is anger. Anger. It comes up. We don't love it. We often dunno what to do with it and it can really feel sometimes like an emotion that we're not supposed to feel, but we definitely feel it. So that's confusing. So breathe, do your deep breaths. A lot of us I have seen over the years and I experienced myself, we have a really hard time 

[00:01:00] saying what we truly feel, which is, I am furious at my kid, or I'm angry about where their choices have led them and our family, or I'm angry at them for what they're doing to themselves. Yeah, and you know, you don't necessarily feel this every day.

This isn't something that is, you know, a 24 7 thing, but sometimes it does crop up. Usually when there's some sort of an incident, if there's a lot of drama, if there are police involved, you know, those things. And I know from experience that it can just feel really bad inside, and I wanna make an important distinction. Right outta the gate here, because I think we often confuse a couple of things. There is a big difference between having anger at the situation that 

[00:02:00] you're in, so you know, this is unfair. I am exhausted. Things are scary. Versus having anger at your child specifically. And as parents, I think we conflate these and then we can really feel like a monster or a really terrible parent.

The distinction here is that anger at this situation. So back to that, you know, I'm angry about where we are. I'm angry that my kid hasn't finished school. All those things that is actually grief. I like to think about it as grief, wearing a mask, a really angry mask with the ice squinted, you know, the little red emoji where everything's red and like squinted in, and when you feel angry at your child versus the situation, it's usually because a boundary has been crossed. So this is where all this work 

[00:03:00] convenes, right? It's not, none of these things work in isolation. So when we talk about boundaries, we are not just talking about boundaries in isolation, we're talking about boundaries because they help with things like not having so much anger and different responses are needed, whether you're, you know, if you're feeling angry at the situation versus this deeper level feeling of grief.

Grief means you need to apply connection and self-compassion among other things. But those were the two main ones, and if a boundary has been crossed, we really encourage you to think about what could I do differently next time so that I don't feel like this again. This often gets buried because there is sort of this cultural script around good parents don't get angry at a struggling kid or hurting kid, or a 

[00:04:00] kid who has differences. You know, we're endlessly patient. We respond with compassion and empathy and understanding, and trust me, I know I talk about this all the time, and we're supposed to do that all of the time. We know that we are SEAL team parents and all, but I have yet to find anyone who can be calm, cool, collected, empathetic, compassionate, all those things, all the time in all situations.

And if you have achieved this somehow in your life, please email me. We need to talk. I wanna learn from you. So the result of this is that anger goes underground. Or it might go underground, and then it kind of leaks out the sides. And that comes through in sarcasm or in silence. You know, I was really good at giving the silent treatment. It might come through in blowups over 

[00:05:00] completely unrelated things, right? So the anger and the resentment builds up, and then you find yourself, you're talking about something completely unrelated. And you end up losing your mind. The other way that this can turn up, that which is more of an internal, way that it shows up is in self-directed shame.

I am sure you are familiar with that feeling. The problem with shame is that it leads to isolation. Isolation leads to more shame and self blame, and then you are in a really dangerous and unhealthy cycle. So I see a lot of parents walking around seemingly having it together on the outside. I mean, trust me, if you are not in the stream community and you came in, you would think this was like a business networking community. These women are together on the outside. I'm say they look put together, they are functioning, you know, they're out on a 

[00:06:00] walk, but on the inside. Often we are twisted and seeding. We don't understand why we feel all this anxiety. We don't understand why are we getting sick more often, or why does it take us longer to heal or to recover from injuries?

Our closest relationships are usually the ones that take the hit when we let anger simmer. So outside looking in. Things look fine inside. But coming out, there's a lot happening under the surface. It's a little bit like what we say with our kids, where we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg and what they're really feeling and experiences below the water, and we don't see that. It's the same thing you may be presenting. The top of the iceberg may be fairly well put together. But underneath you are just wrestling with 

[00:07:00] so much emotion and a lot of that emotion can be anger. So then, like I just said, often it comes out kind of squishes out the side in an explosion, a reaction that isn't kind of appropriate for the situation, and who gets that?

It's usually the ones that are closest to us. It may be our partner, it may be our other kids. They are the collateral damage of you not taking care of your anger. I'm gonna say that again. The people closest to you, the ones you love the most, are often the ones who end up as the collateral damage of you not taking care of your anger, your body. Is trying to cope with just an unimaginable amount of cortisol because I know because I get to fly over hundreds of you. I know 

[00:08:00] what you're dealing with and it is not. For the faint of heart. Let's just put it that way. I can't even think of the right word for it. The things you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis, most parents can't even fathom, and you do it before 8:00 AM and you've already done 12 other things and you're on your way to work to negotiate a big deal.

Okay, so I get it. You are just dealing with so much, and your body also is dealing with all of this cortisol that is just simmering inside of you. And if you don't deal with it, your body will show you how and when it is going to deal with it. And it's probably not gonna be at a convenient time and it's probably not gonna feel great. So I think what I would love to do, if you can, is to start to reframe anger and anger. Yeah, so what I would love for you to 

[00:09:00] do is to reframe anger and reframe it as data. Not because I'm a data nerd, you know that I love data, but just think about your anger as a signal. It's not a character flaw. It is not some bad thing that you're not supposed to feel.

Think of it as a data point. It is a signal to you that something you value got violated. That might be your trust. It might be your safety. It may be a limit that you set, a boundary that you set, or just your capacity to deal. And if you can look at anger as a flare going up. Instead of this kind of emotion that you are getting it all tangled up in, it can help remove some of the kind of torture and agony that goes with whatever's 

[00:10:00] happening around you. So you can think, okay, my body's telling me I'm feeling anger, and whatever that is for you, whatever those signals are for you, whether it's. Kind of a heat in your chest butterflies in your stomach, kind of a throbbing in your head.

You know what your signals are. When you feel that, you can say, okay, my body is telling me I am feeling anger. Now I can decide what I wanna do with it and notice the difference. There's a subtle difference there that I want to make sure you pick up on. Notice a difference between I am angry. And my body is telling me I feel anger. There's a big difference there. It is not you. It is what you are feeling. You don't have to eliminate it. You don't have to somehow shoo it out of the house and clean it up and tidy it up. You want to 

[00:11:00] hear that signal, whatever the signal is in your body, but not let it kind of drive the bus, drive the car, whatever it is.

You don't want it to control you. You wanna be able to just acknowledge it for what it is. It is just an emotion, just like joy is an emotion, just like happiness is an emotion. Anger is just any motion. It cannot own you. It cannot possess you. It cannot do anything to you.

And what we would love for you to be able to do is to feel that without feeling guilty that it's there. It is just there. So if we can acknowledge all of that, we can move from this reactivity. To response, and we talk about this quite a bit here on the Hope Stream podcast, and this is so important, which is why I'm bringing it up again, but reactivity 

[00:12:00] is what happens when your anger fires straight into words and actions. It's heated, it's in the moment. Things are getting ugly, things are being said that you really don't wanna say, and this thing. This reaction is what damages that fragile and critical connection with your child or with anyone. This also happens with spouses, partners, exes, all the people. So the best move is try to create a gap.

You've heard me talk about this before. You've heard Cathy talk about this before. You've probably also heard the famous quote that is often attributed to Viktor Frankl, although it is not actually in his book. Man's Search for Meaning. That's a whole nother story I'll go into another time. However, it is in alignment with his work and often attributed to him. But that quote says, between stimulus and response, there is a space. 

[00:13:00] In that space lies our freedom. And our power to choose our response in our response lies our growth and happiness. So you've probably heard that before. I think this is encouraging because to me it says basically we can become a product of our decisions, not our conditions.

We can become a product of our decisions. Not our conditions, and if you've read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, I'll put a link in the show notes. You will understand why him saying that is absolutely mind boggling. Also, if you're looking for a book to send your kiddo in treatment, I would highly recommend sending them Man's Search for Meaning.

Sometimes treatment programs have them read that anyway, but if they haven't read it, it's a very good one. This came up for me, this 

[00:14:00] whole situation of anger and reactivity. One day when my son asked me to drive him to McDonald's to pay off a drug dealer that he owed a hundred dollars to, and of course he didn't have the a hundred dollars, I was gonna need to provide the a hundred dollars and he would work it off later, but he didn't want to go any longer without paying this guy because bad things were gonna happen.

Can you relate? So these are the impossible situations that we get put in as a parent, right? I'm freaking out. He's, you know, in a situation where I think, who knows what's gonna happen to him. So of course we go to the A TMI get the a hundred dollars. We drive to McDonald's. I'm expecting him to, you know, I'm instructing him like I know how to deal with a drug dealer. I'm instructing him to go into the bathroom and give him the money and come right back and we will drive straight home. Well, if you have been around more than a minute, 

[00:15:00] you probably know what happened inside that McDonald's. My son was not paying off a drug dealer. He was buying drugs and then he met up with his homies in the car outside and waved at me.

And said, thanks for the ride, or something to that effect. My response was not stellar. It was not thoughtful. It was not compassionate. It was not empathetic. It was not controlled or measured or any of those things. It was highly reactive, out of absolute anger at him for tricking me into this, and I did not say good things.

I did not say kind things. I did not even say neutral things. I said some pretty horrible things, including don't ever come home again. So this is where anger can get us into a lot of trouble because did I mean that? No, this was not wait. In the scope of things, of everything that we dealt with, this was kind of a minor situation, but I 

[00:16:00] had been letting my anger build up for so long. And my grief, and when I think about it, it's probably heavier on the grief side that I lost my mind in that situation, in that McDonald's parking lot. And I know you have a story similar, so this is something that is real. I just want you to know that everybody deals with it. I am not exempt. Cathy is not exempt.

Nobody is. And I just tell you that because I think sometimes we can get lost in our stories and we think, there's no way I could possibly deal with this in a controlled manner. Now if I had had any of these skills, these craft skills and invitation to change and self-compassion and all of these things that we talk about at Hope Stream, if I had even had a drop of those. I 

[00:17:00] would have been able to react differently in that situation to respond, maybe not with a lot of compassion or empathy, but I would not have lost my mind like I did. So now you're probably saying, okay. But what do I actually do with this anger? You're saying? I get it, Brenda. I get it. I need to learn how to recognize that I am feeling anger, that I am not anger.

I need to check and see if I am angry at my child because a boundary was disregarded or am I really grieving our situation and it's manifesting itself as anger. I am supposed to be reacting thoughtfully after stepping into this magical gap. And then things will be better, right? But like, what can I do in real life? I never ever want this podcast to be a situation where you walk away thinking, 

[00:18:00] well, that was nice, but I still don't have answers. Now, of course, in our community, we have way, way, way more answers and connection with other moms and all of that, but I want you to be able to pull your earbuds out at the end of this episode and be able to have.

An action that you feel like you can actually do. So what do you do in real life? Sometimes you might have a partner who can help. You know, hold you up and process this. I know some of the moms in our community talk about their partners, that they're really their rock and that is amazing. And if you have one of those, please let them know today how much you appreciate them.

So you may have one of those. You may have a great partner. You may have a best friend who gets it. You may have a therapist. I hope you have a therapist that you can bring these things to and really process through because not only. Is your anger about this, but your anger's probably also reflecting back from your past and there's stuff 

[00:19:00] coming up maybe from your childhood, maybe from caregivers who didn't have a healthy relationship with substances, and all of that is now compounding on you. So therapist is a great person to talk with us about. You can, of course, come to this podcast and just know that you are not alone because I don't, there's thousands of people listening so you can know that you're not alone. And you can also tap into our community. Like I mentioned in the stream, the moms there will 100000% get it.

They have been there. They will tell you their equivalent of the McDonald's parking lot story like I just did and help you through an angry phase. And one thing that I hope that you might be able to do today would be to get some sort of a physical release. Of course not at your kid in the heat of it. That's not what I'm talking about. But I have heard of people who have hung up a punching bag in their garage or they go power walking. I know 

[00:20:00] a lot of people have said, wow, one side benefit of this thing with my kid is I have lost a lot of weight, or I'm able to walk a lot longer than I used to because that is their way of releasing those angry feelings.

You might be a rage cleaner. I am a rage cleaner. I love cleaning when I'm angry, so that could be something you could do. You might wanna go on a long solo drive with your favorite music just cranked way up. Maybe you did that when you were 20 and that feels good to do again. Or you go on a long solo drive with no music, with nothing completely.

Silent, you might wanna go on a hike outside where you can get some distance from whatever's going on and fresh air. There's nothing like being outside in the trees that can give you a different perspective. I have never heard anybody say, oh my gosh, I'm so bummed I went on that hike. I feel more terrible after it than I did before. And if you know me, you 

[00:21:00] know, when I say hike, I actually just mean a walk. It's not a hike, but you might like to hike, so do that if you're a hiker. But be clear when you discharge your anger elsewhere, so you're not just discharging it at your child, you are discharging it somewhere else in the world.

This does not mean that you are avoiding your anger. Because I think there's confusion about that. Sometimes people will say, well, yeah, but I'm just not dealing with it. And if that's the case, if you are not dealing with it, so if you're just sort of going through the mechanics of discharging your anger and you're not sort of going deep with it, you are gonna know my friend.

Because if you are avoiding, it's actually just gonna germinate. And grow, and you're gonna end up right back where you are today versus feeling better. So that's how you know the 

[00:22:00] difference. If you start to feel better, if you're able to call it what it is, it's an emotion. It's not me. It's like any other emotion. Here's how I'm gonna deal with it. Now, you may also need to put some boundaries in place. You may also need to find somebody to work through your grief with. So there, there's action that has to be taken, but those are all the things that are gonna be signals to you that you're doing this right. If you're still feeling terrible, if you never feel better and the anger just keeps simmering and exploding in times when you don't want it to, that's when you know you're not dealing with it and you are avoiding. So hopefully that made sense. All of this in the end means that once you have recognized what you're dealing with, you 

[00:23:00] can actually name it and. You have a go-to strategy for handling it. So this is not just like willy-nilly like, ah, I don't know what to do. You actually have a plan in place. So you say, okay, when I feel the thing in my gut, the butterflies in my chest, the throbbing in my head, and you have a plan in a strategy of how you're gonna handle it, it allows you another chance at connecting with your child.

So this is so important. Sometimes we avoid dealing with our emotions because it seems like, oh, I'll do that later. I'm gonna do that. Once this crisis is over, I will come to terms with my grief and my anger and all of that. When my daughter goes into treatment, when my son is six months sober, we cannot wait because this anger and this grief is sort of like a wall in between 

[00:24:00] you, what I would love for you to be able to do. Is to make that wall more like a mesh. And so yes, you're still gonna have those feelings and you're going to still be able to connect with your child because they will feel your anger, they will feel your resentment. They are going to hold whatever it is that you bring to the table with them. They. More than almost anyone is gonna appreciate you taking care of your anger, because then it's not gonna land on them.

Right? It's not gonna land on their back. They're already carrying a lot. They're carrying so much. They don't need to hold your emotional luggage to. My friend. I truly believe as someone who has had to learn how to not continually stuff down my anger stuff down my emotions, 

[00:25:00] that this emotion which can feel so disallowed as a parent. And often if you're a mom, as a mom in particular, we feel disallowed to have this emotion, but. If you are feeling it, it doesn't disqualify you as a good, solid, loving parent. Those two are not diametrically opposed, and I think we often think that they are. I think if you're feeling this, it might actually be proof of how much you care.