Parental Anger Unpacked

If you’ve ever heard yourself shout and then wondered, “Where did that come from?” you’re not alone and you’re not broken. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I want to slow down what we usually rush past: the inner life of the angry parent, and what that anger may be trying to communicate. When we treat anger as evidence of failure, we miss the real story and we miss the path to change. 

We start by getting precise about language, because it matters for parenting and for healing. Anger is an emotion. Aggression is behavior intended to harm, verbally or physically. Violence is an extreme form of physical aggression that leads to serious injury. Once those lines are clear, we can talk about what sits underneath an angry reaction: exhaustion, overwhelm, anxiety, fear of losing control, and a painful sense of inadequacy. I also explore how fear can transform into attack when the nervous system is pushed past its limits, and why parenting stress can trigger old, unprocessed experiences. 

We look through an attachment and child development lens at regulation, containment, and the question that often changes everything: who holds the parent? I explain how repeated exposure to intense anger can feel frightening and unpredictable for children, why the “shame loop” keeps families stuck, and how practical steps like tracking triggers, noticing body cues, and building a pause can help you stay connected to your thinking brain. If this resonates, subscribe, share with a parent who needs it, and leave a review with the question you want me to tackle next.

Transcript

Series Purpose And Family Systems

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Hello and welcome back. This is Kim Lee, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, and I am continuing the series on parents inside the consulting room and what parents carry. The motivation for this particular series is to help people to understand that parents are not born and the parents take into their parenting their life experiences, their expectations, their hopes and fears, and a whole array of contrasting guidance and advice. As someone who specializes in this area, I'm keen to try and demystify some of the things that people believe to be right. I talk a lot about child development and the different difficulties that children experience, how they can be understood and how they can be responded to. But it seems to me that we have to remember that children are part of the family system and that parents, the system providers initially. And so how parents are, what they believe, how they interact, how they manage their own emotional states, are vital factors in the development of children and in the task of parenting. So today I want to talk about the angry parent. Now I want to start by saying, as I so often say, anger is not wrong. Anger is not bad. Anger is not negative. Anger is a feeling, and we experience lots of different feelings. They are not wrong. They are what we experience. What happens next with that is what matters. So I want to make a further distinction between anger, aggression, and violence. Anger is an emotion. It is both experience at a physical and psychological level, but it's also experience at a physical level, in as much as the nervous system becomes activated and the person will inevitably experience a whole array of additional, although often hidden, features. Aggression, on the other hand, is a behavior, and aggression is a behavior that is intended to cause harm. Now that harm could be physical, but it can also be emotional. Aggressive behavior can cause emotional harm. Violence is an extreme form of physical aggression and will almost always result in some kind of severe injury, physical and otherwise. So anger as a feeling is what people experience. Aggression can be verbal and physical, and violence, as I've said, almost always involves a severe injury of some kind. And the key differences are often confused, as described by those who have studied this in a particular book called The Conversation. There's lots and lots of work that's been conducted into understanding these powerful emotions and the ways in which anger as a primitive emotion can be something which, if not managed healthily, may very well then spill into aggression and potentially violence. This is not inevitable, it is a trajectory that is influenced by other factors. Now, anger as a feeling is an internal emotional state, and it can be irritation, displeasure, or rage, and it is not inherently destructive, and kind it can find expression in ways that are not damaging. People who experience or are concerned about injustice may be very angry in their protesting behaviour, but it's not harming anyone. Whereas aggression is a behavior and it's an action. Now, whether that's shouting at someone or physical, some physical act, and it's aimed at causing psychological or physical harm to another person, it's a broad construct which includes things like threats and not always linked to anger. Some aggression is instrumental or planned to achieve a goal rather than caused by rage. So we sometimes talk about passive aggression, which is where the effect is harmful or damaging in some way, but the person's behavior at face value does not look like aggression. So passive aggression is a particularly interesting one, and this is one we see often in abusive relationships. Quite often, when I hear women say, But I have no bruises, my my thoughts are no, you don't have physical bruises, but my goodness, don't you carry a lot of emotional wounds caused by aggression and sometimes passive aggression. Violence is an extreme action, and it's a subtype of aggression that involves physical force and it's intended to cause serious injury or even death. So you can be angry without being aggressive, and you can be aggressive without being violent. But the core of this is about understanding what it is that it's happening. Now, as a parent, feeling angry with something that your children may have done is understandable, but we still have to consider what's going on, what's happening internally, and how are we managing that? Because there are some parents who are afraid of their own reactions, not because they don't care, but sometimes it's because they feel too much. So in this episode, what we're really trying to look at is what anger might a parent be carrying, and how has that come about? There are some parents who say, I lose my temper too quickly, I shout more than I want to, I'm I'm constantly on the edge. I I don't recognize myself sometimes, I just don't want to be like this. And often this is followed by something else, shame. Because anger in parents is often understood as failure, but clinically it requires a different kind of thinking. Those of you who've listened to my podcast will know that I am always trying to look beyond the behavior and into the meaning, because that is the way that we are then possible to start to look at change by understanding what we can't see. I remember sitting with a parent who had described an incident, and their child had refused a simple request for about the millionth time. So it was nothing unusual, but something in that moment shifted. The parent's voice began to rise, and the tone sharpened, and the reaction escalated quickly. And she she described this, and as she was talking, her whole demeanour changed. She had reignited the angry feelings. And afterwards, she said, I don't know where that came from, I'm so sorry. And I said, Well, the most important thing to me that you've said is you don't know where it comes from, but clearly it comes from somewhere, and that's where we have to look. We have to look at where that comes from. Because if we do that, then we may be able to learn how to manage that differently. So that question mattered, and because often, in fact, almost always, it doesn't come from nowhere. Wilfred Beon talked about something called uncontained affect. And what we might think about is uncontained emotional states. So when a parent's own feelings have not been sufficiently processed or held in their own experience, they remain close to the surface and under pressure. And they can emerge quite quickly. So what sits beneath parental anger? Well, quite often there will be things like exhaustion, overwhelm, anxiety, fear of losing control, and a sense of inadequacy. But those feelings are actually quite difficult to tolerate, so they transform. And they transform into something more immediate. Anger is often the feeling that arrives when something else can't be held. Many years ago I worked with a very eminent psychiatrist, Vladimir Kahan, and had the pleasure of working with one of his colleagues, Professor Norman Tutt, and they had written a book entitled Violence. And I attended a number of seminars on the subject. I was working with very damaged young people at the time and was trying to understand what their violent behaviors at times meant. And an interesting hypothesis was put forward, and it was that violence was the transformation of fear. When we see a person who is behaving violently, or we encounter somebody like that, their view, Vladimir's and Norman's, was that what this what this demonstrated was that actually the person was experiencing fear that was intolerable and it transformed into attack. Now, I suppose if you think about a frightened animal that you corner, there is a very strong likelihood that it will behave violently as a self-protective mechanism. Well, if you've grown up in an environment where uncertainty, attack, physical or otherwise, has been the norm, where things haven't been held, processed, then the central nervous system goes into a stress state, which might be fight, flight, or petrification. So when we fast forward to violence, and certainly when I've worked with patients who have behaved violently, I am always reminded of that underpinning principle that fear lies beneath violence. Now, saying to somebody who is behaving violently, I think you're feeling frightened really, probably isn't too smart. But as a clinician, I am I am interested because I believe that it is possible that anger also serves as a defense because it gives a warning, it changes the tone, it's going to affect the other person. So already we start to think about not just the angry emotional state and its expression, but how it's put together. Another parent I worked with in describing her day talked about work pressures, considerable work pressures, lack of sleep, constant demands. And by the time she returned home, their their internal capacity was already stretched, and then a small moment, a refusal, a raised voice from the child, and something tipped. And then out came the anger. Winnicott, Donald Winnicott, talked about holding the parent, and he spoke about this and the importance of the parent being able to hold the child in an emotional sense. But the same is true of parents. But we can also ask, well, who is holding the parent? Because without that, the parent is left to manage alone. And when you think about parents who are single parents, well, who is holding them in this enormous task when they are doing two parents jobs and maybe other work as well, probably other work, and managing the whole thing. Who holds them? So often when we think with parents about these sorts of things, something really significant begins to emerge. How anger was managed in their childhood, whether it was expressed, suppressed, or frightening. One parent said, and one of many, my dad used to shout like that. My dad was always shouting, and we were afraid. And I always said I wouldn't behave that way. Now, this isn't repetition by choice, it's repetition through unprocessed experience. Sometimes it goes entirely the other way. And parents will overcompensate and suppress anger because they've learned that it's dangerous. And that's understandable, but it's the other extreme. Now, through an attachment frame, a parent's capacity to regulate, and by regulate, I mean manage and tolerate internal feelings, is really shaped by what they have experienced and learned themselves. And that learning isn't vowable. People aren't told how to regulate, they learn it by experience of being with a regulating adult. In my work as a clinician, a good deal of my time is spent holding and regulating a patient's emotional state. That's not about making it better. It's about this, yes, this is this is difficult, this hurts. Yes, you're frightened or you're angry or you're upset. I know. It's okay. And what I'm really trying to do is say it's okay to feel that way. And this is survivable. These are feelings. And I don't correct, I don't get angry myself, I don't cry, I don't say, oh no, that's that's really not very helpful. That's not what we do. And it's really important because if I can contain their emotional states, then they learn to do that for themselves. Because if back to parents, if emotional states weren't contained, then they're harder to contain later on. Now the child's experience is really important here because for the child, parental anger can feel unpredictable, overwhelming, difficult to understand, and incredibly frightening. And that fear is something which affects the nervous system and particular parts of the brain. If exposure to anger is repeated, if it's frequent, there are significant neurological changes that take place. But let's go back to my point that this is not about blame, it's about understanding. Because most angry parents are not indifferent, they're struggling. And then, of course, we have the famous shame loop. And this is where the cycle begins to form, that parents become overwhelmed, anger emerges, parents feel guilt and shame, internal pressure increases, and their capacity reduces further, and then anger becomes more likely. The work that we do in parental guidance is not about stopping the anger, it's about understanding what the anger is carrying and how we manage that differently. And what helps is you know creating room for the parent's experience, for making it possible for the parent to be able to say, This is what I do, this is how I feel about what I do, this is what it was like when I was a child, I don't know what to do, in the presence of someone who really does understand. But not only understands, can help the patient to understand and help them to look at what is happening internally in those moments and what we can do to balance that, to make it more tolerable. Most often, when people are in acute emotional states, whatever that emotion might be, the capacity to think and contain is overwhelmed by emotion. So the prefrontal neocortex, the thinking brain, cannot function. Because in that moment, the limbic system, the feeling part of the brain, has been triggered in a way that causes overwhelm. So helping the person understand the mechanics of what's happening is enormously helpful because then it makes it possible to say, okay, how do we recognize when this is beginning? What do you experience? Not what do you think, what do you experience? Can you name it? Where in your body do you feel it? The probability is they won't be saying, well, it reminded me of something that happened when I was a child. That that won't be there, and that's not where we need to look at that moment. We need to look at what is it you're experiencing. Your awareness needs to move from the reactive feeling to identifying what you're experiencing, not why. Because the moment you get into why you re-trigger yourself. So we look at triggers, we look at how triggers work in this individual, and we help to build moments of pausing, because this is this is this is a way of developing regulation before it escalates. So because a parent who feels understood can not just make sense of but experience being with someone who can say, I can tolerate this, I understand this, I see this, and I and and I and I know you're doing your best. We just need to fine-tune it. People who have that kind of experience, and I've heard this so many times, begin to be better able to understand their child. The angry parent is not a failed parent. They're often a parent carrying far too much with far too little support. Those things where the support element is concerned, it's not something I can help with. However, quite often I will say, yeah, who's who holds you? Who looks after you, who understands you and your needs? And I hear all kinds of answers, and they're not always the ones I want to. But I think the single most important thing to remember is that the anger is an expression of something. And if we understand what that expression is, what is it, or rather what it's expressing, then we can start, we can start working with it. If we this is it, this is a thing I often say. I say to parents when they talk about their experiences in early parenting and the mistakes that they believe they've made, and how they link those mistakes to why it is that their child needs to become a patient of mine. There is often enormous guilt and shame. We did this, we missed it. Up on you it was my fault. And I I encourage them to continue to say that. Not you know, not for weeks, but actually just in that moment. And and I say, Explain to me why you say that. And they will say things like, That's not the parent I intended to be. I knew at the time it was wrong, but I didn't know what else to do. And when they finished, I say, Has it occurred to you that actually you were doing your best? You were doing, under the circumstances, the very best you could. And they say, But I should have done or I could have done. And I say, Well, you're saying that now because you can see it now. But at that time you couldn't see it. And the reason you couldn't see it is for all of the all of the things you've described about what was happening there. And what I'm trying to do is to rebuild or represent a context that means they can they can reframe their thinking. I didn't get it wrong. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, more experience, I wish I'd been able to do it differently. But at the time, I was doing the best I could. And I think that's really important because carrying guilt and shame is actually something which will continue to find expression, and it causes an internal conflict that is really deeply unpleasant. And every time the child does something, whatever it might be, that confirms it. See, I'm a bad parent, I knew it was my fault. And then you go around in circles. In very simple language, when what is being carried is finally recognized and talked out, it no longer needs to come out in the way it does. Because anger in a parent is rarely the problem, it's the signal that something has not yet been held. My final thoughts on this. If you regard yourself as a parent who is frequently angry, ask yourself not why, ask yourself what, what is happening inside you at that time, not with any kind of judgment because it that won't help. But what is happening inside you? The other thing I would say is please don't compare yourself with other parents. Sometimes parents will say, Well, this person manages, this person's situation is far worse, and yet they yes, they manage. And I say, Well, that's the headline, isn't it? But my guess would be, you don't know that person's story. You can see the headline, but you don't know the whole story. There's a lot you don't know about the experiences of other people, and actually their situation is theirs, and yours is yours. Really quite important. I'll be back shortly with the next episode, which is to do with overwhelm when a parent is overwhelmed. Thank you for listening.