A Rule Of Successful Anger Management: Don’t Express Anger Toward Your Family
Abuse within families is among the most common kind. When marital or family feuds occur, both sides usually have genuine grievances and feel justified in taking vengeance. But their vengeance just continues the cycle of abuse. In extreme forms, this abuse can go on for many generations. Closer to home is the reality that we have to be careful not to let the same thing happen within our own families. Husband and wife or parent and child can get so deeply entrenched in a battle of the wills that they don’t know how to break out of it. They keep hurting each other in spite of their love for one another.
When I was young, I knew a couple who was friends of our family. My dad grew up with the father, Chris. Chris’s mother had a very harsh temper, and as he grew up, Chris took on this mean spirit. He got married to Mary in his early twenties. They each had the same hot temper, maybe even a little worse. Evidently they started out just having little squabbles, but the longer they were married, the worse their fights got. They had four kids, none of whom were spared from these rages.
As the years went by the abuse escalated. Finally one day when Chris was at work, Mary broke the arm of one of their children in a fit of rage. She didn’t realize how out of control she’d gotten with her anger; I’m not sure she ever realized how inappropriate her behavior was. She was very sorry about the broken arm, but they did not seek medical attention for their son Teddy because no one outside the family knew about the incident. The shame was so intense that they even denied their child the medical treatment he needed just so that they could cover up for themselves. Many years later, Chris told my dad the story, and that is how I learned what happened.
How did it get that bad? You’ve probably heard the analogy of the frog and the pot of boiling water. If you put a frog in a pot of hot water, it will jump out immediately and save itself. But if you put a frog in a pot of cool water and heat it very gradually, the frog gets used to the temperature little by little and doesn’t detect the danger. It will sit there and boil to death. That is essentially what happened to Chris and his wife. The conflict and violence in their home escalated gradually until Teddy really got hurt. They were at the boiling point and never even saw it coming.
Perhaps you have greatly injured another person by lashing back at them in anger. During the time of your angry outburst, you probably felt justified in your reaction. You might say, “My son was caught smoking pot at school and I told him I wish he’d never been born.” Or I’ve heard men tell me “My wife was screaming and I warned her that she’d better shut up before I slapped her.” Or as children regularly say, “She hit me first!” So what is wrong with hurting another person if that person hurt you first? Much. When you choose to hurt another person, you have to live with the consequences of your behavior, not just the external consequences to your relationship with that person, but the internal consequences of living with what you’ve done.
Each time you hurt another person, you create one more thing that you have to forgive yourself for. And forgiving oneself is the most daunting obstacle that exists on the path to healing. The reason it’s so difficult is that when you hurt another in anger, no matter how justified you may feel at the time, later shame will creep in. Shame is like a little voice that follows you around and whispers in your ear telling you that you don’t deserve a good life. If you’re not very careful, shame will sabotage your healing and keep you
from getting well.
For many years I have seen people try to justify their abusive behavior. This kind of rationalization is a poor substitute for self-forgiveness. It is based on self-deception rather than on acceptance and repentance. Regardless of how hard you try to rationalize your guilt away, you carry with you the knowledge of what you have done. It is like a big pimple on your face: you have to spend a great deal of time and effort constantly covering it up so that it isn’t the first thing you see when you look in the mirror. The worse your offense, the larger the blemish is.
You cannot be truly happy unless you can be honest with yourself. People who have been very abusive to others have trouble doing this because when they start looking inside, they generally encounter self-hatred and shy away. If you will not grapple with the shame and allow yourself to feel the pain and anger (which are the psyche’s natural responses to your own failure), then you cannot feel happy either, at least not naturally.
The more things you do to harm others, the more shame you have to heal from. As surprising as it is, time and time again I have found it to be true that the most important factor in a victim’s recovery from abuse is not what happened to him or her, but rather what he or she did in response to what happened.
