256: Managing Anger as a Parent: The Two Types of Anger You Need to Know

The problem with anger control approaches is they focus on eliminating the emotional response while missing the valuable information that anger provides about what's going wrong in our environment or relationships. There's another way to think about this. Black feminist author Audre Lorde provided a framework that decades of research now supports. She wrote: anger is loaded with information and energy. When you feel anger, your emotional system is telling you something important to you is being threatened or violated.

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Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. What if most of what you've been told about managing your anger as a parent is actually making things worse? Let's come back to that idea in a minute. First, I'm going to set the scene. Tuesday morning chaos is hitting your house again. There are three different lunches to pack, permission slips to sign, someone's shoes have vanished into thin air. You notice that familiar tightness building in your chest, your jaw clenches, you raise your voice at your kids again, even though you said you wouldn't do that anymore. And when you think about it to yourself later, you think, I shouldn't be angry. Other people have it a lot harder than I do, and they don't yell at their kids.

I've been doing a deep dive into the topic of anger over the last few months, and I've uncovered something I think is really important that I want to share with you today, which is that not all anger is created equal. Today we're going to challenge a lot of what you've been told about managing anger as a parent. Most approaches to managing parents anger treat all anger the same way, as a problem that you have to learn how to control. We actually experience two different kinds of anger, and knowing which kind is coming up for you gives you really important clues on how to handle it more effectively. By the end of this episode, you'll have a practical framework for using your anger constructively, instead of suppressing it or exploding. You'll learn how to distinguish between anger that's telling you systems have to change, and anger that's signaling that you've hit your limit.

So let's dig in. So for decades, parents have been told that anger is an emotion that we have to control. Anger management classes focus on suppression techniques, you do breathing exercises, you get advice to stay calm and help your children get control of their feelings. The underlying message is always the same. Anger is a problem that must be stopped, and when we don't feel angry, there is no problem. But research shows that control-based approaches often don't work, and sometimes they make things worse. Studies on emotional suppression, which means trying to push down or hide emotions, show that when people try to suppress emotions, they often experience what psychologists call emotional rebound. Think of it like trying to hold a beach ball down under the water. Eventually, it pops back up with even more force.

The suppressed emotions return with greater intensity than before. Research by James Gross and colleagues shows that emotional suppression creates other problems too. It can impair your memory. You can't think clearly when you're working hard to suppress emotions. I've worked with a number of parents in my Taming Your Triggers workshop who try to describe what happened in a situation when they felt triggered, and they can't because they can't remember what happened. Suppressing emotions can damage relationships because it's really hard to have authentic emotional connections with other people when you're constantly hiding your true emotional experience. The problem with anger control approaches is they focus on eliminating the emotional response while missing the valuable information that anger provides about what's going wrong in our environment or relationships. There's another way to think about this. Black feminist author Audre Lorde provided a framework that decades of research now supports.

She wrote, anger is loaded with information and energy. When you feel anger, your emotional system is telling you something important to you is being threatened or violated. Your anger about being the default parent who handles all decisions is information about fairness and partnership. Your frustration about the reading that school says you're supposed to do with your child every day is information about what's sustainable for your family. A comprehensive research review by Richard and colleagues examined 46 studies on anger and found that anger serves important functions in our cognitive and emotional systems. Anger activates specific brain pathways that help us pay attention to threats and mobilize energy for action. These are features, not malfunctions. The research showed that anger is associated with increased attention to anger-related stimuli. In other words, when we're angry, our brains become very good at noticing what's wrong.

It's a way of gathering valuable information about problems that you can use to decide where to focus your attention. Philosopher Myisha Cherry used Audre Lorde's work to help us understand the two distinct categories of anger that I want to tell you about that I found so useful. Cherry calls the first kind Lordian Rage after Audre Lorde's work. Other researchers call it values-aligned anger or moral anger. This carries information about legitimate concerns and aims for positive change. This anger emerges when your core values around things like fairness, respect, autonomy, safety, or competence are being violated. Values-aligned anger typically builds gradually rather than exploding suddenly. It points to specific identifiable problems. It motivates you toward solutions and change. It connects to your deeply held values about fairness, safety, respect, and it persists until the underlying issue gets addressed. More importantly, values-aligned anger can energize you toward wanting change rather than leaving you drained. So let me give you some examples.

You might feel angry about carrying the mental load of tracking everyone's schedules, supplies, and appointments while your partner focuses only on tasks you've assigned to them. Maybe you feel angry about school policies that create impossible demands on families, like constant volunteer expectations or long lists of supplies that you're supposed to buy for the classroom. More broadly, you might feel angry about workplaces that penalize mothers but not fathers for having kids, policies that make healthcare and childcare so expensive, and how people in many places around the world are treated with so much indignity. So that's values-aligned anger. The second type of anger is reactive anger. This emerges from overwhelm, from past triggers getting activated, or from basic needs today going unmet. This anger is not always about the immediate trigger. It's your nervous system's way of saying, “I can't cope right now”. Reactive anger typically comes suddenly with intensity that might surprise you.

It seems disproportionate to what triggered it, which is why you explode when your child does something that's really pretty age-appropriate. Reactive anger can leave you feeling drained rather than energized. It often connects to past experiences or current overwhelm, and it decreases when you meet some of your basic needs like food, rest, and support. So here are some examples of reactive anger. You explode at your kid for normal kid behavior when you're exhausted from work stress. You get triggered when your child does something you would have been punished for as a child. You snap at family members when you're hungry, overstimulated, or you're feeling touched out. Or you experience rage that seems to come from nowhere during particularly overwhelming periods that doesn't affect you as much when you have had enough food and movement and rest. My current thinking is that you can't always tell just by the inciting event what kind of anger you're looking at.

You have to look at your own history and situation to know what kind of anger you're dealing with. So if your kids start fighting and you were repeatedly hit by your own sibling when you were young, it's likely reactive anger, overwhelmed due to being triggered by that memory. If you didn't experience that kind of treatment but you still get angry when siblings hit each other, it's more likely to be values aligned to anger related to needs for fairness, justice, and safety. I can also imagine it being possible to experience both kinds of anger at once, in which case our job is to try to heal the pain that causes the reactive anger so that we can then manage the remaining values aligned to anger. So that might look like reassuring our nervous system that we're safe now, that this is not our brother hitting us, and that just because our kids are having a hard time right now doesn't mean one of them is going to terrorize the other one. And then once we're experiencing less reactive anger, we're better equipped to help our kids create a situation where each of them can get their needs met instead of fighting as they try to do that, which addresses our values aligned anger.

Reactive anger is trying to tell us, I'm overwhelmed and I've hit my capacity limit, or I'm triggered and something happening now is activating something in me that hasn't healed yet. Sometimes it's saying my basic needs aren't met. I need food, I need sleep, I need connection, I need movement that feels good to my body. Our values aligned anger tells us this system is not working and we can do better. When it's about the mental load, it might be saying I don't think the household chores are shared fairly at the moment. When it's about the impossible school demands, it's saying these expectations don't align with our family's well-being. When it's about lack of support, it's saying we need different policies that actually work for families. I think the big myth that our culture is trying to sell us, particularly as women, is that if we work hard enough on our own selves that we will heal and we won't feel angry anymore. But because values aligned anger isn't about us, as much as it is about what's happening out in the world, we can't heal our way out of that.

It reminds me a lot actually of the smoke alarm at our house. So sometimes it calls the fire department when Carys is microwaving chocolate and I'm on a call the day that my book is released, not that that has ever actually happened. That's our reactive anger. There's no real emergency; it's just chocolate smoking a little bit in the microwave. But the alarm reacts as if there is a real emergency and the fire trucks actually show up ready to battle the blaze. But with values aligned anger, there's a real fire in the building. Shutting off the smoke alarm and telling the fire trucks to go away is not an appropriate response. But that's what our culture tells us to do with all of our anger. When we can't shut it off, we often end up turning it inward, which is one reason why women have a lot more mental health struggles than men do.

We're taught that if we're having a hard time, we need to learn how to cope better, when actually we should all be working to change the system to make it work more effectively for us. Both types of anger contain important information, but they're most effectively addressed with quite different responses. So now you understand the two kinds of anger, I want to offer some practical tools for responding to each kind effectively. Traditional approaches focus on calming down and returning to baseline as quickly as possible. But when we acknowledge that anger carries important information, our goal shifts to understanding the message while maintaining safety and connection. So to help you remember how to do this, I've developed what I call the HEAR method, which helps you to halt, empathize, acknowledge, and respond. In the beginning, you might do these steps after the incident has passed, but as you get more practice, you'll be able to do it in the moment and change the course of an interaction. So let's walk through each step. So H for halt, creating space to think clearly.

When you notice anger building, the first priority is creating conditions where you can think clearly and understand what the emotion is creating. We're working to create space to understand it and respond to the information it contains. And I do acknowledge this step is not easy. We spend a lot of time on just this step in the Taming Your Triggers workshop. I will say it tends to be a lot easier when we catch ourselves earlier in the cycle, which is when you first feel tension in your body, rather than at the moment you're exploding. You might also try keeping a hair tie or a silicone band on your wrist as a reminder of the pause that you're trying to create and transferring that to the other wrist when you notice this tension. Then you take a breath, you pause, you check whether your anger is proportional to the current situation or not, and ask yourself, is this reactive anger from overwhelm or from being triggered? Or is this values-aligned anger about something that I really believe to be wrong? You might find it helpful to notice patterns in your anger.

When does it happen? What's the immediate trigger? And what else has been going on in your life that that day and that week? Can you trace it back to any patterns from when you were younger? Does it seem like it's linked to your values about what the world should be like? Halting gives you the space to listen to what your emotion's trying to communicate. And again, in the beginning, you might do the halt after the incident has already happened, and that's okay. The next step, E, for empathize, means validating your own emotional experience. So empathy means recognizing that your emotion makes sense given your perspective and experience. When I ask most parents to think about the care with which they would treat a dear friend having a hard time, they have no trouble with that at all. But when they try to turn that compassion toward themselves, they can't do it. So you might say to yourself, yes, I'm frustrated, I'm short on sleep, and my boss's demands are impossible, and I see now that my anger is not really about what my child was doing this morning.

Anyone would struggle with what I'm dealing with right now. Or, it makes sense that I'm feeling angry about shouldering so much of the mental load. If these tasks were more equally divided, I'd have more time and space to help my kid instead of hustling them to do one thing after another by themselves. Research shows that self-compassion actually helps people to regulate emotions more effectively than self-criticism. When you validate your own emotional experience, you create space to understand what it's communicating. And the A is for acknowledge, honoring the information. Acknowledgement goes beyond empathy to explicitly recognize that your anger contains important information worth understanding. This step communicates to yourself emotions are not just random experiences to be managed. They're meaningful communications about your values, your boundaries, and your needs.

This is the step where you're getting clear on what kind of anger you're experiencing. So you might think this anger is pointing me towards something I should pay attention to. And then you're wondering, is this really about something that happened to me in the past? Or am I feeling overwhelmed by life at the moment? Then it's probably a reactive anger, and I can take some responsibility for working to heal myself and to meet my needs more effectively today. Or you might realize, I feel angry about this a lot, but it's usually more of a slow burn than an explosion. What value is important to me that's being violated right now? This process gives you information that you will then act on in the next step, which is R, respond and addressing the underlying message. The response step involves taking action based on the information your anger provided.

For values-aligned anger, you might make individual changes like tracking what you're actually doing for a week to have concrete data for discussions with your partner. You might decide to relax cleaning standards at home or involve your child in cleaning with you, even if it takes longer, and cutting back on activities where you have to leave home instead. You might communicate with others. You could say, I've been managing the kids' medical appointments and school communications. Can we divide these tasks differently? Or you might email your child's teacher. The nightly reading log is creating stress in our family. Can we look at alternatives? For broader systemic issues, you might start up conversations at pickup. Does anyone else struggle with the amount of parent volunteer hours that are required? You could vote for candidates who support paid family leave or affordable child care. You might join your school's PTA to push for later start times or reduced homework loads.

You could offer babysitting exchanges for your neighbors or carpool to school or other activities. Instead of participating in conversations about all the activities kids are involved in, you could openly discuss realistic family limitations. You could form a group to get in touch with local representatives to create safe ways for kids to walk and bike to school so you don't have to drive them everywhere. Acknowledging how hard it is to do everything we're supposed to do helps other families do that too, instead of everyone pretending everything is okay. You could support organizations that provide humanitarian aid to people in crisis and talk with your kids about how the things we buy affect other people around the world. One lesson I learned from Mara Glatzel is that rest is any activity that gives you more energy than it takes to do it. So you might initially wonder how would you ever have time to do some of these kinds of activities, but when they're aligned with your values and you've been feeling angry about them, you may find that taking action based on those values gives you energy rather than sapping energy away. For reactive anger, the responses look different. You focus on getting immediate support, getting food, getting rest, getting help with the kids.

You work to meet your needs for sleep, for nutrition, for connection. If you're getting triggered by past experiences, you might consider support to heal those hurts because until you do, they will keep coming up in your interactions with your kids. So I do want to mention we have a printable of the steps of the HEAR method so you can remember how to do it more easily. Just go to yourparentingmojo.com/episodes and search managing parent anger to find it. Now I want to walk you through a quick example. So let's say you explode at your child because they can't find their shoes when you're already running late. So perhaps you might have felt guilt or shame that you yelled at them. You might have apologized and promised yourself or your child you try to manage your stress better next time. But ultimately what you're looking for is a way to get your child to just put their shoes on so you don't have to struggle with this.

But using the HEAR approach, you'd first halt and think, I need to pause and think about what just happened. Then empathize, I'm feeling really overwhelmed and that's a reasonable response to this morning's chaos. Next acknowledge, my anger is pointing me towards something that needs attention. And then you'd respond by determining what type of anger it was. Were you triggered by the memory of getting four siblings ready for school by yourself because your parents weren't available or capable of doing it? Were you stressed by work or family situations happening in your life today? If so, that's reactive anger and your focus is on doing healing work so your childhood experiences don't show up as strongly today and on looking for ways to meet more of your basic physical needs more often. But if it's values aligned anger about systems that aren't working, you might make individual changes like creating a designated shoe storage system by the establishing a shoes and backpack check the night before. You might communicate with your family by holding a family meeting and saying, our mornings seem really stressful for everyone, can we brainstorm how we can make them easier for all of us?

You might have a private conversation with your partner about the workload in your whole relationship beyond just getting out the door in the mornings. And I want to spend a few minutes on that topic because I think it's one that shows up in a lot of our relationships and creates a lot of values aligned anger. When you feel angry about shouldering a disproportionate share of family responsibilities, your anger reflects broader cultural patterns where domestic labor continues to fall more heavily on women. Your individual relationship exists within these larger systems which train boys and men to sit back and let someone else take care of things and girls and women to take care of things. Not all relationships fall into that kind of pattern but a lot of them do. Women are also taught that asking for help means we're ungrateful and when we don't get help the first time we ask and then we ask again we're now nagging. We might assume our partner won't hear us so there's no point in even asking and we might have evidence that when we ask for help nothing will change or it'll change for a week and then go back to how it was before. To echo what I said earlier, you can't heal your way out of that situation. In this context, doesn't it make sense that you feel angry?

When women express anger about these imbalances many male partners respond defensively or dismiss the concerns entirely. They might say well I do help and point to jobs like taking out the trash or changing the oil in the car. They might say well you're too critical of what I do and how I do it when they're presented with data about household labor distribution. Some will become angry themselves turning the focus away from the systemic issue toward the woman's tone or timing. Others withdraw completely which often leads women to conclude that expressing anger only makes things worse. And this whole dynamic keeps the system intact. When women suppress their legitimate anger to avoid conflict, nothing changes. When they express it and face defensiveness or dismissal they might decide to nag and criticize more to make sure that something gets done or just give up and do everything themselves. Change becomes possible when both people can step back and examine how they're participating in these patterns.

Criticism really doesn't help in a relationship but when we ask people who criticize why they do it we often learn that they perceive that so few of their needs are met now that they worry if they stop criticizing then none of their needs would be met. So if we want to work towards a relationship where each of us can share what's really going on for us and what needs we're trying to meet and take some responsibility for meeting that need ourselves and ask for help as well and then we aren't stuffing our anger down and we also aren't criticizing and we feel less angry because the family system is working more effectively for us. I've helped lots of parents do that through private coaching and there's a free introduction to those tools in the Taming Your Triggers workshop. So let's bring this all together. First I want to encourage you to listen to what your anger is telling you. Your anger about mental load, inequitable partnerships, impossible standards and systems that don't support families is a reasonable response to genuinely problematic structures we should change.

And your anger that comes out of nowhere when you're feeling overwhelmed is also really important and is super important to address through healing from the hurts you've experienced and by meeting more of your needs today. Working on your reactive anger helps create space for you to navigate your values aligned anger more effectively. The HEAR method transforms anger from a source of guilt into a tool for positive change. When you halt to create thinking space, empathize with your experience, acknowledge the information your anger contains and respond to the underlying message you honor your emotional experience and create space to help you respond to your anger in a way that's aligned with your values. Second, if you're experiencing a lot of reactive anger, the kind that seems to come from past triggers or overwhelming stress, consider exploring the Taming Your Triggers workshop. The program specifically addresses how to heal from past experiences that keep showing up in your parenting today and gives you tools to meet more of your needs today so you feel a lot less reactive anger.

And finally, model what to do with values aligned anger for your kids. When you honor your own anger as legitimate information about broader systems, you model for your children that emotions can fuel actions that support justice and aren't just something that should be tamped down. When kids see their parents working collectively to address systemic problems rather than just coping individually with unfair systems, they learn that change is possible and that voices matter. You can say things like; I'm feeling really angry about the situation because fairness is important to me. I'm going to talk to some other parents as well and see if they're seeing the same thing. Or, I notice I was getting frustrated with you but I think I'm actually upset about having too much to do today. That's not your fault. Your anger contains information about what matters to you and what needs attention in your life and community. The future that your family creates together depends on listening to what it's trying to tell you. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Hi, this is Jess from rural East Panama. I'm a Your Parenting Mojo fan, and I hope you enjoy this show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can also donate to help Jen produce more content like this and also save us from those interminable mattress ads. Then you can do that and also subscribe on the link that Jen just mentioned, and don't forget to head to your parenting mojo.com to record your own message for the show.