The warning signs for anger work from the inside out. The same is true for isolation. Before others know these two emotions are happening in us, we feel and yield to them before we let them out in words and actions. How we accept them becomes our family relationships.
Isolation
How can you judge if your isolation is bringing harm to your family? Consider these questions:
- Do you spend time apart from your child feeling like there’s something wrong?
- Do your efforts to spend more time with your wife and kids turn into struggles?
Anger and isolation are two very clear problems in fathering relationships. Children and mothers exposed to our anger and isolation automatically feel fear and confusion as we are feeling fear and confusion. A great deal of children’s anger and isolative behavior is learned from their fathers. So, too, with their mothers.
Do you find that you only feel relaxed when you spend time away from your wife and children? If so, you can be sure you’re dealing with fear and anger within yourself.
Anger Habit?
If raised voices and aggressive language are a regular part of your family life, you are using more anger than is healthy. Anger is intended for emergency protection, for life and death circumstances, when we need maximum energy in a physical way to protect us or others. If your frustration leads to impatience, angering quickly, and predictably blasting your family to get your way, you are misusing your power.
How can you judge if your anger is bringing harm to your family? Another question to ask is how often you increase your volume to get your point across. If you’re feeling really committed to a good relationship, ask your wife and kids: “Do I seem angry or isolated to you very often?”
Do you value intimidation as a way to relate?
Anger is thinking and behaving with the intention of dominating others. If you are inclined to intimidate with your voice, consider for a moment how often you are using anger to relate with your family. Intimidation can take the form of a BIGGER, louder, threatening voice: one used to deliver a message that danger is here, but the danger is you.
The paradox of family anger
No one uses anger unless they, themselves, feel threatened. A raised, angry voice means that you are experiencing danger. You feel ‘unsafe’.
If a dangerous situation threatened your child and you raised your voice to warn them, your fear would have been the protective, driving force. Our child might not see an oncoming car, for example. That would be an appropriate use of a raised voice and fear, our dominant energy used to protect our child.
Our thoughts, however, are typically the source of our vulnerability. Actual physical danger is rare. The communication of danger we imagine can be confusing if our loudness and accusations tell our wives or children there is a danger and–even worse—that they are the danger.
Who is Daddy going to hurt?
Nature has designed fathers to be physically bigger than our children for the first ten or fifteen years of our lives together. In developmental terms, this makes sense so we can keep them out of harm’s way by picking them up and moving them, fighting off predators, shaping their lives for them. Ideally, all children experience their parents as powerful and necessary to their safety and happiness. Being protected by our fathers is understood as our birthright by all of us.
Raising our voice to dominate can easily turn our physical strength into threatening our children or their mom. Without ongoing vigilance that recognizes our anger and isolation as a danger, we might turn our temporary size and strength advantage, intended by design to protect, into a very real threat that teaches our children and their mothers to fear us. The anger and isolation within us will likely become reasons for our families to avoid us.
Nature misused
Our children understand, inherently, we are stronger and potentially dangerous. Turning our anger towards them or their mother, even without physical aggression, introduces a threat, which is confusing. “Daddy’s anger feels like it’s going to end me or my brother, my sister or mom.” By the use of our fearful voices and intensity, we become the experience of aggression and destruction.
We can’t stop feeling emotions
As humans, we are all empaths. We not only feel our own emotions all day long, but we also feel each other’s emotions. This is part of the information we use to understand life.
When we are silent or use only a few words, our children feel our anger and make it part of their self-understanding. This is life’s natural design. We all feel emotions from ourselves and others, guiding our behaviors, accordingly.
I am not suggesting we stop anger or get rid of it. That’s not possible. It is important to bring awareness to HOW we use anger: our own, our children’s, and their mothers’. If we use anger to dominate those we love, we have made a horrible mistake.
As part of our anger, if we add-in loud, demanding, or threatening words, we automatically include our children and their mom in feelings of fear we have within us, feelings only we can understand.
When we use raised voices and aggressive words, we share immediate confusion and fear with our families our selves. In explosive anger or intense isolation, we all feel outside the circle of protection and love
While anger is a necessary emotion and can be lifesaving, it can also become a habit. This defeats the purpose of families, which is connection and sharing.
If or when you find yourself pushing away, pushed away, and feeling isolated, you will do well to reconnect yourself to reality. Is there an actual danger? Is there a threatening stranger in the house? Are there lions outside? How about in your thinking and feelings?
A version of this post was previously published at The Father Connection and is republished here with permission from the author.
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