(Content Warning: This week’s article contains descriptions of a parent losing their temper and reacting angrily at a child.)
Everyone has conflict with the people closest in their lives. Family, friends, loved ones, work colleagues. At the end of the day, the people we spend most of our time with are the people that can frustrate us on a regular basis.
That doesn’t mean strangers can’t upset us either. But typically, strangers can only upset us one time. If we never see that stranger again, they will never bother us again.
Our loved ones, however, the people we want to spend our time with; they upset us, we upset them, yet we still choose to spend our time together.
I’m not going to try to break down why we get into arguments. There are lots of reasons and every relationship is different. I guess expectations and poor communication probably contribute to a large amount of them. But that’s about as far as I’ll go on that topic, because there is nothing I can write in this article that will stop you from ever having conflicts. But what I would like to try to convince you to change is how you handle those conflicts when they arise.
When I was a kid, my dad used to get angry. A lot. He would get really angry. I would do something wrong, and my dad would lose his mind. He would yell at me for hours. I LITERALLY mean hours. I would stand there and he would go off on a lecture. Yelling how disappointed he was, how I failed, how ungrateful I was, how much money I cost him. He would scream rhetorical questions that he would then make me answer while he stood there. Honestly, it was pretty horrible. As a kid, I was scared of failure because it meant my dad would scream.
It didn’t matter what I did to set him off, when my dad got into that angry state of mind, he would yell and he would lecture. Oddly enough, no matter why he was mad he would always end the lecture talking about how there were starving children in Ethiopia, and I needed to appreciate all the things my father had given me.
My dad isn’t a bad man. He never was. He is a good father who desperately loves his family. He just wants his wife and children to be happy. We are, and have always been, really close. But he was young when he had kids and back then he didn’t know how to express himself in a constructive way.
My dad, like many people, is a reactive communicator. When he was angry, he let his emotions take over.
While all the yelling and screaming definitely had a memorable impact on me, my dad completely missed the point of all those lectures. He wanted me to learn a lesson. He wanted me to take those lessons and live a better life having learned those lessons.
Teaching your children valuable life lessons is a positive goal. Communicating those lessons in a way other people can understand is a difficult task, regardless of their age.
To this day, I have no idea what lessons my dad wanted to teach me. I cannot remember a single reason why my dad was mad. After all that yelling, after all those lectures, I have learned exactly two facts… My dad had anger issues… and there are starving children in Ethiopia.
I understand why we raise our voice when we’re angry. It is a natural response to our emotional state. It’s instinctual. But an instinctual response does not mean it is an effective response.
When you are frustrated or angry with someone you care about, you want them to understand why you are frustrated and angry. Why? Because you want them to adjust their behaviours so that they don’t continue to frustrate you.
If you don’t agree, consider the alternative. When you have disappointed someone you care about, do you not want to understand why you disappointed them? That way you can avoid making the same mistake. When you have no idea what you did to disappoint them, how would you know what to change?
The moral of my dad’s lessons were lost in the delivery of his messages. Instead of understanding what my father valued, all I learned was he was angry when I was bad. It’s not the moral he wanted me to learn. Having spoken to him as an adult, I now know it’s a lesson he regrets teaching.
Unfortunately, it’s the same message you teach when you yell at your loved ones. That’s probably tough to read, especially if it rings true for you. And it should be tough.
It’s tough when people don’t understand you when your communication style is influenced by your emotions. Often these are the times we feel the greatest need to be heard. And it’s incredibly tough that in the moments you are most influenced by our emotions, it can feel like the people you care most about become the most unhelpful.
So what’s the alternative?
It’s easier said than done… but you have to try to keep calm.
When you can calmly explain your values to someone, then explain how their actions do not align with your values, they might be more receptive to that information. They might not understand at first, they might even be confused. That’s okay; take the time to try and explain in a different way. Maybe they’ll have some questions; maybe you’ll have some answers.
But a good rule of thumb is, if they can explain your thoughts back to you in their own words, they are more likely to understand what you’re trying to say.
I can only speak from experience, but I have found that when someone understands why I feel hurt, their apology is genuinely more sincere.
Ask your self which is more important to you: the emotional release that comes from yelling at the ones you love when you feel angry and hurt… Or… Helping the ones you love understand why and how they hurt you.
If you want to strive to try the latter, I’d recommend approaching your next conflict as a CALM-flict. Acknowledge the intense feelings that may come up during the conflict, but keep your focus on explaining the roots of those feelings. Why do you feel that way? How have the people closest to you impacted your emotions through their words and actions? Try to explain those feelings and their origins in a way that minimizes blame, but that acknowledges a change in behavior or approach may be needed.
Again, there is nothing I can say or do that will stop you from having conflicts with the people you care about. Conflict often arises because we care so much about these people and their responses to us. But you can control how you react in those situations. Your response can be driven by emotion and instinct, or your response can be structured by your values. You can help those closest to you understand more about how you think and feel and respond in moments of stress and upset. Or you can teach them that being “bad” gets them yelled at, and that their own feelings are less important than the nutritional needs of children in a land far, far away.
