My theory is that my wife when she screams at the kids constantly is releasing her frustrations all day long - therefore no build-up to a huge explosion.
Thinking about this process of stockpiling... there must be ‘tools’ and insights for avoiding or alleviating this situation. Tools that I don’t have (and that I want to acquire).
Firstly
How do I not stockpile rage?How do I process each small frustration there-and-then so that it doesn’t build up and be part of a bigger release?
If I would process each one, I guess perhaps it might look something a bit like:
- calmly telling my frustrations why they’re making me cross.
- finding an immediate alternative release for that small amount of tension so that it gets discharged and there is no build-up.
- Find ways to prevent these happening (ie a schedule to help my daughter not be so slow of a morning)
Secondly
How do I know if I’m stockpiling rage?If I were a garbage bin I could see that it’s getting a bit full - and I’d say “better empty that or it will overflow”. I don’t have an indicator display which shows a needle crossing into the red zone. So what are the indicators?
- Physical signs? Tension, shortness of breath, I don’t know...?
- Smaller explosions of increasing magnitude...? (The Mother’s Day weekend had lots of those - the kids, the birthday, Auskick, preparing the house, doing the lunch)
When I say that I have successfully become a calmer & less angry/shouty dad over the last 4-5 years, perhaps what I’ve really been doing is enacting a rage-suppression program. What I thought were occasional ‘lapses’ in an otherwise calm sea were in fact not lapses, but the inevitable (probably obvious) outcome of my rage suppression.
I suppose what did happen is my wife said “don’t yell at the kids anymore” and so I abruptly stopped. I didn’t stop being angry, I just stopped expressing it. I stopped regularly expressing it - I’d express it at intervals.
