For Dads: Confronting the Monster Within

Losing Your Temper Isn't Normal. The Good News Is: You Can Get Control.

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This one is for all the dads out there. Does the following sound familiar?

You’ve just gotten done with a long day at work. You accomplished less than you would have like, but the project you were working on had some unavoidable issues. Your boss has given you a deadline that feels unrealistic, but you have to find some way to meet it or your next performance review is going to be a bloodbath.

On your way home, there’s an accident on your route. Traffic is backed up for miles. You check your GPS, but it’s still the fastest way home. It’s going to be 20 minutes before you’re out of this jam, you’re starving, and you desperately need to pee. Your wife has asked you to stop at the store on your way home to get a vegetable for dinner. You’d rather buy a bottle of whiskey, but you just got one a few days ago and it’s already gone. You know you need to slow down. You just wish all the stress would let you.

You get through traffic, speed through the store, and arrive in your driveway at last. You get out of the car, grabbing all your stuff as in one go, and as you juggle too many things, your travel mug sloshes the last bit of your now ice-cold coffee down the front of your white shirt when you accidentally tip it while getting out. You swear, but there’s nothing you can do. Hopefully it won’t stain.

You head for the door, your hands full. You pop it open with your elbow, the mail you grabbed from the mailbox and piled on top of everything else so you wouldn’t have to make multiple trips tucked under your chin. Your toddler and your 5 year old assault you the minute the door opens.

“Daaaaaddeeeeeee!” they yell. “Daddy’s hoooome!” They slam into your legs, giving you their big ferocious kid hugs. In other circumstances, this would be cute, but you’re frazzled and your hands are full and you can’t walk with them wrapped around your knees. Two of your older children are in the middle of conversation that sounds slightly heated. They come to you without a greeting, and demand you to play referee.

“Dad, John said that he hates me and he wishes I was never born. All because I just wouldn’t give him a turn immediately on the Xbox, but my time wasn’t even up!” His voice is whiny and petulant, and it annoys you. You look at your wife, who is standing in the kitchen, scrolling on her phone, not intervening.

“This is what I’ve been dealing with all day,” she says without looking up. “Your children are being really extra.” Your children, you think. Why does she have to say it that way? They’re always ‘your children’ when they’re acting up.

Another child comes barreling around the corner with a math book in hand. “Dad, how do you do exponents? I need to finish my homework before I can play, but Mom says she doesn’t remember and that I need to ask you.” The kids fighting over who should or shouldn’t be born are bickering again, and it’s getting louder. The little ones are shrieking for no obvious reason.

You feel something inside you slipping through your grip. Heat rises in your cheeks and turns to pinpricks, and your throat tightens. Suddenly you’re yelling before you even realize what’s happening.

“GUYS!! FOR F***’S SAKE, I JUST GOT HOME. I HAVEN’T EVEN PUT DOWN MY STUFF OR HAD A CHANCE TO GO TO THE BATHROOM, AND I’VE NEEDED TO GO FOR THE PAST HOUR!!”

You throw your pile of stuff down on an empty chair. You do it too hard because you want them to really know that you’re upset, but you forget about the travel mug, which bounces off the cushion and hits the floor, knocking the top off, then ricochets off the hardwood, spraying the rest of what’s in the cup (which you thought had fully emptied onto your shirt) across the light-colored sofa. Your wife says your name as an exclamation — a tone that you’ve heard a hundred times, and you cringe inwardly. You’re out of control and she’s warning you. You look down and your toddler and first grader are beginning to cry. Your older kids are looking at you like a lion that just showed up feeling hungry, frozen in their tracks. You know you’re smack in the middle of screwing up, but you can’t figure out how to put the brakes on. You’re too far gone now. You continue ranting under your breath.

“Can’t even come to my own damn home after a crappy day and get a moment’s peace…” you trail off because you’re already on the way upstairs to lock yourself in the bathroom. You were looking forward to seeing your family just a few minutes ago, but you didn’t last five seconds before exploding like a bomb, and on top of all the other stress you feel, you now have to try to fix this, if you can even calm the hell down. Your wife is going to be upset at you and avoidant for the rest of the night, at best. There goes your hope for a little one-on-one time with her later. Everything is screwed up again, and you want to blame your family for provoking you, but deep down, you know it’s all your fault. This is not the example you want to set, but it seems like it’s the only thing you ever do, and you didn’t even mean to do it.

If this, or some variation of this, is something you’ve experienced, this post is for you.

Kirk Martin, the founder of Celebrate Calm, has been helping families become more functional for a long time. We discovered his work over a decade ago, and honestly, I regret not spending more time with it. Kirk grew up with a military man as a father who took no crap from anyone, especially his kids, and Kirk followed suit when he had kids of his own. His story about his own personal wakeup call is heartbreaking. But he turned things around, and now he helps others do the same.

Today, he posted something that sounded exactly like the man I used to be, and am actively working on changing:

The hard truth is that while husbands usually blame their wives for coddling their strong-willed child...wives are more often coddling the husband/father who can't control his own emotions when the child misbehaves (or more likely just does something the dad doesn't like).

So wives end up trying to manage the behavior of a child...so that the "big child" she married can actually "behave" and not lose it.

The wife now has to manage the emotions of a grown adult so he doesn't yell at their child and escalate situations.

Anytime she sticks up for the child, she is accused of "undermining my authority as the husband." Only the husband relinquished his authority himself by being unable to control himself.

This is untenable. A wife/mom can only do this for so long. First, she loses respect for her husband (which is a relationship killer) because she realizes she married a boy instead of a man. And then the distance begins to grow.

Men are not always the problem. Wives have their issues. This isn't always the case. Sometimes it's the reverse. But this IS the norm.

And IF this is the case, then men, you need to step up and learn how to control yourself. No blame. No guilt. But no more excuses. Own it. Apologize. Change yourself. Or you will lose everything, including your own self-respect.

When I was a kid, avoiding upsetting my father was a high priority in my house. I remember the feeling of elated relief I would have on hearing the words, “Dad’s working late tonight and won’t be home for dinner.” It meant that the chances I was going to get reamed a new one that evening were drastically lower.

But then, somehow, I became my dad.

I can't tell you how many times I did something along the lines of the story above. Or how often I was told that everyone felt like they had to walk on eggshells around me. That I was unpredictably volatile and explosive at all times.

That life was better when I wasn’t at home.

I had no idea that the volatility and explosiveness — behavior I hated when I was on the receiving end of it when I was a kid — could nevertheless produce the same behavior in me as an adult. I have since learned that the feelings of danger and fear I grew up with became so habitual, they put me into a state of constant fight or flight. My sympathetic nervous system became overactive, and stuck in the “on” position.

According to MHS mental health services:

During times of stress, your body’s sympathetic nervous system activates your fight or flight response. It happens quickly so that the body is almost instantly ready to run or defend itself. In contrast, the parasympathetic nervous system’s job is to relax the body and use hormones to slow down those frantic responses once the threat is gone. The PSNS gives the body a calm and relaxed feeling over a period of time. The changes don’t happen as quickly as those of the sympathetic nervous system.

How Does Trauma Affect the Nervous System?

In periods of stress, the body’s fight or flight response activates. A normally regulated nervous system experiences the stress but returns to normal when the threat has passed. This period during which you have the ability to self regulate is called the window of tolerance, and most people move through several of these cycles daily. One example is rushing to get somewhere and running late but relaxing once you reach your destination on time. However, the system works very differently when the body experiences trauma.

Traumatic events push the nervous system outside its ability to regulate itself. For some, the system gets stuck in the “on” position, and the person is overstimulated and unable to calm. Anxiety, anger, restlessness, panic, and hyperactivity can all result when you stay in this ready-to-react mode. This physical state of hyperarousal is stressful for every system in the body. In other people, the nervous system is stuck in the “off” position, resulting in depression, disconnection, fatigue, and lethargy. People can alternate between these highs and lows.

In cases of extreme and chronic stress, such as ongoing trauma, complex PTSD may result. One example is children who are raised in abusive homes. Another is a soldier returning from combat. The nervous system becomes conditioned to exist in a state of fear. That state can continue into adulthood, triggered by things that would seem utterly unrelated to the childhood trauma. For example, the soldier may react to the backfiring of a car as if the sound is gunfire because he or she is in a constant state of fear, ready to react to the firing of a bullet.

Your limbic cortex — the so-called “lizard brain” comprised of your brain stem, cerebellum, and basal ganglia (including the amygdala) — is lightning fast. It has to be to keep you safe from sudden threats, which is one of its primary jobs. It is faster in its attempts at self-preservation than your rational brain is at saying, "Hey, why am I doing this?" If you've ever caught yourself reacting angrily before you even processed that you were feeling anger, the efficiency of your “lizard brain” is probably why:

If incoming sensory data triggers a strong association with a painful past event, the amygdala will immediately send a signal to the limbic system. That incoming data could be in the form of someone yelling at us or even just an angry look on another’s face. Even if the threat is not real and just “looks like” something that was painful to us in the past, the amygdala routes it to the part of our brain that will produce a reflex-like reaction.

Unfortunately, the base of our brain has a limited set of responses: fight or flee. We fight or flee to protect ourselves, or we risk being hurt again. What’s more, our minds sometimes misperceive events and circumstances to be much larger and scarier than they really are. This is why we over-react to certain things that happen to us or are said to us. When our brain misinterprets something to be very dangerous, we don’t consider consequences, rationalize actions, or figure out the best way to respond. The cortex, which would be able to perform those functions, is not involved! This phenomenon is called an amygdala hijacking or “lizard brain” because a lizard’s brain is dominated by the basal parts and is not capable of rationalizing its responses.

Men are not the only ones who suffer from the kind of lizard brain anger response I outlined above, but it does seem to be more common in men.

If you’re a guy and you're struggling with this, you need to know, first of all, that it isn't normal to have an explosive temper, or to be irritable all the time. I used to think yelling and screaming were normal; I believed this was just how people dealt with stressful situations and conflict. I thought yelling at my kids in a way that made them feel awful was a legitimate form of discipline, and initially at least, I didn’t even see a good reason to correct it. I had picked up, somewhere along the way, that “our children should fear us just as we fear God.” My baseline for “normalcy” was anything but normal.

I was wrong.

For me, a big part of gaining more control over my emotional responses has been coming to a real awareness of my own behavior and actually facing the effect it has on others. I had to recognize that I was hurting the people I loved.

One day, a few years back, I wound up face to face with the realization that if I died suddenly, while my family might be sad initially, what they would feel most profoundly was relief. They wouldn’t have to worry about me losing my temper, yelling and screaming, threatening or enacting physical punishments, or verbal abuse that cut them down and made them feel terrible for whatever “disrespect” I thought I had perceived. I thought anger made me powerful, because anger was the one emotion I could rely on to overpower fear and push others away, making me feel safe.

Fear. Feeling unsafe. These were the things that were problems for me growing up, and I was compensating for them by acting out in a way that made me feel like I had some control over what was going on. The irony was, I was actually totally out of control. I wasn’t choosing my behavior, I was justifying the behavior I was resorting to reflexively.

Kirk Martin has an episode of his podcast entitled, “How To Be A Dad Your Kids Listen To.” It’s less about controlling anger and more about how to relate to your kids (and not be a jerk), but if you’re a dad struggling with any of this, it might be worth a listen:

The best methods for overcoming the kinds of trauma responses that create this explosive, fight or flight reaction, are still being researched. Therapists tend to recommend things like meditation, breathing exercises, and physical activity like yoga (which combines breathing, meditation, and physical activity) that grounds you in and connects you to an awareness of your physical body. This can help since often times what we are experiencing during these explosions are emotional flashbacks to a time when we were children and felt afraid or overwhelmed. Doing things that pull you out of your head and remind you that you are physically present, here and now, in a moment where you are not actually in danger, can help. Other strategies like tapping, or touching your lips with two fingers to activate the relaxation response of your parasympathetic nervous system (which is directly connected to the lips) are also supposed to help.

There’s a centering exercise which I recently learned from Vishen Lakhiani at Mindvalley, which I’ve come to find quite useful. It’s called the 3-2-1 method. You visualize the number “3” three times, associating that with intentional physical relaxation. Then “2” three times, mentally visualizing scenery you find serene — for me, it’s the Pacific coast just south of the Redwoods. Then “1” three times, which finally brings you to your “center.”

I don’t know how it works, but I can actually feel my body unclenching when I do it, and I now resort to it often when I feel stress taking over. While the lesson is taken from a larger paid meditation series, you can watch that specific lesson for this exercise for free on YouTube:

Now, I’m not an expert on any of this. I’m on the path of self-discovery so that I learn and eventually master self-control. It’s a puzzle that is unique to every person, and you can’t solve it overnight.

What I can say is that I am better than I used to be. Significantly. But I still have a long way to go. As I discover more about how to re-program the brain to react in healthier ways, I will share those discoveries here. But I didn’t want to wait until I have this all figured out to talk about what I’ve learned so far.

Men, if you see any of these tendencies in yourself, you need to be working on this. Today. Don't put it off. Prioritize it. Make time for it. Your relationships with your spouse and your children depend on it.

And perhaps even more importantly, your children's future relationships with their spouses and their kids depend on it, because they will live out the behavior that was modeled for them, whether they like it or not.