Page 27 - How Changing Your Anger Can Help You Be a Better Parent book

Your Thoughts Fuel Your Anger - it’s the #1 Cause of

Your Anger

It can be effective to try to understand how you’re perceiving what's happening around you during
an angry moment, interpreting it and also processing the information.

Thinking about your thinking, your thought process - it's called metacognition.

It can be really helpful in terms of understanding emotional response and also by perhaps at times
being able to pause your thought process. You’re better able to connect to someone else's thought
process - which more commonly may be known as empathy.

Your thoughts fuel your emotions.

Research indicates that the normal time for an emotion (the emotional response, the emotional
charge) to impact the human brain and body is only about ninety seconds and so that emotional
charge should only last about a minute and a half.

Well, you can probably remember the last time you were angry or had another intense emotional
response that may have lasted more than a minute and a half.

Your thoughts are giving additional life and energy to your emotions.

Your thoughts are the number one cause of your anger!

Have you considered how you perceive, interpret and then process different/emotional situations
that you may be in with your child?

Your thoughts about why your child is making you angry fuel your emotions and cause you to
become angry.

How can you empower yourself to be able to control your thoughts, rather than your thoughts
controlling you?

As you start to feel emotional, the emotional part of your brain can take over and actually hijack
the rest of your brain processing.

The emotional part of your brain takes over as you feel that emotional flooding, or the emotional
dysregulation when feeling angry.

You can take control of those thoughts.
You can be empowered with different tools and be able to catch yourself and realize that when
you are emotionally charged, emotionally escalated, or even perhaps emotionally hijacked, your
thoughts will become distorted, and may become triggers.

Your trigger thoughts remind you of past situations, where you may have been angry with your
kids or even past situations when someone may have been angry with you.
Anger response is a learned behavior.

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