Page 47 - How Changing Your Anger Can Help You Be a Better Parent book

Be Assertive Rather than Aggressive

You can come up with more healthy anger responses that will support growth and change in your
child.

By focusing on being assertive, rather than aggressive or even passive-aggressive, you can
change to healthier anger and feel much better after an angry exchange with your child.

Your change process begins with having tools to get yourself calm when hit with an unexpected
anger rush.

Knowing that your angry thoughts can become distorted quickly, you can use some “emergency”
healthy anger tools to calm yourself in the heat of an angry moment.

When you're feeling that emotional charge, that emotional build up inside of you, perhaps
becoming emotionally hijacked, you can take a pause, knowing you don’t have to react with yelling
or spanking or any other form of anger aggression.

By taking a pause, you can develop tools you can use to change your angry thinking quickly and
figure out what you and your child need at that moment. You can do things for yourself to calm
your brain and body which will get you into a clearer thinking place.

Depending upon what may be causing you to become angry with your child or another family
member, your thoughts are fueling your emotions. Your angry thoughts will cause physical and
emotional reactions that you can change.

There's a lot going on inside of you when you become angry. When you become emotionally
charged, the emotional activation in your brain takes over your logical thinking. So, thinking
patterns can become distorted and trigger memories of past anger.

A lot of those memories (even your childhood anger memories) are stored in your brain and can
be triggered when you get angry with your child or other family members.
You can stand in your power and control your angry thoughts rather than allow your angry
thoughts to control you.

Your change begins with calming yourself down in the heat of the moment. When you feel yourself
becoming angry, you can take that pause. You can take some very initial valuable space to realize
that your thoughts are now becoming distorted, perhaps magnifying and catastrophizing what’s
happening. You could be thinking that things are much worse than they are.
If getting angry with your child is triggering you, your brain is falsely connecting your previous
anger memories with your current situation.

You can change your less than healthy or negative thinking and you can start with breathing and
positive self-talk to make quick changes in your angry thinking. Positive mantras - short phrases
that you can recall and recite to yourself mentally - can help shift your distorted angry thoughts.

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