Are You Mad at Your Kids, or Mad at Your Parents?

As we go through our lives, we continually have different experiences. When one of those experiences is traumatic on some level, we tend to internalize the situation and have it stick with us. If you’ve ever been fired from a job or had someone break up with you, it may have made a strong impression. Afterward, if something happens that reminds us of what happened, we may react in fear that the experience could repeat itself. This fear response can occur even when a situation is different from the previous one. Anything that emotionally feels like it could become the same circumstance as what caused our initial trauma can create a reaction of fear that it might happen again.

To illustrate the point, let’s imagine you had trouble getting to sleep as a child because you had a family member making a lot of noise at bedtime. This may have really upset you at the time, especially if you felt helpless to change it. While today you may have more control over your environment than you did as a child, you may still become very upset when someone is making noise in the evening that you feel is louder than it should be. As a result, you may react more strongly than you realize due to your childhood trauma. Even though you are no longer helpless to do something about the situation, your emotions often react from the same place as when you were a child. We all sometimes regress to the age we were when the initial trauma happened in our lives.

As parents, it’s not surprising that our children can sometimes inadvertently trigger our childhood upsets. This means we may sometimes have our judgment compromised when our child does something that triggers us. This, in turn, can undermine our ability to parent them effectively.

One of the ways to recognize when we’re being caught by our own past as opposed to actually choosing our words is to take a moment to reflect on what we are saying. Often, we become emotionally reactive to kids for a number of reasons. Perhaps they were not listening to us or continuing to pester us after we made a decision. This may be because we felt that way as a child when adults did not listen to us. Then, when we become emotionally upset, we may verbally snap at them due to our own childhood frustrations. One way to combat this is to pause to consider our responses. We can ask ourselves, “Are we acting for the benefit of our child, or are we lashing out because of our own unresolved emotional upsets?” By posing the question, we are less likely to react automatically. By considering the answer to this question, we are more likely to make a decision based on the situation at hand as opposed to our past hurts. It’s surprising how just a few seconds of reflection can make a difference in our response.

The next thing to acknowledge is that all of us can be reactive. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a state that happens when we become emotionally upset or overwhelmed, which can then cause us to not make our best decisions. When this happens, it’s important to “clean up” the discussion as soon as we are emotionally able to do so. Once we realize we’re speaking from our past hurt instead of our current logic, it can be helpful to pause the conversation and compose ourselves. This can help us become clearer on what we truly want to say.

Even the most caring and loving parents can get caught by past hurts and become reactive. Once we are able to recognize this, we can start to differentiate between what we’re doing as parents for the benefit of our children and when we are reacting out of our own pain and hurt feelings. This is not easy, as many of us struggle with recognizing when we are acting out of our emotions. However, with a commitment to examine this, we can create a clearer view of what we want to share while parenting and not just perpetuate our childhood traumas. In this way, we can help our children avoid internalizing their hurt feelings, so they have fewer of these conflicts to struggle through when they become parents.