Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week I wanted to touch on a slightly sort of larger, almost like a global message, a bigger picture message, and it deals more with anger and when our kids get angry, and it gives a bit of a metaphor for anger and maybe a change in thinking or certainly a different way to look at it. When we think about anger, it's really hard, right, as a parent when kids get angry because it's very disruptive of the day.
It can often be very destructive and just intrusive in the day. So it's hard to see anger as anything but a bother or more than a bother. But what I'm going to suggest is this kind of like there's a little bit of an anger spectrum.
And first of all, you know, I just want to present the picture that anger is often an emotional need to redress an emotional imbalance. Now what I mean by that, an emotional need to redress an emotional imbalance, as examples of that is if a child, tween or teen, is feeling unheard, they're going to shout. They make themselves bigger, right? If they make their voice bigger.
If a child is feeling small and unseen, anger is another way that they make themselves bigger. They inflate themselves so that they have that sort of bigness. If a child's sometimes feeling low energy and the world is pressing in on them, they can often use precious vital resources within them.
And they will light this bonfire, you know, of anger to, in a sense, almost like re-energize themselves. I've seen kids do this quite a lot, actually. Their anger is just trying to tap into an energy source when they don't feel like that's coming towards them in life in general.
Problem is it kind of burns, flares up and then burns down and leaves them even more vulnerable and low energy. But anger, if we can see it, first of all, in this way, that it's an emotional attempt to redress an emotional imbalance, that right there is, for some of us maybe, is a little bit of a shift of thinking, right? Then the next part, the second and last part I want to bring is that this spectrum that I mentioned is that if we think of anger, and the metaphor here is if we think of anger as heat, you know, this hot, boiling anger, then it's almost, we could see it almost like a blacksmith's forge. It's to, you thrust, the child is just full on in anger and it's like, it's a chance, if we don't get too involved and we don't thrust ourselves into the blacksmith's forge, we need to stay separate from it to be the blacksmith.
They're the metal, we're the blacksmith. What I'm saying here is that if we can understand, if we can get it that a child's redressing an emotional imbalance, and that's one way to stay, maybe one little way, one little toehold on our own emotional self-regulation, and we understand that they're angry and maybe even righteous anger, you know, there's anger that's right, and there's other anger that's just destructive. But if we can remember that something is being redressed here, and we can stay nearby, doesn't mean we walk away, doesn't mean we get shouty, doesn't mean anything other than accepting, just having an openness that anger is just a normal range, it's a part of the normal range of human emotion.
And to be able to say to a child, it's really, really hard, it's hard to be so angry, I know love, something must be really, really wrong. You might have noticed a little bit of intensity in my voice, it's not like, oh, something must be wrong. Oh dear, that is very hard, because that, that was just so annoying anyway, but it means that for a child, for a tween or a teen, you don't get it, you don't understand how angry I am.
But if we have a little intensity in our voice, oh my goodness, this is very, very hard, you know, for a little child or for a tweenager, yeah, it's something must be really up to be bugging you this much. Yep, yeah, absolutely, we can calm it down in a moment, yep, we'll have some calm down time, but I get it, I get it. And the anger often precedes the calm down time, right, but just, I guess, you know, you could say the calm down is beginning with us, we're calming it down inwardly first, so that they can too, but the anger is okay, it's okay.
If we can be okay with it, I know this doesn't apply to every situation, of course, but the, you know, a lot of anger, I would say a majority of it, if we can be okay with it, that's the first step. And then when the time is right to be able to work it out, as just a very recent episode I was talking about this, just working it out, that's us being a little bit of the blacksmith, that's us taking that black, that red or white hot anger, and just saying, okay, what can we do about this? How can we put this right? How can we move it on? Just like I was saying recently in that episode, but the anger itself often gives the heat needed to change the shape of what needed changing, little bit, but what needed changing. And in that way, on this spectrum of a blacksmith's forge is one side of it, at the other end, there's burn the house down, you know, burn the workshop down.
Now the burn the workshop down kind of anger often flares if we also get involved. If we get involved with our anger, then it's a recklessness, the flames shoot too high. What would have been contained in the forge is now licking the rafters of the ceiling and threatening to burn it all down.
So a lot of this has got to do when children are angry, is to understand that there's power in this anger, and more the question is accepting the power, being okay with the anger, letting a child know it's very, very hard to be this kind of, this angry, this bugged, something's going wrong. We're going to work it out soon, love, but my goodness, but it's okay. It's okay.
You're okay with me. And in our family, yep, if we get angry, we move it on, we work it out. It's going to be good soon, but okay, I get it, that.
And again, I want to emphasize, this is not for every situation, but for a lot of them, this is what will move a teenager, a tweenager, a child on, is that we accept that anger is inwardly, we know that anger in that moment, our kids are attempting to redress an emotional imbalance and that's the sort of core of the work it out. Remember we talked about calm it down, work it out, and that's that core of the working it out so we can put it right and move it on. But the core of it is that anger, I don't know if you know what I mean by this, but when kids are angry, if we don't get involved in it, they're very vulnerable, which is weird, right? Because they're so angry, but there's vulnerability in it.
And it's often when we come to working it out with a kid, often that's when the truth is spoken. It's brought something up that did need to be worked through. Okay, another way to look at anger.
All right, hope that was helpful, bye bye for now.
