How to Deal with Repressed Anger at Your Parents
The connection with our parents plays a huge role in our adult lives. Depending on the nature of your relationship with your parents, you may become a self-confident, caring, and compassionate adult. But you may also grow into a resentful, insecure, or narcissistic individual.
When the relationship with your parents is tainted by resentment, hurt, or trauma, you may keep your anger inside for a long time after childhood and adolescence.
Many seek psychotherapy to learn how to get beyond painful childhood experiences and deal with repressed anger toward their parents.
Wounds from the Past
The most common childhood issues that appear in psychotherapy involve dysfunctional family patterns, insecure attachment, neglect, and abuse can all leave deep scars that last a lifetime. Trauma is estimated to affect 46 percent of children during their childhood.
So, if you grew up in an unhealthy family, you could quickly become trapped in toxic relationships as an adult. As a result, you may struggle with depression, trust issues, unhealthy perfectionism, people-pleasing, unrealistic expectations, etc.
Therapy can help you work on your early childhood experiences, learn positive communication strategies, develop healthy coping mechanisms, make peace with the past, and move on.
How to Manage Unresolved Resentment and Anger at Your Parents
So, how can you stay in control and communicate positively during your visits and stays with your parents?
Learn the Difference between Forgiving and Forgetting
When you forgive, you let go of resentment and anger at the person who hurt you. Still, forgiving and forgetting are not the same thing. When you forgive, you don't forget what the other person did wrong, but you are ready to let go of the past and your bad feelings to move on. If you decide to forgive, you can stop seeing yourself as a victim and take responsibility for your behavior.
Both forgiveness and self-forgiveness involve a conscious decision to be free from blame, resentment, anger, and other negative emotions directed at yourself and others.
Develop a Coping Strategy
Because of the Covid pandemic, many of us haven't seen our families in a long time. Re-visiting your parents after such a long time can be overwhelming, so plan to work on emotional control while staying with your parents.
Practice Mindfulness
Try practicing mindfulness, deep breathing, and other ways to calm down. Focusing on the present moment will help you ground yourself and feel more confident in dealing with stressful situations back home.
Work on Communication Strategies
When you and your parents get together, dysfunctional family patterns may resurface. You may wonder whether it is worth speaking your mind and opening up about how you feel. Honesty is always the way to go. However, try to stay calm and manage conflicts positively. Keep an open mind and communicate your feelings and needs assertively.
Try not to let any negative memories affect your mood during the visit. Going back home may cause you to reflect on what could have been done differently or what was missing in your childhood. Instead of dwelling on the past, try to focus on the present and feel grateful for the good things in your life.
It turns out that many men who seek therapy have unspoken resentment and anger toward their parents. Their typical stress reactions are withdrawal, avoidance, or stonewalling. It's sometimes easier to keep all those painful feelings inside and just be angry. Male stereotypes instilled in us as children teach us this.
Do Some Inner Child Work
However, somewhere inside you, there is still that angry, scared, and insecure child. Over time, you've learned to use anger to hide feelings of sadness, hurt, guilt, or shame because it feels better to be angry than to feel these disturbing emotions. So, as an adult, you might have learned to turn all your hurt feelings into anger, so you don't have to deal with them.
If you have a hard time letting go of anger, this can keep you from working on grief, hurt, and forgiveness.
Inner child work in psychotherapy can help you get in touch with that hurt child, and recognize and heal your childhood trauma, so you can protect your well-being, forgive your parents, and move on.
Childhood emotional wounds can significantly impact your emotional health as an adult, as well as your ability to form healthy, meaningful relationships. Inner child work can help you deal with painful memories, release pent-up anger from childhood, and ultimately find peace within yourself.
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