And he probably knows you do all of this, and he doesn’t know what else to do to help. I know my wife would get upset because she was doing a lot, she would never tell me what she wanted me to do. Maybe you could tell him what he could do around the house to help.
This is exactly what happens to me, it still does. My daughter will sometimes just not take to me at all. She’s supposed to stay with me every other weekend, so far she hasn’t. Last weekend she screamed and kicked and wouldn’t even let me near her. So I said forget it and took the younger one. Then the next day she really wanted to go with me. It hurts and it’s frustrating and just makes you mad. So it felt like to me no one cared about me and then once the frustration starts it’s hard to stop.
I’m not sure how much a course will help, it depends on the course. Mine was ok, but it did show me ways to understand when I’m getting angry. Enough to know at least sometimes to stop and think about it. You might also want to try and talk to him about things he can do around the house, I’m not sure if that’s a problem, but it might be. He might feel like he doesn’t do anything, or enough. I’d also suggest you let him take care of the kids for a bit while you get out. He can manage it, but I’d let him manage it his own way and not say anything about it.
I might also suggest finding a sitter and going out for a bit. Even just an hour or two is better then nothing. Let me tell you that over the last 4.5 years I can count on both hands the number of times my wife and I went out together. That doesn’t help things either. She just refused to get a sitter unless it was her parents.
I hope I’ve helped, at least a little. I don’t like that I get so mad so fast, and there’s no one more then me that wishes it any other way.
Thank you so much for your comments - that really helped.
Helping around the house is definitely one of our biggest points of contention, though he’s been so wonderful the last few months, so maybe we should just try to continue to build on that. Also, there are financial issues we need to talk about. Neither of us is a big spender, so we don’t have any problem paying the bills, but we do need to put together an investment plan to take care of retirement and college, something we’ve failed to do for a while that makes both of us uneasy and probably contributes to the general malaise he’s experiencing. So we definitely need to talk to a financial planner, sooner rather than later.
I agree that getting out of the house is good. We’ve been doing it more, which has definitely been helping our relationship with each other. Now I think what we need to do is get out of the dinner rut - you know, where you get out and every time you only go to dinner instead of doing something else instead or in addition. So next weekend I was planning to surprise him with a trip to a local climbing gym with a (very casual) dinner afterward.
He’s always wanted to learn how to climb, but it was something we just never did - something always got in the way. Not necessarily kids. We’ve been talking about it since well before we had them, but we always got distracted with something else, and I want him to know that I still remember that there are things we want to do together and don’t want him (or me) regretting that we never took the time to do them.
My son was sentenced to anger management along with 200 hours community service. The service was fine and helped him a lot, the anger management was just silly. He finished it, but he said he just did what the instructor said by rote, and thought the whole class was a waste of time.
I wonder if anger management classes don’t work because they’re not getting to the root of the problem. tdn alluded to it, and I’ve read that angry people are people in pain. ISTM that if you don’t get to the cause of the pain and do the work to heal from it, then the anger is going to keep being triggered no matter how much you don’t want it to be. I’m sure that anger management classes help with coping in the moment, but in order to resolve the anger you have to resolve the pain.
That looks interesting. I think I might have to check it out myself. While my temper isn’t nearly as explosive as my husband’s, I get mad like everyone else. And I sometimes feel like the burden is on me to remain calm, where he has the luxury of getting really mad, which can add to some of the resentment. I’m trying really hard not to feel that way, but you can’t change the way you feel - just the way you react.
And I agree that the problem is likely more than anger. His father was a terrible, terrible person. Had I been treated the way he was, with such casual and explosive, sudden violence, I would be angry, too.
Very true. I dated a guy that went to anger management and it didn’t work for him. He never got to the root of the anger. For him it was his parents. I now have a prerequisite for dating. I ask my date do you hate anyone? If they say, “Yes, I hate my Mother or Father” I run. If you hate, you can’t love anyone.
You need to somehow find a way to forgive anyone or anything you resent. Forgiveness is the cure. How do you forgive someone? You pray for them every day until the feeling goes away. It took months for my ex but eventually the anger turned into a kind of pity. There are many ways to forgive and that for me is the answer.
How do you pray? This is what I do but there is no right or wrong way to pray. I just ask God to give everything good to the person, place, or thing I resent. I do it once a day until the resentement is gone. It has never failed me yet.
I caution **overlyverbose **that this is not necessarily the case. Anger problems don’t NECESSARILY spring out of any particular deep-seated hatred or past trauma–mine didn’t. I have a great relationship with my parents, and generally I’m a very happy person; however, there’s a little voice deep inside my head that insists the best way to get results is to bellow and smash things. I often don’t even need to be provoked for that voice to speak up, if I’m even moderately stressed out I will have the (apparently more common than one would think) experience of holding a glass and having to consciously decide NOT to let my subconscious hurl it at a wall for the sheer gratuitous pleasure of cutting loose.
I suppose this is also a caution to **Perciful **in a way, since her line of questioning isn’t going to find everyone with a temper or an anger issue.
I am willing to bet that most people whom anger management therapy helps out will be people who are in my shoes who recognize it’s a problem. People who are lashing out due to actual past issues may well need a more generalized approach to dealing with their anger.
Again in response to Perciful: as a former very devoted Catholic, prayer never helped this one bit. I can’t say as I’ve ever known God to be able to do much for people with behavioral issues, at least not without an accompanying course of therapy.
My husband is an atheist, so I don’t think that prayer would work. I can see forgiveness being a somewhat important part of a healthy mentality in general, though.
One thing that I was thinking about was an anger management class I was required to take in high school. It wasn’t me specifically - everyone in our high school was required to attend an anger management workshop. Perhaps they were trying to help us manage our hormones, but it did help me look at anger in a different way. The teacher told us that, no matter how pissed we were or why we were mad, acting angry was a choice, even if it was just a split-second decision and that, like Zeriel commented, you needed to first be aware of that inclination to just let loose, then make the choice about whether or not you were going to actually do it or back off mentally and therefore physically. Basically, the teacher told us that we were 100% responsible for how we reacted to others, including people who made us mad.
What further complicates this is that I can’t pretend that I’ve never given into the temptation to throw things. After a particularly bad weekend with our son last year, I put him in time out. He had been screaming and whining for a day and a half, then managed to hit and kick me, which was absolutely the last straw. So I sat him down and went into the bedroom and closed the door, then knowingly indulged in a fit of throwing laundry around the room while swearing. I felt incredibly stupid afterward, though certainly not as guilty as I would’ve felt had I done such a thing in front of our son. Maybe I should have felt worse. Maybe my husband sees the thing with the ball as the same thing.
Anyway, I have an inkling (though probably not more than that) of what he’s going through, but maybe I should just back off and tell him to go on a walk when an interaction between him and my son gets heated. Urgh. The more I think about it, the more complicated this gets. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though.
Thanks for being a sounding board and for the advice, everyone.
I don’t have a lot of experience in this area, so I don’t want to give advice that is theoretical rather than experiential, but a thought occurs - when he is dealing with his son in a positive way, do you give him feedback on that? It can be easy to forget to praise the good behaviours sometimes.
I’m sorry if this is a hijack, but that last sentence is the biggest load of bullhonkey I’ve read in this thread. You can’t love ANYONE?!?! Ferreals? Bah. And shame on you for punishing, in a sense, people whose only crime was to be born to bad people. Giving birth doesn’t magically make a person decent.
</possible hijack> Overly, I didn’t see this addressed specifically in this thread, and it’s so simplistic that I might be out of line even asking this, but … have you talked with your husband about how he’s repeating the behaviors of this own father? The cycle of abuse continuing, and so forth? I mean, specifically in those exact words? Maybe thinking about his son being all grown up with a family of his own feeling towards your husband how your husband feels about his own father might put things in perspective for him. I dunno.
This is just a thought … might parenting classes be more effective? Could you take them together (even if you feel you don’t need them)? You might present it to your husband as a chance to learn more about how to manage your son’s behavior most effectively, so that it doesn’t get to the point of escalation. Especially if he did not have a good father himself - it’s hard to break the cycle unless you’re very, very intentional about it.
I’ve been in the situation, I’ll take a crack at it. My father is Indian, mother white (as you probably remember overly) and he also had stern discipline as a child, which involved hitting and stern lectures, which (I feel) have no place in an American household. I was the first child, and a girl, so he was never very stern with me; I was a daddy’s girl for awhile, I suspect he never demanded a lot of me because I was a girl, and I was more parented by my mother than him.
My younger brother, though, was an angel with my mom and a hellion with my dad - refusing to comply with his orders (your husband issues orders too) and occasional assaults. My little brother rebelled badly, and there was never any middle ground - each parent parented him differently, he had no clear boundaries, and he tuned my father out completely. You say overlyson has clear boundaries, but he really doesn’t, because they differ by parent. The years went by and he never had a good father figure and always was acting out. Their relationship took a toll on my mom, my youngest brother, and myself. I’m glad you want to break the cycle early, because as time goes on, it’s just too hard to, and the consequences keep building up, not only for your son, but will for your daughter.
At 16, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a party my little brother threw at my parents’ lake home; he was sent to a boot camp (not like on Jerry Springer, one run by psychologists). His pot smoking and abysmal grades were a direct result of his hatred of our father. I’m happy to say that he’s improved drastically, he graduated high school with a B average and is going into the Navy Seals soon, but his relationship with my father is still poor. My dad has softened over the years to be an okay father to our youngest brother. I do wonder if years ago parenting classes would have helped him much more. Academics are still #1 to my dad, but he now recognizes things like physical health, emotional well being, and having fun are part of life as well.
I really really sympathize with you, because my mom was the one who worked full time and always did more around the house than he did. He’s become better about it, but it’ll never be 50/50. I can attest that I respect and love my mother much more than my father, so while it may feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders, know that you kids know what you’re doing and love you all the more for it.
I wish you luck, but I don’t think this is an anger management battle so much as a cultural expectations one. Other people have described feeling angry and a loss of control; the problem I see is that your husband sets unreasonable and out-of-touch expectations, especially in an American home. I hope you guys go to parenting classes/a child psychologist together, because it’s about him fundamentally changing, but I think it’s also about you both presenting a united front. The united front thing is hard for any couple, but especially hard when they come with two completely different experiences to the table. In the meantime, at home, you guys could try playing board games that are secretly educational, like Memory. It would bring father and son together, while you could monitor the situation so that they’re both behaving well. I know we have some good family times (often it’s hard to have real family time organically) around a game board.
Feel free to PM me with more details or questions.
I think this is a good point. I’ve talked with my husband a few times about what he expects from our son vs. what he expects from our daughter, and they’re both certainly different. He expects far more focus and more academic excellence right now, while he has stated that he doesn’t expect that from our daughter. This sounds a lot like the families we visited when we were in India. The boys were spoiled rotten until a certain age when the bandaid was ripped off and they had to perform immediately, whereas the girls…well, many of the younger girls have far more academic standards applied now, but there’s still a vast difference in how they’re treated and what’s expected of them.
And, much as I hate to say it, you might be right about consistency. When I first saw that comment, it made me mad. No parent wants to be told by anyone else that they’re not consistent. But then I thought of all the times I’d told my son, “Hey, let’s take your shoes off now and put on your nightclothes,” and my son responded with, “May I keep them on for a few more minutes? Please?” And I responded with, “You asked nicely, so sure. I’ll set the timer, then it’s shoes off and nightclothes on.” I’d keep up my end, and he’d keep up his end, and we’d rock along pretty happily for the most part. My husband’s response would most likely be, “No. Take the shoes off now and don’t argue with me.” Then the whole thing immediately turned into a power struggle. “No!” Then my husband would pick him up, yank his shoes off and put him in time out. So, yeah, I guess the rules are different, even if the end results are the same. (That doesn’t mean I have to like hearing it. )
So, yeah, maybe a parenting class in combination with some kind of counseling would be good. From reading this thread, anger is starting to sound more like a symptom than a cause (though I think everyone could benefit with at least some help managing anger).
Sometimes a time out to let it out is what you need if it’s infrequent–having the ability to unleash the anger in a (if not productive) harmless way is a great safety valve once the general anger level is low enough that it’s not an every day thing.
I have a punching bag, and I have “being a murderous pirate in EVE Online” that both serve to give me a way to unleash in a socially acceptable manner. If it’s a once a week or once a month thing, and it’s not a deep-seated thing, this could help. On the other hand, I’ve know people with anger issues (usually the ones with deeper issues or ones that feed the anger instead of just having reaction issues) for whom those sort of things just made it worse. Your mileage may vary, consult your therapist.
There’s a lot of different manifestations: There’s “I have angry responses to normal things because anger is something I’m predisposed to”, which I have. And there’s “I have something inside me that makes my base anger level higher and higher even with no outside problems, so I snap more readily”. And there’s “Certain situations make me angrier than they would make the average person due to my prejudices, traumas, or belief structures”. Finding out the causes will help determine the best courses of action.
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