Anger and irritability

We’re fully into the festive season and it seems every other shop in the Glasgow high street has at least one poor parent at the end of their tether. Xmas brings with it a lot of expectations, a lot of pressures on our time and inevitably fraying tempers.

I’ve worked with very loving parents who found themselves blowing up at their own children for basically trivial things and then torturing themselves afterwards. “What kind of a mother would act like that?,” they say, “I’m a failure as a parent.” 

That sort of thinking is obviously unhelpful and we’d work on challenging that with evidence and fostering self-compassion.

What can also help is a metaphor I go back to a lot: the “leaky bucket”. If we think of our capacity to cope or manage irritation as a bucket, every irritant we encounter during a typical day is anger being added to the bucket and it gradually gets more and more full. 

There are holes at the bottom of the bucket so that the anger naturally slowly drains away, but as more and more is added to it faster than it drains away, it can reach the  top and overspill. When that happens we lose our temper. 

Importantly, we’re not necessarily angry at the thing we lose our tempers at. It just happened to be the very last teaspoon added to the almost full bucket that made things overflow. So potentially we find ourselves after a hard day snapping at our kids for virtually nothing and feeling terrible.

What I encourage clients to do when they find themselves reaching that point is take a step back from the moment, catch their breath, and give the anger they’re feeling a chance to drain away. It need only be a few seconds, but that allows you the opportunity to respond with a cooler head. 

Recognising that they’re not the monster they imagined and giving them a tool to manage anger and irritation can be a real game-changer for clients and I’ve seen some amazing success stories.

If you’d like to talk to me about problems with anger or irritability, get in touch through the online form or you can contact me directly at: mckellarCBT@gmail.com

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