CaronMargareteElena* and I are at a local soccer match; she’s a soccer mum like me. Only she’s not a huge fan of the sport and attends just to be seen to support her stepson and her husband, the assistant coach, when she’d rather be literally anywhere else. She looks tired; actually, she looks completely exhausted. Fortunately, her toddler is asleep in the pram.
She takes a deep breath. I can feel the tension radiating from her body. “Caz,” she says. “I just can’t…” Her voice trails off. The coach in me allows the silence to fill the air between us. I can hear it in her voice that she needs to vent to someone who gets it, who gets her.
“You know, I spent all morning cleaning the kitchen, then prepared everyone breakfast. No one thanked me. No one saw the cleaning that I did from their midnight snacking last night.” There are five of them: her husband and four kids that range from 1.5 to 15, three of whom are from a previous marriage.
She continues, “Not one of them said a simple thank you; not one of them put their dishes in the sink. So, of course, I do what I always do. I start yelling and nagging them to clean up after themselves. But do they?” She admits, “One does, but begrudgingly, you know, like it’s a goddamn punishment to just put your plate in the fricken dishwasher.”
“But him,” she says, pointing to her husband on the field’s edge out of earshot, “he just ignores me watching some football game on TV with that son,” pointing to the supporting striker.
Elena is angry. She’s frustrated. But, mostly, Elena is hurting. Elena isn’t seen. She is feeling used and ignored. She doesn’t feel valued for all that she does tirelessly for her large, chaotic family that she clearly deeply loves and simultaneously cannot stand the sight of sometimes.
Elena is perfectly justified in feeling this way. Elena thinks that she needs to yell and scream to get things done and to get the help she desperately needs. What Elena doesn’t realise, though, is that the anger she expresses and the nagging she persists with in the aim of being seen, heard, and valued is having the opposite effect on her desired outcome.
The Real Effect of Anger
Think about the last time someone yelled at you to do something. Did you respond proactively and do what was asked? Did you shut down and do nothing? Did you fight back? Likely one of the latter two options, right? And this is because anger doesn’t get results. No matter how angry or frustrated, hurt, or devalued we feel, expressing ourselves with anger will not result in people wanting to listen to you or wanting to help you.
Anger is an emotional, neurological mechanism we use when something is out of our control. It is a response to the fear that arises when we do not have control over a situation or set of circumstances. It is usually triggered when our boundaries haven’t been observed, respected, or upheld. whether justifiably or not.
Let’s look at the science behind anger…
Anger and the Mechanism of Control
Anger is fundamentally linked to a sense of individual control and certainty (Lerner & Keltner, 2001). While fear is associated with low situational control and uncertainty, anger arises when a person perceives they have the power or agency to change a situation (Lerner & Keltner, 2001; She et al., 2017). This “control dimension” distinguishes anger from other negative emotions; it is often a risk-seeking response aimed at regaining mastery over an environment that has become unpredictable or uncontrollable (Lerner & Keltner, 2001).
The Relationship Between Anger and Fear
Research suggests a significant neurological link where fear promotes anger. Anger can be viewed as an external orientation of the same high-arousal negative aversion as fear (Zhan et al., 2018). When a threat is perceived as something that can be confronted or controlled, the brain is likely to unconsciously transition from a fear response to a reactive, aggressive response (Blair, 2011).
Boundaries and Social Triggers
Anger often serves a functional role in psychological boundary setting (Hirji, 2022). It acts as a protest against perceived mistreatment or violations of one’s expectations (Blair, 2011; Hirji, 2022).
- Frustration-Aggression: Anger is triggered when a reinforcement contingency is broken. Essentially, when we expect a specific outcome, like respect, a reward, or a boundary, and do not receive it (Blair, 2011).
- Social Violation: In social contexts, anger is the primary response when someone frustrates or prevents another’s goals or fails to respect their needs, acting as a demand for change or accountability (Blair, 2011; Hirji, 2022).
Neurological Loss of Control
The prefrontal cortex, specifically the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortex, acts as the brakes for emotional impulses generated in the limbic system (Siever, 2008). When these regulatory regions of the brain are overwhelmed by stress or intense threat, the amygdala becomes hyper-responsive, leading to the hot, unplanned outbursts described as reactive aggression (Blair, 2011; Siever, 2008).
Anger and Communication Effectiveness
While anger serves as an internal signal that a boundary has been violated, it is often an ineffective tool for external resolution because of the threat-rigidity response it triggers in others (Staw et al., 1981). From a neurobiological standpoint, expressing intense anger shifts the listener’s brain from a state of social engagement to a state of survival (Sapolsky, 2017).
When a listener feels attacked, their prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for empathy, logic, and nuanced listening, undergoes a deactivation to prioritise self-defence (Siever, 2008). Consequently, the angry individual’s core message is lost; the listener focuses on the delivery (the threat) rather than the content (the need for respect or control). Instead of fostering the cooperation required to uphold a boundary, anger typically triggers a process to diffuse the physiological arousal in the recipient, leading to resentment or withdrawal and reinforcing the very lack of control the person was attempting to remedy (Gottman & Silver, 2015).
As we align the science to Elena’s situation, it’s easy to see how her anger has become a normal, natural, and understandable response to the lack of support and appreciation she receives from her husband and children, and we can see how she is not getting what she needs from the expression of her anger and frustration. They’re not listening or doing anything because they psychologically shift into threat-survival mode the second Elena starts yelling and nagging. Her husband and children are literally ignoring her, but not necessarily intentionally.
The Coach’s Analysis
Based purely on what I know, because in this instance, Elena is not a client but a fellow soccer mum, I can make a limited assessment here:
- Elena doesn’t feel heard, supported, or respected by her husband or stepchildren.
- Her husband is of Mediterranean culture and upbringing. From her descriptions, the culture is firmly fixed in traditional husband-and-wife roles in family management; that is, he has an expectation that Elena is responsible for all of the cooking, cleaning, and child care, and he is responsible for providing and protecting. This, she feels, has not been explicitly discussed, only assumed.
- Elena feels a lack of control over what she can ask of her stepchildren because they’re not her children. She has the belief that she is their other mother but not their mother and therefore not someone they need to listen to or even respect. From her perspective, her husband does nothing to counteract this belief or their behaviour.
- Elena doesn’t have a job or a business, which fulfils the requirement of the dutiful wife role her husband requires; however, because this is not her cultural norm or upbringing, she feels that she’s taken advantage of and used, which results in a build-up of resentment, frustration, and anger.
- Elena lacks the tools to communicate her needs, boundaries, rules, or requirements for the management of the home.
The Goal of Grounded Presence
At the beginning of each coaching session, I ask my clients what goal they have for the session that will enable them to easily and effortlessly understand or resolve the challenge they’re experiencing. In Elena’s instance, I imagine that she might describe several goals:
- Not to feel like she has to get angry or yell just to be supported, heard, and valued.
- To be respected by her husband and stepchildren.
- To learn how to communicate her needs and boundaries.
- To have a clear demarcation of roles and responsibilities with her husband in the management of their family.
When given options like this, I circle back on this list and ask clients to distill the goal down to just one defining goal that would act like a lead domino. That is, were the first domino in a row be knocked over, it would cause all the subsequent dominos to fall.
In my own words, the summary of Elena’s goal would be to experience grounded presence in the management of her home.
The Neuroscience of Grounded Presence
I liken the feeling of being grounded, present, and self-aware to the concept of allostasis, which the late American stress researcher, Bruce McEwen, expanded in neurological terms to describe how we actively maintain stability through life’s positive and negative experiences (McEwen & Stellar, 1993).
Allostasis is the active process by which the body responds to daily events and maintains stability, essentially achieving stability through change (McEwen, 2016).
In Gabor Maté’s book, co-written with his son, Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal (2022), paraphrased, “The term is a combination of the Greek words allo, for ‘variable,’ and stasis, for ‘standing’ and ‘stoppage’; combined, it is staying the same amid change.”
This is my goal for supporting my clients to achieve grounded presence. Irrespective of what is happening, I want them to be able to be grounded and present to the good, great, bad, and ugly of their experiences, and the resulting feelings, actions, and their reactions with the goal of always feeling like they have a sense of control.
Step 1. Learning to Surrender
Ideally, what Elena first needs to learn in achieving grounded presence is how to surrender to her circumstances. This does not mean give up or give in. It is an internal shift of what she allows to control her feelings.
I was first introduced to the sense of control that arises from surrendering with the birth of my firstborn. Still heavily pregnant, a doula-friend of mine told me that I would feel like I had gone from 100% independent to 150% dependent and that my only way through was to surrender to whatever presents itself with no expectations or assumptions for a specific outcome or result.
She couldn’t have been more accurate of my anger-inducing post-natal depression. Through that experience I learned how to ask and accept help, to not place stringent rules or expectations on what others do, and to allow other’s to do things in their own way. This was no small undertaking, I can assure you.
What was essential in this process was learning that to be in control of my emotions I needed to release the need to control external factors over which I had little or no control.
Step 2. Choose to be Flexible in Your Responses
Elena defaults to anger when she’s not in control or achieving what she needs, but this is not her only choice. As we’ve learned, anger causes others to react as though they’re threatened, so Elena needs to make different choices. She is responsible for her actions, that is, she knows her anger is a problem and hates how it makes her and her family feel, but she also needs to be responsible for her reactions to others’ actions, which includes when her husband and stepchildren are not doing what she needs, wants, expects, or requires.
According to Maté & Maté (2022), what Elena needs to implement is the neurological term known as Response Flexibility, which is the ability to choose how we address life’s inevitable ups and downs, its disappointments, triumphs, and challenges. “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response towards which we wish to throw our weight,” wrote Rollo May in The Courage to Create (May, 1975, p. 100). Elena needs to consciously choose a different response, which with coaching, she would learn.
Step 3. Complete the Structural Capacity Audit
Standard advice tells us to seek “work-life balance.” This is a flawed metric. Balance implies a static state on metric scales that sit perfectly even; however, life is dynamic. Most of my clients are leading a business or full-time work, managing a household, being a loving partner, raising children, and trying, if they have time, to maintain their own sense of self.
In order for Elena to know where the pressure points in her life are, we need clarity on what is overloading Elena’s capacity. Elena feels like it is all things that are out of balance, but realistically, it’s probably one or two areas that require stronger structural integrity.
To better understand my clients’ circumstances, I developed a diagnostic tool to locate capacity misalignment in my client’s professional and personal life. With this information, we’re able to narrow down to what areas of Elena’s capacity have a high or low loads that have either functional, strained or broken systems. When the load exceeds the system, structural failure is inevitable. This audit identifies exactly where the energy leaks are occurring so she can move from reactive survival to a calibrated state of grounded presence.
Step 4. Communicate her needs and boundaries
And here’s where it gets challenging because Elena needs to be able to set boundaries for her needs, wants, expectations, and requirements in a way that achieves the desired outcome of being supported, heard, and valued without further alienating her husband or stepchildren.
Were Elena a client, I would support her with specific tools, techniques, and resources that she could gradually learn and role-play practice with me before attempting to gradually implement, first with her husband and then, ideally with his support, their children.
Considerations in the Coaching Process
These steps are the ideal, but, in a real coaching journey there are several factors that would need to be considered here. Some might be:
- What if her husband doesn’t want to hear Elena or make the changes to his own behaviour that would better support her?
- What if in the course of our coaching we learn that she’s got underlying traumas and experiences that are the root cause of her anger that her family members’ behaviours are triggering?
- And, what if the stepchildren refuse to take on the feedback and make changes that their parents are wanting to instil in the family culture?
These and other factors are possible, and that is the beauty of the coaching experience. We go where the client takes us in alignment with what presents in the moment. As a coach, I do not have the answers, you do. I have tools, techniques, and resources to support the learning and change journey.
For example, in these instances, with Elena’s husband, we would seek to conduct my version of marriage counselling, which is not the traditional method of you both sitting in a room but a one-on-one approach that gives space and grace to each partner while communicating and mediating the desired outcome. For the second, we would use hypnotherapy and time line therapy®, and for the third, I would attempt family mediation in which I would act as a conduit between the parents and stepchildren.
Irrespective of the steps or the journey to get there, the goal is to go from being a mother who is angry and constant nagging to leading your family with a deep sense of grounded presence so you can be supported, heard, and feel valued for all that you do for your partner and children.
Until soon, blessed be,
*Not her real name; for story-telling ease, all my female characters are called Elena.
References
- Blair, R. J. R. (2011). Considering anger from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. WIREs Cognitive Science, 3(1), 65–74.
- Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The seven principles for making marriage work (2nd ed.). Harmony.
- Hirji, S. (2022). Outrage and the bounds of empathy. Philosophers’ Imprint, 22.
- Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2001). Fear, anger, and risk. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 146–159.
- Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture. Vermilion.
- McEwen, B. S. (2016). In pursuit of resilience: Stress, epigenetics, and brain plasticity. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1373(1), 56–64.
- McEwen, B. S., & Stellar, E. (1993). Stress and the individual: Mechanisms leading to disease. Archives of Internal Medicine, 153(18), 2093–2101.
- May, R. (1975). The courage to create. W. W. Norton & Company.
- Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Press.
- She, S., Eimontaite, I., Zhang, D., & Sun, Y. (2017). Fear, anger, and risk preference reversals: An experimental study on a Chinese sample. Frontiers in Psychology, 8.
- Siever, L. J. (2008). Neurobiology of aggression and violence. American Journal of Psychiatry, 165(4), 429–442.
- Staw, B. M., Sandelands, L. E., & Dutton, J. E. (1981). Threat rigidity effects in organizational behavior: A multilevel analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4), 501–524.
- Zhan, J., Ren, J., Sun, P., Fan, J., Liu, C., & Luo, J. (2018). The neural basis of fear promotes anger and sadness counteracts anger. Neural Plasticity, 2018, 1–13.
