Imagine you’re exhausted, you’ve spent ages persuading the toddler to leave the house and now you’re rushing round a shop to get dinner. Then the toddler sends a jar from the shelf crashing to the floor. Something in you snaps. You scream – at anyone who’ll listen – and feel a rage akin to road rage.
THIS is maternal rage. No longer anger but blind rage - the emotional surge that, unlike sadness, is energising, even exhilarating. Its seductive force gives us the illusion of power and invincibility.
So what’s going on physiologically in these moments of explosive rage?
Psychologist Dan Siegel calls it FLIPPING OUR LID:
*Anger is a normal defensive response – in evolutionary terms it’s our brains way of protecting us to keep us safe.
*We tend to feel anger in the ‘FIGHT’ part of our fight, flight, freeze response. We can feel anger in response to situations perceived as threatening. This threat could be a direct physical threat, but it could also be a threat to our self-esteem and dignity: being treated unfairly or unjustly, feeling put down, or thwarted in a desired goal.
*Threats like these generate a quick, catecholamine energy rush, lasting for minutes, readying the body for fight or flight (depending how our emotional brain appraises the threat).
*We ALSO experience an adrenocortical arousal surge – lasting for much longer, for hours and even DAYS. So yes – anger builds on anger.
* This hair-trigger condition explains why we flip our lid following “a sequence of provocations” (Zillman) – so that by the fourth or fifth aggravation, we erupt into an incendiary ball of rage in response to a lost shoe.
*In flipped lid mode, we’re beyond seeing logic. We’ve been hijacked by our emotional brain & our thinking brain’s gone offline.
*This means we can no longer be connected with ourselves or our children, even our moral reasoning’s out of whack – leading to us act in ways that are scary to others – including our kids.
Does this resonate? Next I’ll talk about what fuels maternal anger. Plus ways to douse the flames and soothe it.
Art by @conradroset
Key references:
Daniel Goleman (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ.
Dolf Zillman. Mental Control of Angry Aggression. In D. M. Wegner & J. W. Pennebaker (Eds.), Handbook of mental control (p. 370–392).