F*ck Tha Police

Remember when NWA first spit out those words, and then there were riots at their concerts, and the FBI started threatening them? (Honestly, I only vaguely remember, but having recently watched Straight Outta Compton really helped…)

I’m not claiming that I know what it’s like to be a black male in the inner city in the 1990’s, but that anger, that rage behind those words, I think most of us can understand.
Sometimes, it’s just a little bit of rage, a little bit of :
•    Why are all of these people driving like idiots today?
•    Why am I the only one who does everything around here?
•    Why is my boss such a micro-manager?
•    Why can’t he do more dishes?

No one wants to yell at their kids.

But sometimes, we get to our full on rage point. We’ve let the anger build and build, perhaps letting the offending person or situation pass us by…the first time, maybe even the second time, until by the third time, we explode at those closest to us.
And then in our saner moments, when we’re calm, cool, and collected, we wonder how we could have lost it. And so we blame them: the child, the spouse, the coworker, the other driver, the other person, instead of looking inwards. We use other people’s behavior to justify our own.

Your anger is eating you alive.

So should we just keep it all in, instead? Learn how to smile and put on a happy face?  In a word, no. Suppressed anger can cause cancer. We need to express it somehow. But how?

I was struggling with this my entire life last week, and so I spoke with two different coaches (yes, coaches need coaches! I LOVE COACHING!) about my seven year old who keeps sneaking away to watch television or play on his Kindle, despite his screen limit times. It was a cycle of him sneaking, and then me getting angry with him, and then me questioning why he couldn’t understand that if he kept repeating the behavior, that I was going to get angry?

I was looking to my seven year old’s behavior to justify my (the adult’s) reactions.

What’s your dinosaur brain telling you?

It’s almost like we’re two people, the one who gets angry and explodes, and then the other part of us, the one that knows that we don’t want to be yelling. And really, as parenting coach Keyuri Joshi reminded me, that’s exactly what’s happening. Our limbic brain, that oldest part of our developmental brain, the flight of flight guy, is telling us to get angry, to fight, damn it.

And in those moments, when the T-Rex is roaring, it’s really hard to engage that pre-frontal cortex. It’s hard to think through those instinctive and subconscious responses. It’s hard to see past the reaction that’s coming up for us.

Your subconscious programming:

My awareness coach, Laina Orlando, reminded me that it wasn’t just about what I chose to do in the moment, though. I needed to go deeper and look into what was driving my behaviors. Why was I attempting to control Jack’s screen time in the first place? What did I think would happen to him if he just “watched TV all day”?

 If Jack watches TV all day, every day, then he’ll turn into a blob, an internet porn addict, a person who can’t function in the real world because he’s spending the entire day glued to a TV screen. He’ll never build Legos again, go outside and play, or engage his mind. He’ll become a seven year old Jabba the Hutt. (And by extension, I’ll be a shitty mom.)

But, as Laina reminded me, what if that’s his path? What if he was choosing to become a game writer and make millions of dollars from video games? (Or was just fulfilled and happy doing it, which is what we all really want for our kids.)
And I kept asking her,

“So what are you saying, Laina, that I should just let Jack watch TV all day?”

Her answer was that I needed to establish what my own programming was first. What had I learned as a child, what expectations had been set for me that I was subconsciously setting for my child? Why did I think it was so important for him to be anything other than what he wanted to be? Why do I think he needs to be successful on my terms, anyway?

Do you need to be successful in order to be loved?

So many of us were expected to be the smart ones, the ones who succeeded, the ones who did everything right, and if we did, then we’d fulfill our role in the family…then we’d be loved. (Oh, there’s that if, then programming right there!) We were explicitly or implicitly given these messages from our parents. But what kind of pressure does that put on us? And what happens when we are no longer the smart one? What happens when we no longer want to do what our parents expect?

We rebel against that kind of pressure. Which is exactly what Jack was doing.
Kind of a revelation, right? We are subconsciously sending the same messages to our children that were sent to us, and they are reacting in the same way that we did as teenagers.

How do we break that cycle?

We have to do the work on two levels, both conscious and subconscious. On a conscious level, I’m using an addendum to the Pause (you remember the Pause, right?) that Keyuri recommended. She suggested three deep breaths in those moments, but in order to prepare myself to use the breaths when I most need them, I have to practice them in calm moments. So I set my phone to alarm five times per day (and changed the ring to a very soothing guitar strum), and each time it goes off, I do the deep breaths, no matter what else is going on.

It’s been helping.

And then, I’ve been working through my subconscious programming. What did I believe I needed to do as a child in order to be loved? What do I still believe I need to be in order to be loved and accepted?

(You see where this is going for you, right?)

None of it’s easy. All of it’s hard work. But if we don’t want anger and violence in our houses, if we want to live in a world in which there are no more mass shootings, no more rebellious teens, no more hatred, and no more yelling, then we have to work on ourselves first.

My work as a coach focuses on both of these aspects of the self – the conscious and the subconscious- and that’s how my clients move forwards.