Dr. Becky Kennedy

This is a really hard job because it involves having to learn something for myself and give something to my kids.

Step one.

Step two, of course, you're going to feel angry and overwhelmed.

Every human in the world feels all the feelings.

That's just part of what it means to be alive.

So many of the issues we have around something like feeling angry, which tends to come out as maybe we completely lose it at our kid about something so small, like, oh, chicken for dinner.

And it's like, exactly.

Parents will often say to me, well, what do I do to not scream at my kid in that moment?

To me, that's the equivalent of saying,

what do I do so my car doesn't fall off a cliff?

And what I'd say to that person is, why is your car always on a cliff?

That's the question.

What do you do when your car's on a cliff?

I don't know.

There's not that many great options, right?

But if you think about that metaphor, it's like saying, okay, well, how can I recognize I'm on a road to the cliff?

Because if I can

recognize it earlier, I can exit that road.

This is actually a big thing I talk about in our rage course called the road to reactivity.

We focus so much on the end point because we think we're not supposed to feel angry that we don't actually befriend our anger earlier and listen to it when it's at lower levels and can be much more easily managed.