This morning on National Public Radio I heard a great article about children’s tantrums. The article featured the sounds of a little girl having a variety of tantrums with her parents’ voices in the background. These weren’t just your ordinary tantrums – if there is such a thing! Any of us who have ever had children probably remember the sounds and the experience. Children wield way more power than we’d like to admit, particularly if we are in public with that child when the tantrum begins. There is nothing that blares “you are a terrible parent” more than when your young child begins to let loose with blood curdling screams while you stand by knowing that no matter what you say or do it simply has to run its course. But I digress…
Part of what I found so interesting about the article this morning on NPR (once I got past the flashbacks!), was that a group of researches studied tantrums by having the parents put a “onesie” on a child with a hidden microphone sewn into it. By doing that, they were able to listen to the sounds from the minute the tantrum began until it finished. What they discovered in the graph of the sounds is that they could hear both anger and sadness present in the tantrum. Most parents who are experiencing the tantrum only hear the anger and they tend to meet the emotion by feeling and expressing anger back toward the child, which serves to deepen the sadness.
As is so often the case, we have a great deal to learn from children. Most professionals who study and treat emotions or emotional disorders will tell you that anger is not a primary emotion, but a secondary emotion. What does that mean? Anger is not the first emotion you feel, but it is often the emotion we most readily or unconsciously show or display. In the case of a toddler or young child, they feel sadness when a parent says they can’t have the cookies they have just seen in the grocery store. Instead of calmly expressing that sadness, they express it in the form of a tantrum. Remember, though, they are so young they do not even have a full vocabulary yet! In the case of adults, when someone says something to hurt your feelings, often what you will display and then feel is anger toward that person. The other person then can’t imagine why you are angry with them and their feelings get hurt. They then display the same kind of anger back to you and so on. It doesn’t take much to figure out how many problems in our families, our communities, our nation and our world stem from the inability to identify and express what it is we are really feeling.
Last week I found myself in a situation where I was steaming mad. If I had been somewhere other than at work, I think I would have felt better if I could have thrown something. Instead, I did the usual things like raise my voice, stomp around, walk in circles, and get nothing done. I sent an email that did not convey my direct anger (fortunately) but was very strong in tone and could have done some damage if I was not naturally a person who tries to make peace. What I figured out in the midst of my mini-tantrum (yes, let’s call it what it was) was that I was feeling sick (I had been in bed 3 days that week), exhausted and fearful about the coming months. There is a huge difference between feeling those 3 things and feeling angry. Our default button seems to be anger and so often we don’t even try to figure out what our primary emotion is or has been. Imagine how different it would be to be on the receiving end of someone feeling fear than it is to be on the receiving end of someone feeling anger. It’s vastly different!
I work primarily with volunteers. It does not serve me or them to be angry with them. My challenge is to stop when I am acting or sounding or feeling angry and take some time to identify what my primary emotion is at the time. Once I identify it, I can express it and the other person’s experience of me in that moment will change drastically. Someone called me in the midst of mini-tantrum last week and I began to bluster and the person who called was very calm and asked me a couple of really good questions and then really listened to me. It wasn’t long at all before tears came to my eyes and I felt the fear of overwork washing over me. In just a couple of minutes I went from steaming mad (or so I thought) to feeling exhausted and vulnerable and fearful.
When a parent with a child in the midst of a tantrum can hear the sadness, it changes how the tantrum is experienced by both of them. If, as adults, we can hear the underlying emotions when someone is displaying anger toward us, our experience of that person and their experience of us will be vastly different. I wonder what would happen if we applied this same principal to countries? Instead of using anger as a justification for retaliation and war, what if we had stuck with the emotions of hurt and devastation and grief following September 11th? They were, after all, our primary emotions. Maybe the way to peace in our world, which we consider during this season of Advent, is the way of identifying and living from our primary rather than our secondary emotions.