Last week, I explored whether avoiding all anger at one’s children might be too much of a good thing. In essence, I argued that when children see us deal with our aggression, they learn to deal with theirs. Anger is most essentially a response to having one’s boundaries violated. When someone is angry at us, we get valuable feedback that we have crossed a line. In this way, we learn that we must adapt ourselves to other people’s boundaries. We become familiar with necessary limitation. Our own fiery feelings are tempered in the flames of another’s anger.

A child, therefore, who never or rarely experiences parental anger may be insufficiently aware that his actions have consequences – that he can affect other people. He may not be aware of limitation. Parental limits – often set in the context of parental anger – is how children first learn that they are not omnipotent. Anger is how we know we have stepped on another’s toes. In that sense, it is how we find each other – we see the person as an “other,” with her own subjectivity, feelings, moods, and needs. This is relieving somehow. It is, in the end, good to know we are not all-powerful, that there is some place that our influence stops, and that there are things larger than us in life. This loss of infantile grandiosity relieves us of the need to have all the answers and prepares us for genuine relatedness. Real relationships have joy and friction; love and hate. Deep in our bones, we know this.

A child who has not experienced the limitation of interpersonal anger is uninitiated. She is not ready to handle the dark energies that she may meet out in the world – or within herself. Some research is perhaps relevant by analogy. Psychologists have discovered that there is an inverse relationship between being exposed to some challenging behaviors as a child and anxiety later in life. In fact, parents who engage in “challenging behaviors”  -- for example, roughhousing, playful teasing, allowing a child to lose a game – are inuring their children against anxiety, according to recent research.

I have wondered whether exposing our children –within limits – to our difficult emotions such as anger might help them develop resilience and fearlessness about such fiery feelings. The tendency to stay away from difficult feelings, termed emotional avoidance, is a significant contributor to mental health problems. If our children see us get angry, express our feelings, and then recover and reconnect, taking responsibility for any rupture that may have occurred, we have modeled for them an appropriate relationship with anger. They have learned that anger – our own and that of those we love – can be survived. They may see that anger can be clarifying, perhaps even bringing us closer together. This will likely help children to feel less avoidant of angry or aggressive feelings as they grow, giving them greater access to their own emotions, and helping them to be more attuned to other people’s.

A child that has not faced the fiery furnace of emotion may be unprepared to deal with upsetting experiences, or the natural frictions that occur in relationships with others. Metal and glass work sometimes need to undergo annealing – a process of heating and then cooling in a controlled way in order to make a material softer, more workable, and less brittle. Experiencing difficult feelings such as anger at or from a loving and trusted parent can serve as a kind of emotional annealing, allowing the child to become more resilient.

The Grimm’s tale “Frau Trude” can provide a fairy tale example of a psychological situation in which a child has never been forced to yield to limits, perhaps as a result of not being sufficiently exposed to parental anger. Such a child has not been exposed to “emotional annealing,” and may be easily burned once she comes into contact with strong affective experiences.

Frau Trude

Once upon a time there was a small girl who was strong willed and forward, and whenever her parents said anything to her, she disobeyed them. How could anything go well with her?

One day she said to her parents: "I have heard so much about Frau Trude. Someday I want to go to her place. People say such amazing things are seen there, and such strange things happen there, that I have become very curious.

Her parents strictly forbade her, saying: "Frau Trude is a wicked woman who commits godless acts. If you go there, you will no longer be our child.

But the girl paid no attention to her parents and went to Frau Trude's place anyway.

When she arrived there, Frau Trude asked: "Why are you so pale?"

"Oh," she answered, trembling all over, "I saw something that frightened me."

"What did you see?"

"I saw a black man on your steps."

"That was a charcoal burner."

"Then I saw a green man."

"That was a huntsman."

"Then I saw a blood-red man."

"That was a butcher."

"Oh, Frau Trude, it frightened me when I looked through your window and could not see you, but instead saw the devil with a head of fire."

"Aha!" she said. "So you saw the witch properly outfitted. I have been waiting for you and wanting you for a long time. Light the way for me now!"

With that she turned to girl into a block of wood and threw it into the fire. When it was thoroughly aglow she sat down next to it, and warmed herself by it, saying: "It gives such a bright light!"

The child in this story has not managed to come to terms with limitation. No matter what limits her parents set, she oversteps them. She is unprepared to meet the devouring archetypal forces that exist both within ourselves as well as out in the world. These forces can be overwhelming and destructive when they are not properly mediated. “Good enough” parents help mediate such strong emotional experiences for children in part through the every day experience of rupture and repair. When we become irritable or upset with a loved one or friend, we may say or do something that is hurtful, that temporarily breaks the sense of connection and simpatico we have with the other person. We may, for example, raise our voice at our child. In response, our child feels angry, upset, or afraid. When the conflict is passed, we reconnect with our child through hugging, talking, playing, or just being silly together. These kinds of ordinary interactions help children integrate a sense that strong feelings are a normal and even healthy part of life.

Next week, I will expand on the metaphor of “emotional annealing” and how it can lead to resilience.

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This article originally published on PsychCentral

Burning with rage at our children is a nearly universal experience, and yet it is one that most moms feel great shame and remorse about. It is frightening to find ourselves capable of wrath and perhaps even violent impulses toward those whom we love so greatly. Could it be okay or possibly even important to feel fiery, hot anger toward our kids?

Jung’s concept of the archetype can be helpful in allowing us to come to terms with this dark side of ourselves. Jung posited that there are inborn patterns that precede experience, priming us to respond to certain experiences or images. He called these patterns archetypes, and always stressed that an encounter with archetypal energy will leave our conscious personality feeling dwarfed. According to Jung, the archetype of the Great Mother is one of the big ones – turning up eternally in art, myth, and dreams. Archetypes, importantly, always have two poles, a positive and a negative one, and one pole cannot exist without the other. When the positive aspect of the mother archetype gets constellated, the negative aspect is never very far away.

This makes a lot of sense in practical terms. When we become a mother, we fall deeply in love with our child. We feel protective, maternal, and nurturing. But it is precisely because we love our child so deeply that we can feel such depths of rage and frustration toward him or her. Then for a moment, we may embody the dark aspect of the archetype – the Negative Mother.

While most images of the archetype in Western culture show the positive and negative aspects split and personified by different mythological figures, other cultures have retained both poles of the archetype in one image. In Hindu mythology, Kali is both the giver and taker of life, she who gives birth to new life, but is also capable of devouring her offspring.

We all have both potentials within us, and it can be frightening and confusing to get in touch with our potential for rage and darkness. Verbal abuse can be very damaging, as our children are likely to take in the negative things we say to them, and those thoughts may become part of their self-concept. But is our anger always negative? I think not.

There are many possible benefits to our children experiencing us as capable of anger at times, and I aim to explore some of these in upcoming blog posts. To start, what might it look like if we never got angry with our child? Would that be a good thing?

When my daughter was four, I befriended Beth, who also had a four-year-old daughter named Mindi. Beth was a very thoughtful and intelligent person who herself had been subjected to much abusive treatment as a child by a raging, alcoholic father. She confided in me that she had felt very damaged by this, and had sworn when she became pregnant that she would never speak harshly to her child. She told me about the tremendous self-restraint she had cultivated in order to keep this promise to herself.

One day, my daughter and I were visiting Beth and Mindi at their home. While my daughter and Mindi were playing, Beth went upstairs for a moment. With her mother was out of sight, Mindi pushed my daughter, knocking her down. I witnessed the incident quite clearly. Mindi’s aggression was entirely unprovoked, as far as I could tell. My daughter began crying. “It’s not okay to push someone, Mindi,” I said, while tending to my daughter. At that moment, Beth returned. “Mindi doesn’t push,” she answered me, matter of factly. I was quite flummoxed and wasn’t sure what to say.

It was clear that Beth genuinely believed that her daughter was incapable of aggression. It was as if she had so effectively cut herself off from her own aggression that she could not imagine it to exist in her child. Anger had been so effectively banished from consciousness in this family that it was free to roam unchecked in the unconscious, behind mom’s back, as it were. It struck me that Mindi was not being helped by having her aggressiveness erased so completely. She never got to see her mother angry, and therefore never learned that anger can be normal and healthy, or that people can survive being angry at one another.

The incident with Beth and Mindi recalled for me a Grimm’s fairy tale about a “too good mother.” The tale is called “Sweet Porridge.”

There was a poor but good little girl who lived alone with her mother, and they no longer had anything to eat. So the child went into the forest, and there an aged woman met her who was aware of her sorrow, and presented her with a little pot, which when she said, "Cook, little pot, cook," would cook good, sweet porridge, and when she said, "Stop, little pot," it ceased to cook. The girl took the pot home to her mother, and now they were freed from their poverty and hunger, and ate sweet porridge as often as they chose. Once on a time when the girl had gone out, her mother said, "Cook, little pot, cook." And it did cook and she ate till she was satisfied, and then she wanted the pot to stop cooking, but did not know the word. So it went on cooking and the porridge rose over the edge, and still it cooked on until the kitchen and whole house were full, and then the next house, and then the whole street, just as if it wanted to satisfy the hunger of the whole world, and there was the greatest distress, but no one knew how to stop it. At last when only one single house remained, the child came home and just said, "Stop, little pot," and it stopped and gave up cooking, and whosoever wished to return to the town had to eat his way back.

This is a story of a mother who is “too much of a good thing.” It hints at how destructive and dangerous that can be. The mother in this story doesn’t know how to say “stop,” and as such the sweet porridge threatens the whole town. It is anger that helps us to find our “no,” that helps us put our foot down and put an end to that which doesn’t serve us or is destructive.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that the destructive action in the story involves a pot that is boiling over. Beth could not allow her own anger into her relationship with her daughter. Where did it go? Perhaps it boiled over in sweetness, filling the room with a sticky ooze that doesn’t leave room to breathe. Beth was unable to say “no” to Mindi’s inappropriate aggression, and therefore her daughter was not getting help in learning to contain these impulses. Some anger on Beth’s part would likely have helped Mindi to metabolize her own entirely normal hostility, which likely would have felt relieving to the child.

Soon after this incident, I found my own “no,” and stopped spending time with Beth and Mindi. Though I appreciated Beth’s intelligence and depth, I wasn’t willing let my daughter become a victim to the over-flowing sweet porridge that ruled the psychological dynamic in her home.

In next week’s blog, I’ll explore more about how anger and aggression can be a healthy and necessary part of our relationship with our children.

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This post was originally published on PsychCentral

Last week, I shared a fairy tale which explored a parent child relationship in which the parents are ashamed or embarrassed by their child. There is a similar tale that explores this – and darker themes.  A recently published book by Orna Dornath entitled Regretting Motherhood: A Study explores the difficult subject of mothers who regret having had children. You can read more about Dornath’s study in this short article.

Dornath is exploring maternal regret through the lens of sociology, and her work is an important contribution to a neglected subject. As a therapist, however, I am more interested in the experience of maternal regret from the point of view of the individual. What is it like to find that you regret being a mother? In my experience, mothers who have difficulty attaching to their children have often themselves experienced extreme stress or trauma.

One of the most unusual and oddly lyrical fairy tales in all of Grimms touches on this taboo subject of poor attachment between mother and child. The beginning of the story is of most interest to us. Text of the full story can be found here.

Hans-My-Hedgehog

Once upon a time there was a peasant who had money and land enough, but as rich as he was, there was still something missing from his happiness: He had no children with his wife. Often when he went to the city with the other peasants, they would mock him and ask him why he had no children. He finally became angry, and when he returned home, he said, “I will have a child, even if it is a hedgehog.”

Then his wife had a baby, and the top half was a hedgehog and the bottom half a boy. When she saw the baby, she was horrified and said, “Now see what you have wished upon us!”

The man said, “It cannot be helped. The boy must be baptized, but we cannot ask anyone to be his godfather.”

The woman said, “And the only name that we can give him is Hans-My-Hedgehog.”

When he was baptized, the pastor said, “Because of his quills he cannot be given an ordinary bed.” So they put a little straw behind the stove and laid him in it. And he could not drink from his mother, for he would have stuck her with his quills. He lay there behind the stove for eight years, and his father grew tired of him, and thought, “if only he would die.” But he did not die, but just lay there.

Now it happened that there was a fair in the city, and the peasant wanted to go. He asked his wife what he should bring her.

“A little meat, some bread rolls, and things for the household,” she said. Then he asked the servant girl, and she wanted a pair of slippers and some fancy stockings.

Finally, he also said, “Hans-My-Hedgehog, what would you like?”

“Father,” he said, “bring me some bagpipes.”

When the peasant returned home he gave his wife what he had brought for her, meat and bread rolls. Then he gave the servant girl the slippers and fancy stockings. And finally he went behind the stove and gave Hans-My-Hedgehog the bagpipes.

When Hans-My-Hedgehog had them, he said, “Father, go to the blacksmith’s and have my cock-rooster shod, then I will ride away and never again come back.” The father was happy to get rid of him, so he had his rooster shod, and when it was done, Hans-My-Hedgehog climbed on it and rode away. He took pigs and donkeys with him, to tend in the forest.

Although the tale eventually ends, happily, I find that it contains some of the most heartbreaking images of any fairy tale. A hedgehog child is an eloquent metaphor for a child who is, for whatever reason, unlovable.

Attachment Trouble

Wikipedia tells me that hedgehogs are spiny mammals. When threatened, they roll themselves into a tight ball, causing their spines to all point outwards. Certainly, there are children – and adults – who show similar psychological defenses, such as is the case for those with reactive attachment disorder. Because of profound early trauma, children with RAD may be difficult to comfort. They find it difficult to attach to a caregiver, or receive love.

Imagine trying to nurse or cuddle a hedgehog!

Temperamental Fit

The image of child as hedgehog could also be an apt analogy for a poor temperamental fit between mother and baby. Researchers have noted that a baby’s temperament has a significant effect on the relationship between mother and child. Babies with difficult temperament may be hard to soothe, making parenting them more challenging and less rewarding. Some of that research can be seen here.  It is instruction to compare and contrast the tale of  The Little Singing Frog that we looked at last weekwith Hans-My-Hedgehog. Both animal offspring are redeemed in the end by a royal marriage and transformation to human form. The little frog’s redemption, loved as she is by her parents, is much less complicated and difficult than that of poor lonely Hans, who lives many years alone in the forest. This can indeed be the psychological experience of those whose parents were, for whatever reason, unable to love them.

The fairy tale is relatively silent on the subject of Hans’ mother and father. They want him dead. They want never to see him again. At the end of the tale, Hans finally reconciles with his father, who rejoices to learn of his son’s good fortune. By this time, the mother is not in the story at all.

I suspect that hers is a particularly difficult story to tell.

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