Ever take your anger out on some undeserving someone close to you? Then feel bad? It’s called displaced anger, and it is actually quite easy to find appropriate….even fun….methods of venting normal anger, frustration, and stress without yelling at our loved ones. You can clean the house with a vengeance, beat the pillows, sing along with some acid rock music, rip up old phone books, scream underwater or in the car with the windows rolled up. You’ll inevitably end up laughing, model appropriate venting to your kids, and spare your loved ones’ feelings.
A good rule in your home might be that there is no yelling unless the house is on fire! And there are certainly powerful ways to express your anger at your mate without yelling. While it feels powerful to vent and yell, must of us don’t want to be on the receiving end of that. We get defensive when we are yelled at, and real communication gets thwarted. Remember the old EF Hutton commercial? In the midst of a loud raucous party, a financial advisor began whispering a hot stock tip to someone. A hush fell over the entire room as it waited with baited breath. The ad’s tag line was “When we talk, people listen.” A low-key, impassioned voice commands listening.
Growing up, I had a friend’s whose mother who yelled at him all the time. He never heard her. He lived in fear of her and rebellion toward her. His father, a military officer, however, veritably hypnotized him by simply quietly saying: “Now, Stephen Allen Johnson…” in his quiet, reserved way. He hupped two, three, four!
We feel like we are heard when we yell, and you’d think it’d work that way, wouldn’t you? And volume does get attention; usually the negative kind. In reality, most of us completely shut down and hear nothing but the yeller’s tone of voice and anger. Further, it generally triggers deep feelings of previous experiences when we were yelled, reducing us to little children. The real truth is people can’t really hear you at all when you yell. Oh, they may jump up and perform, but they usually are nervous and make more errors than if motivated with gratitude and support. Fear/anger/yelling work in an emergency situation, but overused, can lead to hyper anxiety and underperformance. Someone great once said: “Fear is a great motivator, but a terrible master.”
Loud noises certainly get our attention (sirens, screams, alarms, etc.), but they trigger that primitive, fight-flight mechanism. While this is a necessary instinct for our survival, it can be a killer (pun intended) to real communication and intimacy.
So if your partner or teen starts to yell at you, simply say to them in a calm, low-key tone of voice: “Honey, I can’t hear you when you yell. When you talk, I’ll listen.”