Welcome to the first article in our series on why you get so easily triggered by your kids. These will help you understand the 4 root causes of emotional dysregulation and how to heal them.
Struggling to manage your emotions around your kids can manifest in many ways. One common issue we see crop up with our clients is feeling so easily triggered by their children. This can cause them to shout at them more than they’d like.
This can occur daily if you constantly feel out of control, anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed.
This series will examine the 4 root causes of emotional dysregulation. It will help you understand why you’re struggling to manage difficult feelings and show you effective emotional regulation tools to help you change this.
Nervous System Regulation: How Stress Can Make You Feel Easily Triggered By Your Kids
One cause of feeling easily triggered by your child’s challenging behaviour is having a hyper-aroused sympathetic nervous system.
Our sympathetic nervous system is responsible for keeping us safe and alive. It controls the “fight-or-flight” response, scanning our environment for potential dangers. It sets off a series of physical, emotional and behavioural responses that make sure we do what we need to stay safe.
It was an effective system when we were hunter-gatherers and needed to react quickly to life-threatening situations such as a predator, rival tribe, or dangerous weather.
Now, we have different pressures, but our body reacts the same.
An outburst from our child, criticism from our manager, an overloaded to-do list, or an argument with our partner or a family member. These can all cause our nervous system to kick into action. Yet we don’t eliminate the tension or extra adrenaline by fighting our way to safety or fleeing the situation any more.
So, our body holds on to the stress and we go about our day poised for threat. As we live in a fast-paced world, where we’re often on the go from the moment we wake until the evening, stress builds up during the day. This can leave us feeling overwhelmed, on edge and reactive. We feel primed to react to situations rather than respond calmly or think rationally.
When we’re constantly switched on, multitasking all day, even small things can trigger us.
Here is an analogy that I often use in my teachings.
Imagine an empty cup – this signifies your emotional capacity. Whenever something stressful happens, it takes up a little space in your cup, leaving you with slightly less emotional space.
While your cup is empty or not too full, you can move through your day relatively easily. Small frustrations and problems can occur, but you have the emotional space to deal with them, problem-solve and support those around you.
However, your cup will inevitably fill up throughout the day.
Perhaps you didn’t sleep well, so a tired start to your day takes up a little space in your cup. Or maybe you run late for school and work. That stress takes up a little more space. You forget to do something important in the morning. More space is filled. You get home to a messy house and think you must add tidying to your already full to-do list. More space in your cup is filled and there’s much less emotional space to deal with life. But then your kids come home with their problems and demands and a difficult email pops up on your phone. And before you know it there’s hardly any emotional space left in your cup.
So when your child spills their drink across your cluttered kitchen table, refuses to get upstairs for bed or answers back. Guess what? Because your cup is full, you’ve no tolerance left and no space to deal with it. Before you know it you’re frustration spills out as snapping, shouting, or shaming even though this is the last thing you want to do
When your cup is full, you can’t pause before you react because there is no space to realise that or help yourself calm down. It’s hard to see things the way you do when you’re not feeling so stressed.
This is why many parents lose their cool in the moment, despite their best intentions. If your cup is too full, it’s almost impossible to find space to pause and calm down instead of reacting.
You know accidents happen, kids can’t always listen and their dysregulation can be hard when they take it out on you. And if your cup had been emptier, you may have been able to remember that before reacting. Your nervous system responded to each of the stressors you encountered throughout your day as if it were an actual, physical threat. Something that needed to be fought or run away from.
How To Support Your Nervous System
What’s the solution to supporting your nervous system? Ensuring your cup doesn’t get too full.
Make sure your cup doesn’t fill up too much, by paying attention to the things you do that tend to fill it up and actively doing what you need to empty it when you need to.
Exercising, talking, being in nature, breathwork, early nights, engaging in a relaxing hobby. Try any activity that helps you relax to ensure your cup doesn’t get too full.
Ultimately this will give you more emotional capacity to support your children how you want to when they exhibit challenging, yet normal, behaviour.
Influencing the space you have in your life, by creating a world around you that prioritises calm, ease, and a slower pace, will help you find the space to respond rather than react.
Your children learn from what they see. Tending to your nervous system may be one of the greatest lessons you teach them.
How Can We Help You Feel Less Easily Triggered By Your Kids
Regulating your nervous system can be difficult. It can be hard to slow down and relax when your nervous system is stressed or overwhelmed. Our Emotional Regulation Programme will help you get step-by-step guidance and the right support to prioritise yourself, feel calmer, and more relaxed, and cope with family life again. This will stop you from being easily triggered by your kids.
It is a wonderful, protected, and supportive space to help you explore stress and your relationship with your nervous system. If you feel overwhelmed or want to understand how to support your kids with their stress levels, get in touch for the next cohort of our 12-week online programme.
We support parents in transforming their emotional well-being through evidence-backed CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) and Compassion-Focused Therapy strategies. Through our weekly group support calls and easy-to-follow workshops, you too can lower your stress levels and make your life easier. You can email us at hello@consciousandcalm.com and we will be in touch directly.
If you’re interested in knowing how anxiety and overwhelm affect YOUR life and the best way to ease difficult feelings, we can help. Take our Anxiety questionnaire now to gain some insight. It’s free, easy, and quick to do, and it may change your life.
