Unreasonable Anger
Anger Behind the Picture-Perfect, Pt. 2
This is part 2 of a 3-part series on anger in Plain communities. Find the first article here.
When I first began thinking about anger and how it manifests, I had a burning question in my mind: “What is going on when someone explodes over something insignificant, and this happens with regularity and without repentance?” Which is to say, I was trying to figure out my dad, who had enough of a pattern of anger to keep me on the edge of my seat as a child. Whenever he relaxed and became genial and lighthearted, I always felt a question, a hesitation in the quickness of my smile: Are things okay? Can I relax? Ahh, yes, I think, I think I can.
In considering those memories, I wondered: How do you get to the point where you freely treat your family with contempt, where they expect anger instead of kindness from you? How, why do you get there?
A couple weeks ago, I had the chance to ask these questions of Coach Joi. She works as the program director at Center for Peace, coaching those who abuse along with their partners. In speaking about abusive anger, she pinpoints the beliefs motivating that emotion and its destructive outcomes:
Most [men who abuse] have wrong or incorrect beliefs, what we might call entitlement. But I say they exploit . . . their emotional energy and use it in really unkind, really hurtful ways, really abusive, sometimes torturous ways with whatever victim they target. . . . That permission—what I call a permission-giving belief—they need to have that permission removed. Somehow we have to either eradicate it completely, or really boldly confront it: ‘You don’t have the right. That is not yours to have!’
In the minds of those who harm their families with regularity, without repentance or change, it is their right to inflict hurt on the ones who defy them (although they may not acknowledge it as hurt). It is their right to control. It is their right to crush with their words and their fists. It is their right to deny empathy, protection, or agency to another human being. These are the beliefs about “what you are allowed to be angry about and then the behavior that you give your body permission to do,” Coach Joi says. Furthermore, men who abuse believe that “something is happening to [them]. They don’t see themselves as cause, they see themselves as effect.” This is the notorious victim mindset.
It’s important to note that this type of anger is not a matter of someone lacking the ability to control themselves. Instead, someone who gives themselves permission over and over again to harm others with their anger creates an instinctive response in themselves. “What I say is that we create a neural pathway that’s deeply woven into our response bases. And so it’s not kneejerk, because we can control it, but we don’t think about controlling it. . . . It becomes less conscious. Not less responsible, less conscious. [A husband might say] ‘She makes me do that! You make me so mad! I lose control!’ No, you’ve just given yourself permission for so long.”
I think the problem of abuse is particularly exacerbated in conservative Mennonite and Amish communities (and other religious groups) because of implicit views of women and children as inferior, and the inability to sort out what leading as a servant actually means. If you believe that men have some kind of special leadership role in the church and home—and most Anabaptists do—is it absolutely vital to be able to identify coercion and control, manipulation and intimidation, and repudiate those behaviors (and the attitude of superiority behind them) as counter to Christ’s call to love and serve one another. It is vital to the health of your community to “stand in the gap” for victims, offering them ongoing support and protecting them from their abusers.[1] It is also vital to become educated about abuse and reach out to other groups of people (i.e., law enforcement, therapists, counselors, domestic abuse agencies) for assistance in dealing with abuse.
Most of the time, none of the above happens in Mennonite churches. I suspect that’s because if those things happened, many people would feel their sense of control being threatened.
My father was angry. Many times, I believe he was angry because he sensed he was losing control. And what was he gradually losing control over? The beliefs, actions, and choices of his children. The unquestioning cooperation of his wife. The high ideals of a particular way of life that he thought was God’s will. He was not significantly challenged in his beliefs until past midlife. Sometimes I wonder if the pastors and leaders who were influential in his life in earlier years had both observed and confronted his “permission-giving” beliefs, and prioritized safety for his family, what would have been his response before years of pride and anger had drummed a well-worn pathway in his heart?
For many Mennonite and Amish parents, anger feels like the easiest tool to reach for, the key to keeping the “peace” (the tight control) in the home. Even those who might not be as naturally inclined to losing their temper can be pushed in that direction by the expectation of their communities to look a certain way, behave a certain way. God forbid your kids are the ones having meltdowns in the church sanctuary! High control environments are most easily reinforced through anger, which can also mask fear—What if my wife and kids don’t toe the line? What will people think of me?
Lizzie Hershberger, author of the memoir Behind Blue Curtains, notes: “One [way] to know how controlled and how much discipline Amish children get is you watch them when they’re out in public. When you see [them] out in public, Amish kids are always extremely well-behaved. . . Those children and those women are obedient in public because of everything that has happened at home already. And I’m talking about . . . before they even get to walking, kids are beaten. . . . Some people are much harsher than other people, but I’ve seen all kinds of objects used on kids.” [2]
So why lower your voice, why refrain from that angry smack, those many smacks, why take a deep breath before you approach your child, if it is the raised voice, the raging nervous system, the slicing, contemptuous words, the physical stinging and smarting contact, that teaches your child to fear and thus, to obey at all costs? So then at church or at the house of your friends, when your children become rowdy or your wife says something you disapprove of, a few words with a certain ominous inflection—or maybe just a glance—is all it takes for the surface of the lake to glimmer calm and smooth again. Ah, here we are, world, the exemplary Christian family. Look how in control we are. Just look.
It takes a brave, resolved heart, and many, many moments of conscious decision, to turn away from this system of fear and control and seek to win your child’s heart through love and connection. It takes resolve to turn away from forming your family into puppets and engage the difficult work of forming actual relationships. It takes resolve to discipline [teach] your child, not with a spirit of anger, but one of love, gentleness, kindness, patience, and self-control. Oh, how much self-control we need!
And self-control, especially in parenting, is difficult to learn when you have no template for what loving discipline might look like. Your reflex is to parent how you were parented. As a child, what you see is what you learn. Those lessons bear fruit in your adulthood, most abundantly when you have your own children.[3]
I remember clearly one of the moments when I realized that my father’s unreasonable anger lived on in me. My son was close to 2 years old, and one summer night, he decided to boycott his dinner. Without the parenting experience to realize what a typical action this was for a toddler, after twenty minutes of coaxing, I brought out the deal breaker sentence: “If you don’t eat your supper, we are not going to the soccer field tonight!”
Twenty more minutes passed, in which I realized how badly I wanted to bike to the soccer field that night, and it began to dawn on me that this child was not, absolutely not going to eat his supper. And I really, really wanted to win this battle—changing my mind would feel like defeat.
Now upset at having to sit at the table for nearly an hour, my son was wailing. My husband took him to the recliner to sit with him and calm him down. I sat down opposite them, anger and outrage seething inside of me. My husband was soothing Theo, telling him we loved him and we wanted the best for him. “Give me a hug,” he said. Theo opened his arms without a second’s thought. And in that moment, the devastating realization crashed into my chest: I do not want to hug him. I do not want to tell him I love him. I am too angry. I want to make him pay for this.
I was angry because a toddler had not conceded to my ultimatum, and because we were not going to the soccer field on a gorgeous summer’s night, because I had decided we were not going.
Yes, how ridiculous. But the moment was pivotal in understanding my tendency to become angry over ridiculous things (which don’t we all?), and even more importantly, that moment helped me acknowledge the temptation to feel justified in that anger and to withdraw my love from, or even harm, my child as a result. That’s what I experienced with my father, and it feels easiest, most natural, to do that with my own children.[4] Painful moment by painful moment, I am defusing that unreasonable anger, noticing it, examining it, questioning it, taking some space when I need to, screaming into pillows when I need to (a great game to play with toddlers!), getting outside and moving my body when I need to. These are all methods of expressing or releasing anger before it festers, before the sun goes down on it (Eph. 4:26).
This isn’t to say I have a perfect track record, though. When we do mess up as parents and yell or give consequences in anger, our kids need to witness our repair of those failures. “I’m sorry,” and “I shouldn’t have done/said that,” or two of the most powerful sentences you can say as a parent.[5] This past winter, when I asked a friend with four young children about her experience of anger, her reply seemed counterintuitive at first. She actually wants her children to witness her anger.
“I want my kids to know that I’m not perfect. And I want them to hear me apologize.”
I nodded slowly. What is better: to express our anger as we feel it, in as healthy and non-harmful a way as possible, or to press it down until we explode with rage? Apologies are often needed, whichever route we take, but there may be significantly less harm to our children if we do not fear expressing our anger, or fear their witness of it. This way, they absorb lessons on how to handle their own anger. They learn how to acknowledge their mistakes and take responsibility for their emotions and the effect they might have on others.
For some parents, especially those who have been raised in homes or churches with abuse present, or where all expression of anger was condemned, it might feel safest to squash their anger, ignore it, and deny it. However, labelling anger as bad and attempting to erase it from our lives will not have the saintly effect we might hope.
If we are uncomfortable with the expression of anger in any form, we may “stuff” our frustration, irritation, and growing rage until our bodies simply cannot bear it anymore: We either explode uncontrollably, or we may become depressed. Coach Joi notes, “[Anger] is just going to smolder until it ignites . . . if you keep that anger on a low boil, it’s always with you. Anger on a low boil, over time, is just going to create more harm, because if that’s your operating system, that’s dangerous. . . to everyone around you, but it’s dangerous to you as a human as well. Suppressing anger will [cause it] to come out sideways in other ways.”
Anger is one color in the rainbow of human emotion, a color, yes, that may slide from twilight blue to deadly black, but it is an emotion we are created with nevertheless. Fearing it does not help us express it wisely. If we do not give our feelings a space—an opportunity to be expressed—they will rend and burn and seethe and push until they do have a space of their own. Most often that forced space will be ugly, pressing its ways into our hearts and into the lives of our family members.
Although this thought runs counter to our stoic Mennonite expectations, what if our anger is an opportunity for growing closer to Christ? What if, when we pour out our rage to Him about our terrible day when the kids are whining nonstop and pushing every boundary and there’s not a wick of sunshine, we are given a chance to trust God anew with our lives and hearts? As we lean into and enquire of our anger as parents, the Spirit reveals to us where we may need repentance, where we may need to release control, where there may be fear or helplessness hiding behind our anger.
Hannah Greer writes this lovely prayer as part of Every Moment Holy Vol. 3, and it is a fitting conclusion to my thoughts here:
Father, give me the capacity I need
To respond lovingly to my children who cry out
To be picked up and held again and again.
Remind me of the blessed truth
That while I hold my little ones, you hold me.
Let me display to them what it looks like
To joyfully lay down one’s life for another.
Help me to show them that
While I will fail them at times,
You will never fail them,
And you will always hold us fast.
Amen.
Next post, pt. 3: Aquinas’s “unreasonable patience”; when we need anger to alert us to the reality of hurt and injustice; and what in the world do we do with all that hurt?
[1] This is something Rachael Denhollander speaks about in a Q&A session at the Haven of Mercy 2025 conference. I highly recommend visiting the website and signing up (for free) to watch those videos.
Her observations quoted are the reason I feel relief when seeing children actually behave like children in church and home settings, instead of the “living-statue” stillness I sometimes observe.
[3] A great podcast about retraining your reflexes:
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[4] It’s impossible to parse out how much of my struggles with anger as a parent are due to my own upbringing, and how much is simply a matter of sin nature and my nervous system stretching to accommodate the demands of parenthood. My childhood is certainly not an excuse to harm my own children. I think everyone struggles to control their unreasonable anger toward their children; it just might be a little more difficult if you grew up with an abusive parent.
[5] These words rapidly lose their power, though, when they are used in an insincere manner. Your kids will know the difference.
So, so good. Thank you ever so much for writing this. So helpful and powerful.
This was cathartic for me to read. I'm so glad you're writing about this. And it's so well-done, too.