Three Consequences of Having Had Very Angry Parents

We can feel deeply sympathetic to the grown-up children of formerly scary parents; they are, in general, the very loveliest sort of people. These adults once had parents who (though now frail or dead or calm in their retirement) were properly threatening. Understanding the long-term impact of parental anger helps to explain why such tenderness and sensitivity so often coexist with deep anxiety. Back in the old house, these parents were constantly losing their tempers, they ruined a lot of family holidays (there was that time in France…), they smashed things up (normally chairs or door frames) or ran sobbing from the kitchen table, leaving confusion and guilt, or suddenly turned on you (seemingly for no reason) and would say, in a voice that the former child will be able to remember all their life: ‘Why on earth did you do that, you little idiot?’

Sadly, the legacy of angry parents isn’t just a matter for sympathy (though it is very much that too). We can commiserate a lot (and we do) and yet, at a certain point, we may need to make an uncomfortable but necessary admission. The children of angry parents bring with them, at times, serious difficulties of their own. It might be important for everyone, especially their partners, to recognise some of the dangers and have the courage to take a few gentle mitigating steps.

Here are three of the legacies:

Difficulty Taking Responsibility

Firstly, angry parents breed children who (to put it directly, but with a lot of humanity too) aren’t very good at taking responsibility for what they have done. The logic for this pattern is evident. If the bar for truth telling feels like it has been set unfeasibly high, if the reward for being honest is to be intolerably humiliated and put at risk, is to set off a crisis every time, is to reduce a beloved adult to tears or screams, no wonder if small children – the very tiniest and most fragile of humans – often choose not to tell the facts as they actually are and are liable to say (and then even to think): ‘it wasn’t me’. It wasn’t me who broke the glass. It wasn’t me who took the chocolate buns. And then, later on in life, when the parents move away or die and stop being the direct focus, it wasn’t me who upset you or read a situation wrongly. The partner of the children of an angry parent might say: ‘I think it perhaps wasn’t quite fair what you said to me in the car, I’m annoyed…’ And rather than this now very grown-up child listening and responding: ‘I hear you, maybe I did wrong, perhaps I made a mistake’, their first, native and most entrenched impulse will be to panic and reply with speed and conviction: ‘What? Absolutely not, this wasn’t me, I had nothing to do with it, it’s not my responsibility it’s yours’. They will speak like this not from endemic nastiness or some kind of imaginative limitation but because it’s a response they once had to hone and put into effect in order to survive – and they haven’t let it go since. They had to be (in the early years) people who pushed away responsibility, even for things they did, because they stood in front of a judge who would – as it were – have sent them to be executed for admitting a grain of wrongdoing. It’s deeply understandable; deeply poignant – and very complicated.

The Impact of Parental Anger on Pleasing Others

There’s a second pattern that crops up in the children of angry parents: a tendency to be extremely ingratiating to the audience – to a fault. As little ones, these people learnt how to tame the wildest, angriest tigers. They therefore now know how to humour, cajole, smile, win over. They could win national competitions for charm; everyone remarks on how polite and lovely they are. The problem is what can happen – at times – to their need to express awkward feelings; like that they might be very cross with you, or don’t agree at all with something you said, or wish you’d shut up, or are annoyed about something you did five weeks ago. All this the normally very pleasant offspring of angry parents will tend not to do you the honour of mentioning, perhaps until it is too late. It might come in a sulk or a depression or a fury with a bedside drawer or a car tyre. The first you’ll realise that something is up is that they don’t want to have sex any more, or have gone off to the garden shed for a long time, or are packing up their things. How much kinder it would be if they could call you a fool cleanly, be exasperated for a time and move on. But no such freedom or burp was ever allowed in the olden days; survival depended on smiling, and now the smiles continue even when they mask important levels of disappointment and fear.

Fear of All Anger

Thirdly, and relatedly, the children of angry parents are likely to feel extremely sensitive about the expression of any kind of anger whatsoever. Having experienced the very worst kind of outbursts, they may have vowed inwardly never, ever to let the cancer of anger into their relationships. They may have zero tolerance for any kind of so-called bad behaviour or the slightest raised voice. One sympathises instinctively; peace is always preferable. But the danger is that this absolute ban on anything other than a quiet voice may block off the articulation of occasionally very important truths and sentiments. A burst of anger may – in truth – belong to a good life; the odd heated moment might be part of the emotional repertoire of otherwise gentle and kindly folk.

What one doesn’t want to do with the children of angry parents is make them angry by pointing any of this out in a tone that might feel cold or unsympathetic. One can love these people very much indeed (they might be oneself at times) – and still hope that, with a clearer understanding of the impact of parental anger, they could gradually learn to let out a bit more of their reality and trust that they could be forgiven and accepted (as they always should have been, from the time when they were tiny) for who they are, in all their goodness and frailty.