Kyle McCray had a rocky adolescence. His parents’ story began with an unlikely romance: his mom, a college student, met his dad, a local firefighter. She had never imagined staying in a small college town, but after discovering she was pregnant, she sacrificed her dreams and gave the family a chance. It didn’t stick. When Kyle was eleven, his mom left, and their relationship diminished to occasional visits.
Kyle’s dad didn’t handle the divorce well. To the community, he was a hero fireman. But, at home, he was moody and emotionally unavailable. Kyle, in exceptional pain, had no one to talk to about his feelings and lacked healthy examples for working through complex emotions.
To externalize his pain, Kyle got in fights. Luckily, a perceptive coach noticed this trend and drafted Kyle into the local Hockey team, figuring he could express his aggression on the ice. Playing hockey, Kyle found a healthy physical outlet for his anger and learned about teamwork, trust, and adaptive ways to manage emotions.
Big feelings can seem overwhelming and explosive if they aren’t addressed constructively. Lacking a safe space and method to process emotions and healthy coping skills, people sometimes resort to harmful ways of externalizing their pain.
Here are tools for processing emotions rather than externalizing aggression.
Face the Underlying Feeling: Try conversation, traditional journaling, or journaling in apps like How We Feel. Also, connect with people who make you feel safe about your feelings, their causes, and how and where you experience emotions in your body.
Give Yourself a Healthy Emotional Release: Go for a run, play hockey, punch a heavy bag or a pillow, dance it out, or have a big cry. Try layering these emotional releases together if one isn’t enough.
Parents Can Model Desired Behaviors: Parents who notice these externalizing behaviors in their kids can teach by example by verbalizing when they are feeling emotionally flooded, what is causing these feelings, and the healthy emotional release(s) they choose to try.
Love Tracey Lange? Me too. Check out my post on The Role of the Family Hero and THE CONNELLY'S OF COUNTY DOWN by Tracey Lange.