Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
The Durable Dad podcast gives men the skills and tools they need to be rock solid for their family, their work and their community.
Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
106: Anger Isn’t the Problem
It’s not the outburst that matters—it’s what’s driving it.
Highlights:
• The text from Tommy’s mom that exposed how quickly frustration can surface
• Why anger is a part of you—not all of you
• How Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps men understand their reactions
• What anger is really after
• The link between frustration and how we parent
• What changes when you pause and get curious about your reaction
• Simple ways to quiet your “angry part” before it takes the wheel
Takeaways:
- Stop trying to suppress anger—start understanding it.
- You are not your anger.
- The calmer you are inside, the calmer your world feels outside.
Tommy references Dr. Richard Schwartz’s No Bad Parts and walks through how “parts work” reshaped his relationship with his mom, his wife, and himself.
If you want to understand your own anger and lead from calm, schedule a 50-minute strategy session at DurableDad.com. We’ll talk through where that part shows up and how to get back to steady ground.
Stop Losing Your Temper Road Map
This roadmap will teach you how to have more patience.
To give your kids more time and attention.
Anger isn't your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Learn how to manage it so it doesn't get the best of you.
https://www.tommygcoaching.com/roadmap
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, Tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community, and most importantly, your family. All right, what's up, episode 106? We're gonna dive right into it. I want to talk about frustration and anger today, the part of us that reacts really quickly when things don't go as planned, or when our kids don't listen, or when in my case, my mom doesn't act the way that I want her to. And I'm gonna start with a text message that I received five years ago. Tech said, Hey, tell Luna to have an awesome day today. Luna's my daughter. That's all the text said. Hey, tell Luna to have an awesome day today. And when I read that, there was frustration. I felt the tension in my chest, I felt the heat in my face. I did some journaling, and the thoughts that came out were really extreme thoughts about how my mom shouldn't be texting my daughter, those kinds of comments. She shouldn't put pressure on her to have a good day. Thoughts that I was not aware of, frustration, anger that seemed way too extreme for the situation. I mean, 30 other people could read that text message and say, Oh, that's a nice message for a grandma to send her granddaughter. But in me, there was anger. And I wanted to figure out what that was about because one, I wanted to have a good relationship with my mom. We've always had an awesome relationship. She has supported me, believed in me my whole life. She's funny. I was a mama's boy growing up. And this part of me that was angry was getting in the way of us having a solid relationship. Another reason why I wanted to figure out this angry part was because it was getting in the way of communicating well with Brenda. When it was time to discuss family holidays and how we were gonna make sure that we were getting our time in with all families, I would get defensive or I would shut down and not have a normal conversation. And I know that this anger part had something to do with it. That's what I wanted to figure out. And looking back, it's even more clear than it was at the time because I've coached so many men on the relationship between them and their mom and them and their wife. Something about that triad brings a lot of tension, and it's usually more internal tension than external. I mean, Brenda and my mom get along really, really well. Brenda handles conversations much more maturely than I do. So it's an internal tension, and that's what I wanted to figure out. It's not all of me that is feeling this frustration and anger and rage, it's a part of me. So I need to start to understand this part of me more. I brought it to the coach that I was working with and just told him that this had recently come up, and he pointed me in the direction of internal family systems. It's a therapeutic modality. It's also called parts work. And the gist of it is that we're made up of a bunch of different parts inside of us. Internal family systems meaning internal inside of you, not the family of your wife and your kids and all that. And these different parts all have different agendas. You can think of it as a part of me wants to yell at my kids for not listening, and another part understands that they're just kids being kids. When you feel pulled in multiple directions, when you have an inner monologue going back and forth in your head, those are different parts. I had a part of me that was really, really angry, and this is totally normal. Everyone has these different parts, and an anger part is one of them, and it's not a bad part. That was something for me to first understand because I was annoyed with myself that I was getting angry all the time. I was frustrated at myself that I was getting frustrated. In this modality, internal family systems, the guy who created it, his name's Richard Schwartz. He wrote a book called No Bad Parts because this anger that was there was in some way, shape, or form trying to serve me. But in reality, it was hurting my external relationships. So, what do you do when you want to manage your inner parts? You get to know them a little bit better. That's what I'm gonna talk about for the rest of this podcast. I'm just gonna give you a little guidance on the angry part of you, the frustrated part of you, how to start to get to know it. And the first thing is is understand that it's not bad. It's a part of you that is trying to help you. The first thing you do is you kind of hear it out. And by hear it out, I mean ask it, why are you so angry? And this is really good work to do with a coach or with a therapist, because you can voice it out loud and then the coach can reflect it to you. The other thing to do is journal about it. Why am I so angry? Like I did with my mom. The anger went off with what it wanted to do, wanted to text her back, all these different things. Why? Why are you so angry about this? And you start to understand it a little bit more. I'm not going to go into my own story because it's pretty specific, but you can ask these questions to any part of you that's angry in any circumstance. Your kids don't listen and you feel that anger and rage. You stop and you notice it and be like, okay, I'm feeling angry right now. Hey, anger, why are you so angry? Oh, because my kids aren't listening. Why is it so important to you that your kids listen? Well, they don't respect me. They need to understand how to follow rules so they can be successful in life. There's gonna be a story that this anger has to tell. And it sounds kind of weird, but you're actually having a conversation with this inner part of you. And that's what managing your inner world means. And when you do get to know your anger a little bit more, it quiets down, it doesn't need to shout anymore. And once that happens, once it settles down a little bit, you go to the next step and you ask it, what is it trying to protect? And usually it's trying to protect you from losing control, it's trying to protect you from failure or getting something wrong. I've taught on this podcast before, the guys that I work with know anger is a secondary emotion. There's usually some underlying emotion underneath it. And whether it's fear or embarrassment or guilt or shame or concern, that's what the anger is trying to protect. But we can't understand until we pause, slow down, ask the anger some questions. And when we do, when we quiet that inner anger, the outside world feels quieter. When we're able to create a calmness inside of us, the world feels a little calmer. We can handle chaos. There's more space for us to respond the way that we want to. For me, my anger was perceiving my mom's actions and conversations with Brenda as them not being happy. That's what my anger was trying to protect, trying to protect other people's emotions. I wanted everyone to be happy, I wanted things to be easy. Externally, everything was fine, but my anger radar was picking up little subtleties here and there and didn't like it. It was trying to control my mom's actions and Brenda and my mom's emotions. If you listen to this podcast, you know you can't keep other people happy, you can't manage other people's emotions. It's a no-win game. But that's what anger tries to do. It tries to control things in our external world that are not in our control. What I want you guys to take from this is that we are made up of different parts. So when a part of you gets angry at your kids, gets angry at your wife, gets angry at a coworker, don't be ashamed of that part. It's just a part of you, it's not all of you. And that part is trying to help. So what you do with it is you pause and you get to know it a little bit. You breathe, you ask it some questions. And over the course of the last few years doing this work, it has improved not just my relationships with my mom and Brenda, but all of my relationships. I'm more patient now. When I coach other men, I can understand where they're coming from and see their blind spots. Because when you get to know your anger and the reason that it's there, when it comes up, I still get triggered. You understand it more, and it doesn't take the steering wheel. You get to talk to it, put it to the side, and then come with calm, with peace. If you want to do this work, you can start by journaling. You can go grab the book No Bad Parts by Dr. Richard Schwartz, read that book. There's some awesome exercises in it. Or you can set up a conversation with me. Go to the website, my calendar's open for 50-minute strategy sessions, and you can just set it up and say, let's talk about that podcast when you introduced parts work and internal family systems. When I start working with men on their parts, especially starting with their anger part, they start to realize that they parent from the parts they don't want to be parenting from. They parent from the anger part or from the fear part instead of the part that is loving, that is confident, that is calm. When you talk through this stuff, you're able to access the calm, positive parts a lot more easily, which is the goal to be the durable dad that's balanced, not reactive, sturdy in how he responds to the world. All right.
