The Cranberries - Ode To My Family
A couple of years ago, I was in a charity shop with Sam. I was flicking through an uninspiring rack of CDs while Sam was looking at the kid’s books. When he found nothing to interest him, he came to get me – because I’m only allowed to stay in any shop as long as there’s something in it for him, after that we need to get out of there asap. When I didn’t immediately jump (there might have been an obscure CD by the Colourblind James Experience hiding in those final few CDs… that has happened to me before… once… it could happen again) Sam leant against a nearby shelving unit and demonstrated his boredom with a hefty sigh.
At this point, an elderly gentleman / fellow customer / Grumpy Old Bastard came storming over and shouted something at us both to the effect that if we weren’t careful, “that’s boy’s going to pull the whole shelf off the wall!” I turned, considered my response, then said to Sam – with a volume that turned heads across the shop – “Right, buddy, we’re going – we have to get as far away from this rude man as possible!”
Peter Gabriel - Family Snapshot
Afterwards, I did consider whether my reaction was setting the best example to my son, but frankly it’s not the first time Sam’s seen me lose my rag in a shop, and I doubt it will be the last. However, unlike more general frustrations about people blocking the aisle or pushing past me or spending ages reading the ingredients on a can of beans, this particular burst of rage was clearly triggered by the third letter in Dr. R. Douglas Fields’ angry acronym, LIFEMORTS. F… is for FAMILY.
Now before you start thinking, yep, nothing more likely to get me wound up than certain members of my family… this isn’t about the anger we feel when our (pre-)teenage child ignores our wishes and does whatever the hell they want, specifically the thing we told them not to do. It’s not the anger we feel when our other half replaces the toilet roll so that the front sheet hangs down the back when any sane person in the world knows it should hang down the front – beard good, mullet bad! It’s not even the anger we feel when a previously level-headed sibling suddenly decides to stick flags up outside their house and starts telling us how that Nigel Farage has some quite interesting things to say, actually.
No, the Family trigger in LIFEMORTS is actually the complete opposite of all that. It’s the anger we feel when someone or something attacks, threatens or even insults someone in our family. Because our brains are genetically hardwired to protect those close to us. This is something scientists have noticed in many different species – often they characterise it as “maternal aggression”, where a female animal will act aggressively to protect its offspring from harm. But clearly it’s not just a female trait – mothers and fathers are both conditioned to keep their offspring safe. Not just from physical threat – but even from the threat of insult. (As to why we consider insult a threat, I refer you back to the last post in this series.) Scientists tell us that our brain does this because it’s fighting to preserve our genetic lineage. The survival instinct doesn’t just cover us as individuals, we also want to ensure “species survival”.
Simon & Garfunkel - Save the Life of My Child
But I don’t think those are the only reasons we get angry when someone threatens our family. I think it also has a little to do with that key emotion science still has trouble with properly accounting for: love. And when it comes to a threat against our children… well, there’s no greater love. I was watching some TV show a while back – I wish I could remember what it was – and one of the characters said something about how all fathers secretly wish they could die to protect their child. The idea being that there would be no greater expression of paternal love. When I heard that – just a line in a TV show, nothing I can find any scientific research about – it connected with me.
Marvin Gaye - Save The Children
The Family anger trigger isn’t just about parents and their children though. We feel a similar sensation whenever anyone in our immediate tribe is threatened. You may well have someone in your family circle who, in your opinion, is a complete dick. You may even have had occasion to tell them this to their face. And that’s fine. That’s just families. But if someone from outside your tribe upsets, attacks or insults them… you’ll probably still feel the urge to leap to their defence. Because our brains recognise that family units offer protection – safety in numbers, yeah, but numbers that are bonded together by blood or time or proximity… that’s even safer. This might even explain why people in abusive relationships might still feel the urge to protect their abusers from outside forces. And it definitely explains why otherwise non-aggressive kids get into fights at school because some big doofus has just insulted “your mum”. Or, as the wonderfully foul-mouthed Dr. Faith (remember her?) puts it…
“It’s the likely precursor for why we may hate everyone we are related to, but we still beat the shit out of anyone outside the family that messes with them.”
How do we deal with this then? I’m not sure I’ve found an easy solution in my research other than the general piece of advice that always comes up when tackling our responses to emotion: recognise it, acknowledge it, understand it. So when that Grumpy Old Bastard came over and had a go at my son in the charity shop (while also casting aspersions on my own parenting), what I should have done is taken a step back – recognised that I was feeling anger because I saw this incident as a threat against my family and that my brain was conditioned to release the relevant stress hormones in a situation like this in order to facilitate a fight, flight, freeze or fawn response due to an ingrained, genetic predisposition to protect my child. And then I should have calmly assessed whether or not my reaction was valid or whether my brain was actually displaying an archaic evolutionary threat response which really wasn’t relevant in the modern world. And if I decided that to be the case, then the very best reply would probably have been to smile, defuse the situation with a vague apology for any unintentional upset caused, and carry on about my day.
Massive Attack ft. Tracey Thorn - Protection
Or maybe I should have decked the old bastard, pushed him into the very furniture he was so desperate to “protect”. “Oh, look what you’ve done now – you’ve made a right mess of those shelves.” Hulk smash threats to Hulk’s people. F can stand for more than just Family.