Chapter 5: THE TRIANGLE

Years ago, I was working with a group of eighth-grade boy moms. They wanted help handling their sons’ group mentality that seemed to be continually getting them into trouble. One specific day this group of moms stormed into my office. The previous weekend their sons had been throwing oranges at passing cars after dark. Neighbors caught them, and in this small community, the news spread like wildfire.

One mom took it very hard. Her son had been in trouble many times before, and this was her tipping point. When her son got home from the orange-throwing incident, she screamed and yelled at him. Without remembering the specifics, she said things like, “You are the worst. You always mess up. You are an embarrassment to our family and to me.” She self-proclaimed that it was not a pretty interaction. In her own words, she said it reached the point of shaming, and it put a pit in her stomach.

Her story is not unusual. How many times have you found yourself in the following situation? Your child does something, you get angry (a wild, seething, crazy, my child is the worst human ever, I am raising a monster kind of angry), and then you feel so bad about how you reacted that you find yourself feeling guilty (the deep, painful, gut-wrenching, I am the worst parent ever, my kids will need years of therapy because of me, I have messed everything up kind of guilty). Whether you are the extreme or somewhere in between, you are not alone. Feelings swirl within all of us, and they affect everything we do.

THE RESEARCH

In the late 1950s, clinical psychologist Albert Ellis researched and created Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). He theorized that when humans become emotionally charged based on an event, it is not the event that causes the emotion, but rather the individual’s irrational belief system. In the early 1960s, a psychiatrist by the name of Aaron T. Beck pioneered Cognitive Therapy (CT). Beck theorized that a person’s reaction originates from their thoughts. If your thoughts are negative, depression will follow.

Today, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is the catchall or umbrella term used for cognitive theories like Ellis’s and Beck’s. The basic premise is that our thoughts create our feelings and behaviors. At the very least, they are all interconnected. If we can begin breaking down our thoughts and how they affect our feelings, we can start changing our behavior.

THE CBT TRIANGLE

The CBT triangle is a tool used to help people understand how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are intertwined. When we have a thought, we then create feelings, which is often the catalyst for our behavior.

NOTE: Because I work with both parents and children, I have added an offshoot to the CBT triangle: the child’s reaction. For the sake of our focus, moving forward I will be switching the term“Behavior” to “Parent’s Reaction.” Having said that, the terms “reaction” and “behavior” will be used interchangeably throughout the book.

EXAMPLES

Thought: My child did not get invited to the party! Why don’t people like him?
Feeling: Sadness, Hurt, Disappointment
Parent’s reaction: Mom rapidly fires questions to her son, “Why did you not get invited? Did you do something to make him mad? Are you playing with anyone on the playground? Do you have friends? What could you do differently? Do you want me to call the mom? Are you okay? Are you sad?”
Child’s reaction: The child just stares at his mom and wonders how he can get away from her rapid-fire questions. He tries to answer the questions the best he can, but by the end of the conversation, he is wondering if something is the matter with him.

Thought: My child just scored the winning goal! That was awesome!
Feeling: Joy, Happiness, Pride
Parent’s reaction: Mom gives her daughter a huge hug after the game and congratulates her on scoring the winning goal.
Child’s reaction: Daughter leaves the field with a smile on her face, feeling proud of her accomplishment.

Thought: I can’t believe he flunked the test! What is the matter with him?
Feeling: Anger, Frustration, Embarrassment
Parent’s reaction: Mom yells at her son for flunking the test. She tells him she is disappointed in him and is taking Xbox away for a month until he stops being so lazy.
Child’s reaction: Son yells back at mom saying she is the worst mom in the world and that he wished he had a different mom. He runs out of the room screaming.

Let’s use the CBT triangle to look at the mother of the orange-throwing boy. During our meeting, she gave me permission to use her example to help me fill in the CBT triangle. I asked her to work backward from the screaming and yelling and put a thought behind the outburst. She took a deep breath and bravely shared, “Are you kidding me! Is he that stupid? I cannot believe he messed up AGAIN!”

I have done this exercise with many moms, and I have filled in several triangles. It is fair to say that her thoughts were mellow in comparison to some of the thoughts other moms have shared. I have heard everything from expletives to complete anguish. Parenting can be a tough business.

I moved to my next question, “What feelings came up when you had that thought?” She quickly replied, “Anger, frustration, disappointment, and embarrassment, just to name a few.”

All the moms began nodding their heads in agreement, and based on what she had shared earlier, we already knew she reacted with screaming, yelling, and in her words, shaming. Her thoughts were creating intense feelings, which created fertile ground for escalated anger. She was in a downward spiral of feelings, and her reactions reflected that spiral.

This is an example of authoritarian parenting:

If we only focus on the CBT triangle, we miss the most important part—how our triangle affects our children. Relationships are a dance of reactions, and a parent-child relationship is no different. We react to something they do or say, and they react to us by doing or saying something back. Children will react in many different ways, but this mom shared that her son replied with an angry, “You always overreact! Nobody else has a mom like you! I hate you!” Not only were there words, but there was also eye-rolling as he stormed out of the room.

After the boy’s angry comments, my line of questioning took me back to the top of the triangle. I simply asked what her next thought was, and all the moms started nervously laughing and mumbling to each other. She said, “I am raising a complete lunatic! He is going to be a menace to society, definitely in jail at some point! He makes me insane!”

She shared that, at this point, her feelings were moving at warp speed, and the verbal darts she began throwing at her son were not pretty. Anger, rage, and fury had overtaken her as she screamed, “Who do you think you are talking to me like that? How do you think it is for me to have a son like you who always gets into trouble? You are a complete embarrassment to me and this family!” She had officially hit what I call the crazy corner. We will talk more about the crazy corner in later chapters, but as you can imagine, it was not pretty.

This is an example of the crazy corner:

When she shared this, everyone in the room started uncomfortably laughing, agreeing, and comparing notes. It is much easier to laugh at our parenting crazies when we are a few days past the incident, and in this instance, surrounded by a mom clan who had walked in her shoes. However, the reality is difficult. When such a spiral happens, and we are alone, it feels like we are shouldering the weight of the world and receiving a punch to the gut, often leaving us deflated with feelings of hopelessness.

NOTE: There is a small percentage of you who are saying, “Huh? That doesn’t sound like me.” That is because you are not a screamer, yeller, or fighter. There is not an authoritarian bone in your body. If this is the case, you are either more of a permissive parent or more of an AUTHORITATIVE parent. If you are more of a permissive parent, hang tight, we are about to circle around the triangle to you.

When the group settled down after a flurry of mom bonding, I started my questioning again. “When you got yourself into the crazy corner, how did your son react?” It suddenly got painfully quiet. Speaking slowly, she said, “His eyes filled with tears, and he walked out of the room.” Crickets and Kleenex. Everyone was silent.

I gently moved forward, “Okay, let’s take it to the top of the triangle. What was your thought when he did this?” She pointed to herself and replied, “Damn it! I messed up again! I always mess up! I am the worst mom ever!”

She began by throwing darts at her son because she was so angry and ended up drinking the poison because she felt so bad. It is a vicious cycle that we can find ourselves in, and it always shifts the way we parent. It is what keeps us from being an AUTHORITATIVE parent.

NOTE: There is another small percentage of you who are saying, “Huh? That doesn’t sound like me.” You never feel guilty or bad when you are parenting. You feel like your children are always at fault, and you stay in anger. If this is you, you are strictly an authoritarian parent, and your triangle will just keep looping around with anger. Most people will quickly move into feelings of guilt.

I continued, “How did you feel after you had that thought?” She replied, “Horrible, sad, deflated, guilty, shameful. You name it.” Everyone knew what was next. I asked, “And how did you react?” She shared how she tried to talk with her son to tell him how awesome he was and how badly she had messed up. “Buddy, you made a mistake, but I lost it. It’s not you. It’s me. I am so sorry! Can we forget this all happened and go get ice cream?”

This is an example of permissive parenting:

Her son was throwing oranges at cars and needed a consequence, but instead, he was rewarded with ice cream because she felt so guilty about the way she had parented.

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