It was about weekend plans. Or the dishes, or a text you did not answer. And then his voice went up and his face went hard and the room got very small. You do not remember exactly what he said, because your body stopped listening to the words and started listening for the door. Then the door, slammed. Then the quiet.
And now you are on your phone, typing my boyfriend yells at me, and underneath that question is a worse one. Is this what he is really like? Is this what I am going to live with?
I want to answer that properly, and to do it I have to tell you something about myself first.
I am a yeller
When talking turns into the same fight
Talk it through with Figlet right now. Private, judgment free, built on 17 years of couples therapy.
I am a couples therapist and I have a temper. When I have worked five hours and I am tired and something small goes wrong, I turn into what my wife calls a belligerent Irish farmer. There is the dog food and I asked you to do it. Did you do it. Jesus. That energy. I am not easy to be with when that is the energy I have called on to get through the day.
Once, my neighbour’s dog went for my dog and I ended up on the ground on top of it, shouting at the neighbour that if his dog ever tried that again I would kill it. I felt ashamed of that for six months. Why tell you? Because I am just like your boyfriend. There is a stimulus, I get frightened, and when I am frightened I have a reaction. And then I hate myself for it.
So this is not a therapist explaining a man to you from a safe distance. This is one yeller telling you what is going on in another.
There are no angry people
This is the line I say more than any other in my office. There are no angry people in the world. There are just people who look angry when they are really, really hurting inside.
A man who is shouting at his girlfriend is not, in that moment, powerful. He looks powerful. That is the point of it. But what is actually happening is that some love need of his has gone unmet, it has landed in a place in him that is very old and very sore, and the only thing his nervous system knows to do with that much pain is to protest. Loudly. It is a mammal on the savanna who thinks he is about to lose the one person he cannot afford to lose, and he is making the loudest noise he can make.
Underneath a screamer, almost every time, is I am still not a priority. How is this happening again.
Why it is so out of proportion
You will have noticed the volume never matches the topic. It was the dishes. How did we get to this?
Here is why. The dishes on their own are two units of pain. But nobody feels the two on their own. It runs back through every old memory of being made to feel like a failure or a disappointment, and if there are two hundred units of that back there, the two gets multiplied. Two becomes four hundred. That is what he is actually feeling when he shouts about the dishes. And four hundred units is unbearable, so it comes out of his mouth at you instead.
Which kind of yeller you have
There are two, and they need different things from you.
The first is the quiet one who explodes. He usually lives down in his head, keeps the peace, says fine, goes along. Then one day he feels he cannot please you no matter what he does, that there is no room for him to be heard and seen as acceptable, and the pressure comes out all at once. Stop interrupting me. Leave me alone. Door. The only reason anybody shouts stop interrupting me is because their feelings are hurt and they feel completely powerless. It is an emotional prison and he is rattling the bars.
The second is the one who chases. He yells because he is panicking that he is losing you. Look what you are doing. Why are you not listening. What is wrong with you. He is not doing that because he is mean or dramatic. He is doing it as a protest against feeling disconnected from you, because being connected to you means so much to him that it really hurts.
Both look the same from the outside. Both are terrified.
Why calm down makes it worse
I know what you have been doing, because everyone does it. Stop yelling at me. Calm down. You cannot talk to me like that. Can we please just communicate like adults.
Every one of those is reasonable. Every one of those is a can of gasoline on the fire. Because to a man in that state, calm down lands as you have no right to feel what you are feeling, and now that you have shown me what you are feeling I am going to tell you it does not matter. It gets him closer to the exact pain he was shouting to get away from. So he shouts louder, or he slams the door. Not because your request was wrong. Because nobody can take in a request while the alarm is going off.
The line. I will not skip it.
Everything I have said so far assumes you are in a bad cycle with a hurting man. Some of you are not, and you need to know the difference tonight, not in six months.
I say this in my office exactly the same way every time. Violence. Threats of violence. Blocking the exit. Using his voice to the point where it frightens you. Controlling your money, your body, who you can see. Those are not cycle. Those are not acceptable under any circumstances, and I will not do couples work where they are present, because you cannot safely study a system while one person in it is not safe.
The test I use is simple. Is it loud, or is it frightening? A loud voice from a man who then feels terrible and would never lay a hand on you is one thing. A voice that is used to make you smaller, to make you stop, to make you scared to leave the room, is another. If it is the second, put this article down and talk to someone today. If you are not sure, that not-sure is worth a conversation with a professional on its own.
If it is the first, keep going. That can change, and it usually does. And if the shouting comes with names, that has its own article.
What to do in the moment
Almost nothing. That is the honest answer. Everything else is noise while the alarm is on. You are two people who love each other who have scared the shite out of each other. Nobody is thinking.
So do not try to solve it. Do not try to explain. Do not match him. If you can, say one short thing and give the room some space. I am not going to do this at this volume. I am going to step out and I will come back. Then come back. That last part matters more than the leaving.
And run what he said through the translator. What he shouted is not who he is. It is what a reptile brain says when it thinks it is about to lose you.
What to say tonight
Later, when he is himself again. You are not going to prosecute the yelling and you are not going to explain communication skills to him. You are going to reach under the noise, which is the one thing nobody has done for him.
Something like: When you shouted earlier, I think something really hurt you before that. What was it?
He may say nothing. He may say you started it. He may say I do not know. Say it again another night. What you are doing is showing his nervous system that there is a way to be in pain with you that does not need volume. When that lands, and it does land, the shouting loses its job.
Then, on a different night, not the same one, the impact. Not a lecture. Just: when you yell, my body goes somewhere and it takes hours to come back. That is it. Impact, not intention. If he is any way healthy underneath, that will hurt him more than any ultimatum you could give him, and that hurt is what changes behaviour. Scolding never has. I know, because I have been scolded for my temper my whole life and it never once helped. What helped was being met.
One shared story
My mother, in Dublin, once had a furious fifteen-year-old storm into our kitchen shouting and cursing. I was petrified, looking for the exit. She just got up and said, yeah, what is it, go on, tell me what is going on. She met him in his fury. Five minutes later she reached over and touched his arm and he was crying.
That is the whole thing. Not stopping the anger. Getting under it. Going from two separate bubbles, where I feel terrible and you did it to me, into one shared one. Would you look at what we are doing. We are both hurting because we are so important to each other.
If you want help with the words for tonight, that is what I built Figlet for. Tell it what he shouted and what you said back. It will show you which kind of yeller you have, which side of the line you are on, and give you the one line that reaches under the noise instead of answering it.
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When talking turns into the same fight
Figlet is relationship coaching built on 17 years of couples therapy. Talk through what is happening the moment it matters, get a clear next step, and stop circling the same fight. Private, judgment free, ready whenever you are.
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”
