Observing families with children often makes me pissed. I was often wondering why. Especially those moments when the kid is crying, shouting, hitting, pulling, and their parents just do nothing. I have always felt like I want to go to them and start shouting what the hell are they doing and why can't they teach their kid to behave normally. If the parents are not around I feel the urge to take the kid and smash his head against something hard. I want to see terror in the child's eyes. It's rather terrifying but this is what I am feeling.
And this was something I did not even pay too much attention to, as I used to think that it's normal that some people find children annoying. But there was one moment when I saw an around 7 year old kid at a lake, throwing a piece branch in the water and being excited at how the water splashes. I realised that even though there was nothing annoying in what he was doing, it still made me angry in the same way, if not more. I felt like I want to walk up to this kid and start yelling and swearing at him, so that he..
..gets broken.
It was annoying the shit out of me that the kid is feeling at ease. That he is thoughtlessly playing. I understood that what pisses me off is not the effects of children's thoughtlessness but the fact that they are allowed to be thoughtlessness, cheerful. That the idea that someone adult may suddenly come up to them and smash their head because they are laughing does not even cross their stupid little minds. And I find it (almost morally) wrong that they do not live in constant fear about what they may be doing wrong (hello codependency).
Of course what it tells about me is that this is how my parents were treating me, and because of how bad it made me feel, those emotions are re-triggered whenever I am in a situation that reminds me of the past situations. And this is the tricky and counterintuitive thing about psychology - one could expect that I would feel wounded and sad but instead I reverse the situation and take the anger of my parents as mine. I wonder what it depends on - when do we reverse the situation after a trauma and when we don't. But definitely such reversal occurs often, and if one is not aware of this mechanism it makes it quite difficult to untangle things.
It is a good exercise. Take a family with children and observe yourself. It can give you some great hints about your own childhood.