My daughter’ is a ‘bunny boiler’

Professor Tanya Byron

Monday March 15 2021

The Times

Q We have five adult children in their twenties and thirties. They are all doing well in life and largely get on except for one of our daughters, who has an anger problem. She believes totally and utterly that she is always right and can flare up into shocking tantrums.

She screams, blocks family on social media and says that her life is terrible. The temper has always been there, but we set boundaries in childhood so she learnt early on that a negotiating approach was best. She has dropped this measured approach in recent years.

She doesn’t have a partner, although the rest of her life is going well despite lockdown. She’s very clever, kind, pretty and funny and has a close circle of friends, but she has a blind spot when life doesn’t go her way.

My mother was like that and we tiptoed round her moods, although when she was in a good mood life was wonderful. My daughter has had a couple of good relationships, but now one of my sons says she’s a “bunny boiler” and throws herself into every relationship at top speed, quickly becoming the crazy ex.

I have tried to talk to her about holding back and taking things slowly and she went ballistic, saying that she wasn’t the type to play games. She meets men and says there’s an instant connection and she knows he’s “the one”. Oddly, with siblings and friends in similar situations she is wise and supportive, but terrifyingly lacking in self-awareness. We’re all fed up with the drama and the fixation on finding a husband — she recently said she’d rather be dead than unmarried by the time she’s 30.

This isn’t a lockdown problem, although it has possibly been slightly exacerbated by it. Her siblings are starting to step back from her and form a different group because they have all been victims of her foul temper. I offered to pay for counselling and that triggered another rage in which she said that if I’d done that for her at age 16 her life would have turned out differently. Her unpredictable temper is holding us all to ransom and my husband worries about family feuds starting and going on for years. Please help before our lovely big family falls apart.

Ramona

A You are clearly worried about your daughter, who can be capable in some areas of her life but seemingly very fragile when it comes to maintaining close attachments. Indeed, it sounds as if her attachment pattern is anxious and insecure.

An insecure attachment style is described when a person struggles to retain the necessary healthy boundaries in their closest relationships. This can play out in a number of ways and with your daughter it sounds as though, although she has friends and attractive qualities, she is emotionally regressed with those to whom she is closest: family and partners. This emotional regression displays itself via her tantrum-like displays of anger, immature immediate connections to new partners and an inability to hear constructive feedback from those who know her well.

An insecure attachment style can develop when a child’s needs are not met — because they don’t receive what they need emotionally from parents who are overly anxious and inconsistent in their approach to meeting those needs or because parents ignore their child’s needs. In your daughter’s case she seems to show an “anxious ambivalent attachment style”, which presents itself in adulthood with behaviours that are intensely dependent and crave approval, and show an extreme sensitivity to any feeling of rejection. A relationship will be very all-or-nothing, developed at top speed where everything is perfect, but then the focus shifts to what is problematic in the relationship and it falls apart.

This occurs because of difficulties with “distress tolerance”, which means the ability to take the rough with the smooth. It makes it hard to manage heightened emotions and think them through, to appreciate and hold on to the necessary emotional boundaries that allow the sometimes normal stormy seas of close attachments to be navigated without catastrophic fallout.

Research has shown that women who display insecure attachment styles when asked to think about negative relationship scenarios will show higher levels of activity in areas of the brain related to emotion and lower levels of activity in areas associated with emotional regulation. In such imagined situations they show higher anxiety and a difficulty in managing those feelings — anxiety is the fight-or-flight response and, as seen in your daughter, to fight is a form of self-protection. This anxiety can lead to high levels of almost obsessive ruminations about the problem and the wrongs that have been done, which fuels the anger and leads to tantrums.

I suspect that you will find this difficult to read. It is clear that on many levels you have raised a daughter who manages life well, is kind and has close friends. However, I am curious about how she “learnt early on that a negotiating approach was best” when you set boundaries. I wonder if, while you set those boundaries, you might not have always held on to them and your daughter soon learnt how to negotiate herself away from whatever boundary and consequence you had set. This indicates possible inconsistent boundary-setting for a child who needed to understand the consequences of her behaviour and have extra support with mastering the skills of emotional regulation.

Children who are master negotiators can struggle to internalise the necessary boundaries in close attachments because they will have an overriding sense that they can manipulate things their way. Children with greater levels of anger and temper tantrums may be managed less robustly by parents who fear triggering something worse and so more easily allow their boundaries to be negotiated away. While this might avoid the short-term pain of an angry child, it creates longer-term issues for that child, who may expect everyone they have a close primary attachment with to behave similarly.

This may explain why, when the heady days of early love die down, your daughter struggles to cope with a relationship where she cannot always have her needs met and cannot negotiate everything in her favour. Being described as “a bunny boiler . . . crazy ex” by her brother suggests that she also gets extremely resentful and can behave in an inappropriately angry way towards an ex-partner (like a child who continues to sulk and have tantrums).

You mention that your mother was similar in personality and that while she could be in a good mood and then life was “lovely”, she could also have moods where everyone tiptoed round her. It sounds as if your mother, like your daughter, held everyone to ransom (a word you used to describe how your daughter’s moods affect the family) with her moods, which made her extremely powerful and probably made other family members fearful of when her moods would switch. Therefore, while this might be an inherited personality trait, your daughter’s moods from a very young age perhaps left you feeling the same sense of panic and helplessness you felt as a child with your mother, making you less robust in holding on to the boundaries with her.

And it seems that this continues: she becomes enraged, screams, blocks people, is furious with you for offering advice and suggesting that she get professional therapeutic support. My first recommendation is that your daughter can only learn to manage this part of her “emotional self” better if she learns to understand it. She needs to recognise that her problems with distress tolerance are related to a sense of unmet need, then develop the necessary emotional regulation and interpersonal skills.

My second recommendation is that you and the family hold firmer boundaries when she rages. Don’t meet her rage with rage; just don’t engage until she has calmed and is more thoughtful. The only way to help your daughter is to enable her to recognise the impact she has on others by seeing that they will engage with her when she is being her kind and thoughtful more mature self, but ignore her when she becomes a raging toddler. In time she can then see where she struggles. With luck this will lead her to make her own, empowered decision to seek the therapy that will enable her to find her life partner.