The result of this sense of overwhelm for men can be any number of reactions, including: disengagement, silent treatment, angry outbursts, or excessive attention to work. Of course, everyone loses when these reactions become commonplace. And truth is that these reactions can be improved upon and eventually avoided.

Here are five ideas to help in dealing with overwhelm with your family:

1. Raise your standards: Stop blaming others for your overwhelm, this only makes things worse. Commit yourself to improving your own skills in dealing with overwhelm and realize that it always starts with you.

2. Take time outs. These will help to put some perspective to situation and they’ll also show your kids you’re working on it. You can’t expect your kids to work on their “stuff” if you don’t work on your own.

3. Plan ahead and train your kids. A lot of stressful situations can be avoided by being prepared. Get things ready night before and be very consistent with routines.

4. Raise bar for yourself by having your wife or kids (or both) keep you accountable. Tell them to remind you if they see you getting overwhelmed and angry. Then do what’s necessary for you to create a healthier response.

5. Use a well-practiced and routine relaxation response for your overwhelm. Whether it’s deep breathing or counting to ten, have a tool to use when going gets tough. It beats yelling any day.

Fathers are often fixers of things in their household. While not an easy task, flooding that fathers feel during overwhelm is a fixable problem.

The choice is clear: point fingers at your family or deal with your own issues?

What do you think is best for your family?

While it’s true that your partner may treat you in a way you don’t like sometimes, it’s not true that you need to react to it with strong negative feelings. These strong negative feelings are a reflection of your own esteem issues. They also have a way of keeping your partner engaged in struggle with you so that you can continue to blame each other. When you are both engaged in struggle, you’ll believe that she needs to be fixed. She’ll think same of you. Nobody wins and everybody loses. This isn’t very smart or effective.

What would happen for men in their important relationships if they gave up defending themselves and believing their needs needed to be met? What would happen if they worked at being kind and caring with their partners? I’ll tell you what would happen. They’d have great relationships! After all, only thing that you can do to improve a relationship is to improve you.

So stop looking over at your partner and seeing all of her flaws. Stop blaming her. She has issues just like we all do. But if you see her as a collection of flaws you’ll have no chance at a successful relationship. And it’s successful relationships in life that make us truly happy.

Mark Brandenburg MA, CPCC, is a certified personal coach, speaker, and workshop leader who helps men to create balance in their lives and to immediately improve their family relationships, guaranteed! He is the author of Fix Your Wife in 30 Days or Less (http://www.markbrandenburg.com/e_book.htm#fix and can be reached at mark@markbrandenburg.com or at http://www.markbrandenburg.com.