Look back at your childhood. Were you allowed to be mad? Who in your family was allowed to express anger and who wasn’t?
I learned as a child that expressing anger hurt more than it helped. Little girls who were dutiful were loveable and angry girls weren’t. Little girls were also responsible for managing the emotions of those around them.
I unpacked this decades later with a therapist. It took being in crisis over my working and loving lives to discover that I had disconnected myself from anger. I no longer knew how to experience or express it.
“First, you will relearn how to feel anger,” my therapist said. “Then you will learn what to do with it.” She smiled.
She sees anger is one of three primary emotions, the others being happiness and sadness. Anger has a hot, energetic quality, and signals a desire such as a boundary. Anger doesn’t need to be harmful as I was taught to believe. In its pure form, anger can fuel inspiration, creativity and authenticity.
Different cultures have gendered emotions in different ways. Anger is subtly pathologized in girls and women where I was raised. There, it’s more likely that people who are socialized as women express anger as sadness and that people who are socialized as men express sadness as anger.
Those who cannot process and express anger risk tolerating unsafe environments to their detriment. They also struggle to assert themselves to fight for safety or to affect change. I paid a high price for not being able to process anger including years on the burnout scale, ground-down molars and some unhealthy relationships – including with myself. The cost of suppressing anger in order to belong was a sense of authenticity.
The idea of reclaiming anger felt both crazy and scary. I grieved that I had subconsciously suppressed such a significant part of the human experience in myself for so long. I also knew that accessing anger would push me into leaving fraught spaces and relationships that had formed big parts of my identity. I could not remain in crisis; however, so the only real option was to accept the challenge and embrace change.
Here are some activities that have helped me to reconnect with anger as an adult:
- Journaling about my interests, desires and the injustices I encounter,
- Writing about unfair situations in past relationships and work environments,
- Slow solo travel where I can process emotions in solitude and be confronted with uncomfortable experiences,
- Identifying safe people and places where I don’t need to perform,
- Identifying unsafe people and places and setting firm boundaries with them,
- Reading anger-inspiring books such as “The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls” by Mona Eltahawy
Reclaiming anger has been a challenging, non-linear process and is still playing a central role to my personal development. Learning to access anger has enabled me to rage which is anger put into action. Studying the works of black radical feminists such as Audre Lorde has helped me learn how to channel and apply rage. Writing and participating in activist groups such as the FCA has provided me with creative outlets to channel these emotions.
What has been your experience with processing and expressing anger? Are you able to access it? If so, how do you experience and express it? What societal changes could help people of all genders learn how to process these emotions? How can we as intersectional feminists consciously channel anger and rage as part of our work?
The FCA will facilitate a group discussion on Feminist Rage on Sunday 25 May at 16:00 at NieuwLand, Amsterdam. Join us for a reflective, open discussion as we share personal experiences, challenge stereotypes, and consider how anger can be transformed into action. Register here to join!
