Erasing the Anger Taboo
I have always had a fiery temper. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of an elementary school soccer match that my team lost in the final seconds. As I stood on the field watching the other team celebrate their victory, I felt the familiar monster of rage rising within my chest. My anger was too much for my nine year-old body to handle and my fists flew out, making contact with two members of the opposing team. Over twenty years later, I still remember the shame I felt afterwards. I can feel it in my body – my shoulders caving forward to shield myself from the torrent of parental screaming, the visceral desire to sink into the earth and disappear forever. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning my terrible sportsmanship. Punching people on the soccer field is an incredibly stupid idea. But the problem was, both I and everyone around me equated my anger with the action it produced. I was taught that my anger was completely unacceptable. Bad. A sign that there was something deeply wrong with me. After all, no one else was beating people up under the goalposts.
It has, thankfully, been a long time since I punched anyone. But anger has been an almost constant companion for me. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve been told to calm down, to restrain my temper, to control my emotions – which really just meant to stuff them deep down into the recesses of my soul. Because nice girls don’t get angry. Nice girls who become priests really can’t get angry. It might give people the wrong idea. But try as you might (and trust me, I’ve tried), you can’t just wish anger away. Anger has to go somewhere. If we manage not to direct it into our fists, then society tells us we’re winning. But the truth is, our unexpressed anger is eating us alive. And no one is talking about it.
It’s not hard to figure out why anger has become such a taboo emotion: I mean, just look at 2017: the violent fury on both sides of the political spectrum is a huge part of why people are calling last year a dumpster fire. Anger is a big emotion, too big for our bodies to contain for long. If we can channel it constructively, anger can be a surprisingly short-lived experience. But in order to do that, we first have to feel it fully. And that scares the crap out of us. It’s hard to feel something fully when we’ve been taught that certain emotions are unacceptable. It takes work to unlearn the script we default to every time we feel that surge of anger (mine is a predictably scathing “WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU!?”). It’s hard enough to just be angry. It’s a million times harder when you add in shame for feeling something taboo and total despair because you still don’t know what to do with the anger you’re not supposed to be feeling in the first place.
Anger doesn’t need to be controlled. It needs to be felt. Like any of us when we’re upset, all our emotions want is to be seen and honored and witnessed. You can’t reason with rage, you can’t lure it away with logical explanations. But you can honor it. You can hold space for it. And once you acknowledge that it’s real and valid, anger gets a lot less hot. It softens its death grip on us and makes space for other things. It lets you go on with your life. And, if you have the courage to listen to it, anger can offer you some crucial information about what your true priorities are, what boundaries you’re not respecting, and where you might need to do some healing. When we ignore our anger, we slam the door on our potential to grow.
Here’s the thing, fellow angry people: the world is never going to be enthusiastic about our anger. There will always be someone who, with the best of intentions, says, “well, have you tried just not being angry?” (Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?) There will always be people who judge us when we get ragey and tell us it’s unseemly/unladylike/unchristian/etc. So our job is to ignore the scoffers and learn how to create ridiculously safe and compassionate internal space for whatever the hell we’re feeling. And, since that takes time, practice, and a lot of trial and error, our job in the meantime is to find people who aren’t afraid of our anger. People who don’t wrinkle their noses or run away when things start to heat up, but who see our anger as real and have the good sense to deduce that, given our druthers, we probably wouldn’t choose to be feeling it. Those people are gold. Find them, hold them close, and learn everything you can from them. Listen to the language they use around anger and try it out on yourself next time you feel the rage rising. See if you can’t start to change your script around anger, one word, one letter at a time.
Do the work for yourself, not because you’re feel guilty for making other people uncomfortable with your big feelings. Do it because you want to feel different, because you want to free up some internal real estate for something that’s not rage. And in case you, like me, need to be reminded of these things: however much anger (or fear, or sadness, or resentment, or grief, or whatever) you’re holding in your body right now, you are not broken. You’re not unseemly. There’s nothing wrong with you. And yes, it is, in fact, possible to feel different without sacrificing your full, radiant, beautifully big personality.
