On anger

This article discusses domestic and family violence. Support is available via DVConnect (1800 811 811) or your local equivalent international support service.

Don't apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.

– Joanna Macy

I was ten years old the first time I got angry.

It wasn’t that I never saw anger - quite the opposite. My childhood was punctuated by the extreme outbursts of my father, whose mercurial moods cast a heavy cloak of fear over our household.

But until I was ten, I didn’t realise that anger was something I could feel for myself. I stayed angry. I felt rage all through my adolescence: white hot, seething anger. I didn’t understand it. I flew into rages with teachers who gave me detention for dying my hair, bullies who picked on my friends, girls who flirted with my boyfriend. I would slam doors, abruptly hang up the phone, sever friendships without a second thought. I tried to physically fight the men who casually groped me at parties, their hands grazing my ass as they walked by me. When my dad punched me, I punched him back. I told him I would kill him if he ever hurt my mother again. He never did, or at least not around me.

I always felt deep shame after these episodes, like I was horribly defective. Friends told me that I was strong and independent, and admired my feisty personality. But I didn’t always feel strong. I felt out of control. I was scared that I was turning into my father.

It wasn’t enough to stop being angry, though: I couldn’t do that if I tried. Anger made me feel like I was no longer a victim. Rage, as Soraya Chemaly says, became a layer of my skin. It wrapped me in a cloak of protection, and kept others at bay. It worked. But it worked too well. Anger kept everyone from getting too close to me, including people who could have loved and supported me. Worst of all, it kept me from myself. By the time I was seventeen I was tired, spent. I felt impossibly old.

I was no longer angry.

I was just very, very sad.

We are women, and we are angry.

“A society that does not respect women's anger is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.”

― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

It’s easy to explain my anger by saying it was protecting me from being abused, which is true. All too often, children raised in abusive households become either victims or abusers. We end up recreating in our adult lives what we experienced in our childhoods. Abused children grow up to marry archetypes of their parents - the controlling mother, the emotionally distant father, the alcoholic father, the violent mother. Or they become those archetypes themselves. Maybe it’s an unconscious attempt at resolving the trauma. Maybe it’s just because it’s all we have ever known. In any case, the past is recreated, over and over again, for generations, until it can be transformed.

For women and anger, it’s more than that. We tend to have a complicated relationship with anger. Even those raised in the most enlightened, egalitarian households often have some baggage over it. Society peppers us with messages about how women “should” act - sugar and spice, being “seen and not heard”. Women. displaying healthy assertiveness are often derided for appearing “aggressive.”

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been subtly and, at times, overtly shamed for what others perceive as anger. The phrase “Does not suffer fools gladly” became the running joke in our family, after it was written on all my report cards.

“You need to smile more,” said male managers, who never smiled themselves. “It’s.. just… your delivery,” said one, when I pointed out that my disagreeing on a proposal was perceived negatively, when an identical refusal by my male co-worker was not. Act like a woman, we are told. Except the times we are expected to act like men.

We’ve come a long way since the women’s liberation movement in the 50’s, but there’s still a long way to go. In some ways, we have to work harder than our counterparts at spotting the ways in which women are shamed for their anger, because it’s not always readily apparent. Sexism may not be so overt any more, but it is insidious.

“When a woman shows anger in institutional, political, and professional settings,” Soraya Chemaly writes, “she automatically violates gender norms.”

And as we progress on the path of a much-needed revision of these gender-norms, men are caught in the cross-hares. “Sensitive New-Age Guys” are expected to appear both strong and soft, two states that often feel in contradiction. They must be the providers and the protectors, but they also must be in touch with their “feminine side,” displaying and being attuned to emotions. This often translates, erroneously, into not showing anger.

So we hide our anger by turning it inwards or by expressing it in unconscious, passive aggressive ways. Repression always leads to explosions, and so the cycle perpetuates itself. The less comfortable we are with expressing and feeling our own anger, the less we are comfortable with others expressing and feeling their own anger.

Towards anger, beyond anger.

“Anger is usually about saying "no" in a world where women are conditioned to say almost anything but "no.” ― Soraya Chemaly

We should be angry. We should be furious. Society’s misguided attempt at quelling women’s anger just stoked the fire. We have been told who to be, how to be, and what to be, for far too long. I can’t begin to detail all the ways we can fix this. In truth, I have no idea. But if I can hazard a guess, I’d bet that one of the most powerful ways of creating this change is by becoming a role model for others.

I don’t know how different my life would have been if I’d had that role model. If I was taught ways of protecting my boundaries without harming others. If I was shown that there were more than two states of anger: more than the explosive kind, and the quiet kind - deep, seething, inward, barely noticeable and at times completely invisible to even the owner. I think there would have been far less hurt, of myself and of others. Far less transferring my pain onto others, passing patterns on in an attempt to ward off the gaping hole of sadness inside me that was begging to be heard.

I still get angry all the time - at morally-bankrupt politicians, at the greed of big pharma and multinational corporations, at the conservative right trying to dictate what women should and should not do with their wombs. I rage and sometimes my anger is misplaced - I’ll snap at a call centre worker or a receptionist, or pick a fight with my fiancé after a bad day at work.

But I’ve gotten better at understanding how the inner workings of my own murky psyche can make me act out in unnecessarily hurtful ways, and in expressing the pain and sadness that I feel. I’ve gotten better at appreciating anger. Because the power of anger doesn’t lie in its strength, its capacity to destroy and to transform. That’s just surface level. The real power of anger lies in what it protects – vulnerability, the real essence of being human - and at the very heart of that, love.

Love for others.

Love for self.

There isn’t much difference between the two.