I grew up being told that it wasn’t okay for me to be angry. This is something that my parents told me directly.
Good girls don’t get angry.
Nice daughters don’t react.
Hold your tongue.
I grew up with anger being a bad word, and not an expression I was allowed to feel or embody, especially at and about my parents. My parents’ anger and rage were not always proportional to what I did and so I grew to fear anger. I know now it’s because my parents didn’t have the capacity to hold it. They were not allowed to feel angry as children either. Their unprocessed feelings continued to live inside them, only to be misplaced onto me when they became adults.
“In an effort to be perceived as good, we have denied ourselves the potency of what rage can empower.” So says Meggan Watterson in her book, The Girl Who Baptized Herself. And yet, the good we are is inherent as to what it means to be human. Our goodness is not meant to be performative. Her book Mary Magdalene Revealed came into my life in a very timely way. One key take-away was the original 7 Powers of Mary Magdalene that later became the 7 sins; one if them was Rage that ultimately warped into a shadow interpretation of Wrathful Vengeance.
Now I know that it wasn’t that I wasn’t allowed to be angry, but that these feelings were too hard for my parents to navigate. They didn’t know how to temper their own anger or allow it to be present when they were children. This is especially true for my mother. So I internalized this inherited limiting belief that anger is wrong.
I no longer resent my mom for her anger because I know what to do now to let my anger be felt and processed, and move through me. I trust when i sit with a feeling, that feeling is telling me something: Resentment tells us that something needs to be expressed or grieved because someone else has something that you also want and don’t have. Now I sit with so much more wisdom, empathy, and understanding about my mom‘s anger as it was unexpressed pain, trauma, and grief that she also had to hold in only for it to explode.
She also inherited this anger.
Our foremothers were forced to internalize anger and become small, mainly because women’s anger was threatening. Not to ourselves, but to men and folks who wanted to re-shift power to benefit them.
Is it perimenopause or rightful rage?
Or is that the scream that has been living in your body the people pleaser or nice girl who is burnt out. Are you tired of being ignored or teased?
PMS as we know it has become pathologized and negative. So has perimenopause and the fact that so many women are wanting a divorce in mid-life.
Maybe that hot flash is your body screaming for your attention. Maybe it is your Inner Fire telling you have power. I have noticed that I often feel a surge of heat when I sit with a client who is telling me about an injustice, pain, or lack of support in their life.
Let’s take a moment to remember what our menstrual cycle teaches us. We go through inner seasons and moods with each menstrual phase. For instance, our Luteal Stage that appears right before our bleed is the Truth-Teller. It reveals what has not been able to happen for us – that can come with sorrow or rage. It is meant to be processed or metabolized. Our menstrual cycle is also connected to our motherline, the red thread that has continued down from our foremothers. It is also that cycles back each month in our own body. So often, the rage we feel now is due to a lifetime (or several) of not getting our needs met. That anger may feel disproportional to the specific moment, but it is a call for our attention for something to change.
It’s been a reclamation for me to listen to my anger as a messenger and having a rightful place in my emotional ecosystem.
I needed to heal my Inner Angry Teenage Girl
One key thing I’ve done to reclaim this is to repair what my body needs to express anger. That means moving it through, baring my teeth and making noise. It means embodying the sacredness of the feeling, and not the aggression that used to take over.
Speak your truth. Anger is a superpower.
It’s a reckoning.
It’s a re-wilding.
We have a lot to be angry about.
Anger is a valid response to something that happened. It is an oracle. It is a truth teller. It shows us a need or boundary has been violated. My anger is valid as it tells me something powerful. The difference is not taking this power and misusing it, but to let the power be an energy field within.
We know now it’s never too late to rewire and repair the needs that we had that weren’t met. So now, as I sit with the parts of me who have metabolized old stories, one thing that has been so helpful for me is to let the anger move through me and out. Doing it in a way that feels more like a channel versus a reactive explosion is the key.
My Parts Fight with Yours
It is when our Parts jump onboard the bus and refuse to leave the driver’s seat that conflict erupts. It is our parts that are in conflict with each other, both within us and between us. Maybe that thing we call mom rage is just a young part who’s screaming WHAT ABOUT ME? “Sometimes i wonder if the raging mother – me who fantasizes about throwing the pasta against the wall, is simply the acting out of my inner child who is angered and hurt at the injustice of being so chronically overlooked.” Anna Mathur
If we can slow down and sit with curiosity about a feeling we’re having, it is a messenger. It is trying to tell us something first somatically, and then we bring consciousness to it with our mind.
Those of us socialized as girls and conditioned to be good girls were taught to internalize our anger because being angry isn’t nice. And yet the world we live in is the opposite of nice. And so now our unprocessed rage and generational pattern of being quiet are starting to erupt. And maybe that’s exactly what those in power were afraid of so many centuries ago.
I believe that we are here now for a reason. What I’m learning and unlearning for myself and others is part of the alchemy that needs to happen for change to be manifested. This is especially true for those of us who have children in our lives (in whatever way) because they are the change that we need to keep this momentum going. I first had to unlearn that limiting belief that anger is scary or destabilizing so that my children can embody it more fully.
Anger is a mobilizing feeling and expression. It needs to move to go somewhere. So, we need to listen to the soft animal of our body. We need to feel that anger rise as heat in our body, that fight that is trying to get out. It is not wanting to fight others but rather, fight for us, on our behalf. And yes, we need to thank it for its message, and turn towards it with love and understanding.
Our feelings have a somatic experience in our body. It is a sign of strength to have a wellspring of emotions. The fire inside me is my Inner Oracle telling me when something is wrong. Learning how to titrate it and still vocalize and let it be present is where the alchemical change happens. I’m reclaiming my anger as an Oracle messenger telling me that an injustice has been experienced. My anger isn’t just for me, but for all of us. And maybe that’s exactly what those in power were afraid of so many centuries ago. If we can slow down and sit with curiosity about a feeling we’re having, it is a messenger. It is trying to tell us something first somatically, and then we bring consciousness to it with our mind.
Midlife rage is unprocessed anger from our life and before our life. Our wombs and lives have inherited how our mothers expressed anger and conflict. Rage is present because it wants something to be different and it’s mobilized in our body and our nervous system as a fight energy. Sometimes it’s righteous or sacred rage because our needs or boundaries aren’t being met.
Often what happens is we couple anger with its shadow side of aggression and uncontrolled action. Anger shows us when our needs have not been met, namely, our boundaries and also what we find to not be aligned with our values. The more we keep our anger at bay it can become a volcano that explodes out of context or out of proportion. We can use anger as an Oracle, a Messenger telling us what our needs are. Anger is a mobilizing feeling and expression. It needs to move to go somewhere. Anger itself is only information. What we DO with it is what matters.
There is so much to be angry about and I think our right and rite to anger were the missing ingredient that is needed to create this change for a better world. Patriarchal forces don’t like us to be angry. So they made us internalize the anger as a bad feeling.
We need to move through this together to reclaim the rightful place anger has in our body and experience so that we can express it.
At the beginning of this year, I didn’t foresee that there would be a cascade of more violence, misogyny, and hatred. And yet I’m also not surprised. Maybe the momentum that we need to shapeshift into the fire horse energy of this year is embodying anger as fuel.