‘We have learned to cover anger with sadness. It makes us seem less dangerous’.
Why are we so afraid of female anger?
Even as girls we hear that anger is harmful to beauty and unfeminine, because when we are angry we are ugly: red, sweating, screaming. But it’s also because in anger we are proactive, we want to change what’s going on around us, we don’t agree with something we think is not good for us, we reach for what we want. For most of us, socialisation into the female role included unlearning how to express anger. We were supposed to be good girls, to be ‘smarter’, not to make trouble and not to be a problem. Consequently, in order to be loved and accepted, we stopped expressing it. Meanwhile, we live in a culture that is very oppressive towards women, and we need access to conscious anger as women the most!
Many women say they ‘don’t get angry’.
That’s true. Nobody ever taught us how to express anger responsibly. Meanwhile, anger is one of the basic emotions. We feel it, whether we want to or not. We cannot turn it off on request. Instead, we can learn not to see it. Then, even though the body gives us information that something bad is happening – our blood pressure rises, our heart beats faster, we feel tension in our muscles – we use various mechanisms to ignore this feeling. Such accumulated, unexpressed anger often manifests itself in various psychosomatic illnesses. Soraya Chemaly, an American activist and researcher and author of ‘Rage Becomes Her’ (2018), describes research that suggests a link between breast cancer and unexpressed anger. This research alarmed me because it pointed so directly to the impact of anger suppression on our health.
What strategies do we use to avoid feeling angry?
We are extremely creative in this! One of the most popular is complaining and being annoying. That is, acting not directly and usually not towards the real addressee of our anger. This is the kind of strategy which, apart from being universally recognised as a typically Polish trait, is attributed strictly to women. The second common strategy is eating. In the workshops I run, I invite women to evoke the feeling of anger in themselves, listen to the impulse from their body and make a note of what they feel like doing. Most often it is a particular food: for some, a brand of crisps, a particular type of sweet. We talk to drown out this anger: which one of us does not sometimes grab our phone to call a friend in a moment of anger? It’s nice to reach out for help, to talk through a situation and see it from a different point of view, but often this only serves to vent, to calm you down, rather than to take valuable information out of your anger and use it in your everyday life. It is like withdrawing money from our account and scattering it in the street. It wastes energy and reasserts us in the role of the victim who can cry – yes – out of grief that there is nothing she can do. My dream is that women in these situations, rather than soothing and calming each other down, support each other in proactively using wisdom. And consistent action, even in small steps.
Why do we want to cry with rage?
Because we have learned to cover anger with sadness. This makes us appear less dangerous. This is another common defence mechanism. Anger is energy, change and mobilisation. It is a message to others: don’t come any closer to me, not a step further, here is the limit of my patience, welfare, physical closeness. Sadness is an invitation to help, it allows for regeneration, withdrawal and mourning. In grief we can feel powerless and look powerless. Sadness says: take care of me, I have no strength, no power. Socially it is more accepted in women as a reaction to injustice. But mixing these feelings, with extremely different functions, produces lamentable results.
Sociologist Erwin Goffman, who analysed newspaper advertisements in the 1970s, discovered that the built-in expectation of women was ‘ritualised submission’. One of the keys to presenting women was the melancholy look, parted lips, lowered shoulders. Sadness can seem sexy, anger is quite the opposite.
When we are sad, our eyes glaze over, our lips enlarge, and our face begins to resemble that of a child. This can have a calming effect on the opponent. In workshops I often observe a gap between the level of anger women feel and what they express outwardly. They declare that they are angry, they practice saying ‘no’, but their face and body express, for example, fear, sadness, submission. Sometimes even a smile or seduction.
I feel that sometimes we do not believe that our anger can be effective. And we often encounter disregard. We get angry not because we’re defending ourselves, but because ‘we can’t distance ourselves’, ‘we are probably about to get our period’, ‘we have not had enough sex’.
If we say one thing and the body and face express something different, a conviction arises that when a woman says ‘no’, she thinks ‘yes’. To be clear, I believe that when a woman says ‘no’, even if she says it with sadness, that ‘no’ should be heard and respected. At the same time, the world is what it is. That’s why I help women express on the outside exactly what they feel on the inside. That is, for example, ‘no’ or ‘yes’ in tone of voice, facial expression, body posture. Free access to anger allows us to move from a submissive state into a dominant state. Because you can also use anger, for example, to bring your opinion, an idea, to convince others of your point. And not to give up at the first hint of dissent.
What do we do to make our anger effective?
Since, for the most part, we have unlearned to feel it, we have desensitised ourselves to our anger, there is a fantastic adventure ahead of us to recognise and establish a relationship with it. If we were to create a scale where zero is total calm and 100 is uncontrollable rage, most women only realise that they feel anger and use this feeling called anger when it reaches an intensity of, say, 40-50%. It is then difficult to have a calm conversation. It’s more about action, shouting, strong words and gestures. At the same time, we are afraid that if we explode, we might hurt ourselves or someone else, or face physical aggression. To set boundaries effectively, we need to learn to recognise and acknowledge our anger earlier. Not when someone has crossed them and is standing in our garden, but when we see someone approaching that boundary and our anger is at 5-20%.
But is this enough for others to respect our opposition?
This level of anger gives us a kick of energy, determination, clarity, decisiveness. We can then react appropriately to the situation. We do not need fist fights, throwing of papers, slamming of doors. Change does not occur because we shout at someone, but because we consistently strive to make, for example, a new behaviour, a way of building relations with a given person or group of people become the norm. For the most part, we know how to set a boundary, but can we maintain it? We can maintain a low level of anger for long enough to achieve this. This can be trained, just as we train physical fitness. I have already worked with over 500 women in this way.
We see anger as a destructive force and we need to build a dam to stop it, while you treat it as a drive for action, a vital energy.
Without conscious and responsible anger we will never free ourselves from the patriarchy. I would like us to move away from the old connotation map where anger is linked to aggression, being hysterical, burning villages, being uncivilised, being a ‘tomboy’. In the workshops I collect these associations – there are a lot of them. I invite my students to create and embody a new map where anger is a resource. It gives clarity, strength, allows you to be more authentic in relationships, and gives you the inner power to make changes, to maintain your boundaries.
Anger, after all, is just the information that reaches our brain about what is going on outside, and the energy needed to use that information in a practical way. I often say that anger is like a sharp sword that each of us has at our side. We can learn to use it safely. We can hurt with it, but we can also use it responsibly to defend ourselves, our loved ones and our values, and you can maintain boundaries with it, including towards yourself.
How should we then react when we feel anger?
Understand the information it carries and use that energy. This is obviously not some cosmic energy, but chemical changes in our body that make our heart beat stronger, our blood flow faster, cause us to have more energy. A cocktail of neurotransmitters and hormones, such as adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol, make us more focused, more physically powerful for a given period of time, more active, more mobilised for action. Every one of us has experienced it, when pissed off we’ve cleaned the flat, washed the windows or the car and crossed all the outstanding items off the ‘to do’ list.
When I got very upset, I redecorated my flat and arranged my child’s room. On my own.
That is the power and energy of anger. The great news is that we have the power and can access it, and call the story of the ‘weaker sex’ a fairy tale. This is another myth to keep us in learned helplessness. We lack confidence in our own physical strength. And yet, when necessary, we can lift weights, move furniture or ask for help. We don’t have to fit into the image of the fragile woman, because when we make friends with our anger, we have access to strength, courage, agency, consistency and gentleness.
It seems that anger is a ‘dangerous’ emotion. But for very different reasons than is commonly believed.
Yes, anger is dangerous, because properly directed it can lead to real change. Let us consider what the world would look like if we all had free and responsible access to our anger? What would the world look like if we all stopped swallowing our ‘no!’ and our ‘yes!’? What would the world look like if we didn’t play a game that wasn’t ours, but started to co-create new rules ourselves and support each other in feeling and expressing our anger consistently.
Perhaps we are still so comfortable in the role of victim that we lack determination. Or maybe it’s that we feel there is so much anger inside us that if we allowed ourselves to express it, real fury would flow out of us.
The aforementioned Soraya Chemaly, who has done in-depth research on female anger, coined the metaphor of water for it. If you let water flow freely, even if you regulate the current – nothing happens. When we put up dams, the water will find the weakest spot and break the blockade, flooding everything around it. And that weakest place is often the relationship with someone dependent on us. If I’m annoyed by a boss, a partner, and a driver on the road – bigger, stronger, violent – I won’t stand up. But then that anger explodes when I’m with a child, a shop assistant, a partner. We’re afraid of hurting someone, losing control, wrecking our relationships, our careers and turning into angry tomboys. Meanwhile, the experience of the women who attended my workshops is drastically different. Firstly, when we start to recognise our anger at a lower level, we can respond appropriately to the situation, instead of becoming enraged. Secondly, anger serves relationships because it becomes a gateway to feeling a wider range of emotions that make us more fragile, vulnerable and exposed. We will not have conscious and free access to our anxiety if we do not have full access to our anger. Nor will we allow ourselves unfettered, ecstatic joy unless we have an inner sense that at any moment, should anything happen, we can put a boundary appropriate to the situation. This allows for greater authenticity. If I don’t say what I want, how is the person I am in a relationship with supposed to know about it? Apart from being able to say the things I want to happen between us, I can also say what I don’t want. If I set boundaries, it is not to end the relationship, but to maintain it. This is very important because we often don’t set boundaries for fear that someone will be offended or the relationship will end or suffer. Meanwhile, the only people who are unhappy that you are setting boundaries are those who have hitherto benefited from the fact that you have not set them!
When you talk about anger in this way, I feel that it is a force that we can direct in any way we want. And the more of it we have, the easier it is not only to say ‘no’, but also to choose what works for us without feeling guilty or worrying about what others will say or whether it’s appropriate.
Because ‘positive anger’ is the next level of the relationship with anger. It is relatively easy to say what we do not want. However, if we stop only at this level, we can enter the role of a girl who, admittedly, knows that she does not want a lollipop, ice cream or patriarchy, but does not know what she then wants. This is a very important distinction, to know what you don’t want, but anger also shows us which of our needs or desires are unmet, what we care about. In the workshop we work with expressing ‘no’ and ‘yes’ out loud. I observe that we shout ‘no’ much longer, and we damn well need our ‘yes’ – to ourselves, our own ideas, our projects. Then we don’t have to concentrate on destroying or modernising what we see, on looking for culprits, but on creating something new that will be my ‘YES’. Buckminster Fuller said something that inspires me enormously: ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’. My new model is a society with access to conscious anger. For now, it seems to us that anger is a beast, something to be tamed. Meanwhile, when we listen to it, we come to terms with it, we can enter into dialogue with it, and from conversation a relationship is formed.
Women come to your workshops to build this relationship. What do they gain, what changes in them?
Sometimes amazing things happen. It is quite common that they ask for a raise and get it. There were those who started their business related to what they want, took the first steps to get out of violent relationships. I’ve had situations where some women returned to their passion, for example, started painting, got involved in activism, and they came out of a sense of powerlessness, they started acting, and then they felt their agency and as a consequence it turned out that they could quit antidepressants. What they also gain is recognition of their power while acknowledging the power of other women.
The more angry women we have, the more chance we have of creating a world where we stop blaming and start acting.
Audre Lorde, a black poet, activist and feminist, in her book ‘Sister Outsider’ wrote one sentence that is particularly important to me: ‘Your silence will not protect you’. I bet each of us has swallowed our ‘no’ or ‘yes’ a thousand times. Out of fear, out of convenience, out of love. But while silence may seem safer in the moment, it won’t make the world around you better or prevent you from becoming a victim of injustice. It would be more logical to speak up and make your point. You are more likely to make a difference by saying what you need and what you feel. And I do not want to be alone in this. None of us should be alone in this. That is why I do what I do.
Gabriela Klara Kowalska – is a researcher, bodyworker, stakeholder and trainer of Possibility Management, Facilitator of (FiT) Community Building by M. Scott Peck (a technology for group process navigation and community building). She supports women in embracing the power, energy and wisdom of their own anger. She teaches other women how to burn constructively and not get burned, and how to create important, beautiful and valuable things through this.
Author: Aleksandra Więcka
Ilustracja: unsplash.com
The text was published on wysokieobcasy.pl on 12 March 2022
