Anger as Information
Are you a good girl?
Are you friendly? Nice? Accommodating?
Are you light? Flowy? Easy to be around?
Phew. You are a good girl.
Wait. What was that?
You are also angry?
No. You can’t be angry. Angry doesn’t fit in this equation.
If you are a good girl then you can stay. You are accepted. You belong.
If you are angry then…well, then we don’t know what to do with you.
There is no room for angry in the definition of a good girl.
I was working with a client (I'll call her Sofia) who was sitting with something genuinely unfair that had happened to her at work. Workplace discrimination, micro-aggression, micro-managing, bad boss unfair.
You know it. You have experienced it. Or at least observed it.
And her first move, before she even let herself feel the weight, was to qualify it.
It's not the worst thing that's ever happened to someone. Other people have it way worse.
Which sounds like perspective.
But it’s not.
It’s dismissing. In fact, it’s practically gaslighting herself.
Here's what I told her:
Let yourself be angry about it. It's an injustice that you have experienced. Is it the worst injustice in the world? No. But that doesn’t mean you don't get to be mad about it. As soon as you start to qualify your injustices, you're stuck in a cycle that does not serve you. Let yourself feel angry, really angry.
Most of us — especially women, especially the ones who were raised to be good girls — skip right past the I AM REALLY EFFING ANGRY feelings and right onto the justification and explaining away. We go from an inkling of anger right back to good girl.
And when that happens — when you don’t let yourself get angry, it doesn’t just go away. It festers into something worse. It becomes self-blame.
Your anger manifests as beating yourself up, using your own anger as a weapon against yourself.
As I told Sofia: Because you're not expressing this anger outwardly — in the direction it deserves to go, you are telling yourself that it’s your fault. When you can't say to somebody 'this is your fault,' you drop into 'it's my fault.'
Not only that, but not letting yourself get angry about something can leave you angry about that too. As Sadie (not her real name) said about processing her divorce after decades of marriage, “I still feel anger at times, but it's more anger at not being able to get angry.”
And there are real benefits to letting yourself be angry. The three that I always point out to my clients are:
Anger is a barometer. You wouldn’t get angry about something that didn’t matter to you so let your anger be a signal that you really care about something.
Anger is a boundary. When you get mad enough to say, you know what? I'm not going to take this anymore, you are setting a boundary. A line that will not be crossed.
Anger is a catalyst. Every social justice movement has started with anger. Civil Rights? Anger. Women’s March? Anger. Black Lives Matter? Anger. End of Apartheid? Anger. Woman Life Freedom? Anger. Anger brings about collective change. It’s not the fuel we use to start the work. We don’t want to be there forever, but damn does it spark a flame.
So, how do we get the anger out without assault charges or a scorched relationship?
Write it out. Emmy (pseudonym) told me “I wrote one, two, three pages. There was a lot of defensiveness in there to start out. I talked about how knowing that you're the one who's the backstop for everything — all the car breakdowns, broken toilets, new fridges, medical emergencies — it's a stressor. It was good to get it out.”
Vent it out. Find someone safe to be in your anger with. Get it out. Get messy. Get down and dirty with it. Don't apologize. Find the space and the person. Let. It. All. Go.
Smash it out. Go to a rage room. Scream into a pillow. Go to an axe throwing range. Close yourself into a room and scream until your throat hurts. Buy a punching bag. Throw a temper tantrum. Physically release that which is knotted inside you.
Work it out. Go for a run. Lift heavy weights. Go to a kickboxing class. Participate in a CrossFit challenge. Join a Spin class. Burn energy. Burn anger.
Blast it out. I have no data to back this up, but Nordic countries rank near the top of the happiness scale and also listen to a lot of Metal. Just saying. Throw your noise canceling headphones on, ask Siri for some Black Metal and see where it takes you.
It’s time to let the good girl go.
