Anger

When I was a fifteen/sixteen, I was friends with a group of kids who called themselves The Baldies who shaved their heads, wore combat boots and suspenders, and tried to rescue other teens who were being converted to Neo-Nazism by an influential adult White-Supremacist organizer. My friends would talk to the kids about working class solidarity, and how racism wasn’t the way to go. Talking was one element of their approach. Making a culture of resistance that was based in basically hanging out, looking good, believing in equality was another. And then there was “Where they go, we go,” which meant making our city inhospitable for Neo-Nazis by beating them up. This little group of teens eventually went on to help form Anti-Racist Action, affiliated groups of young people with the same type of approach in different cities across the country. There’s a great podcast about ARA that was turned into a book and I think they’re making a curriculum too: It Did Happen Here

(not a photo of me, but a photo from another recently released book We Go Where They Go: the story of Anti Racist Action)

Anyway, in theory, I really wanted to go fight Nazi’s with my friends, but I always bowed out, saying I was scared of violence.

My fear of violence didn’t seem right. It wasn’t quite the right words, but I didn’t know what I was feeling. My friends weren’t typically angry when they would go out to fight Nazi’s, so it was confusing. I didn’t know how to separate anger and violence. I may or may not have really wanted to get in a physical confrontation with Nazi’s, but the fear wasn’t that, it was what would happen if I felt my own anger. I had the unconscious child-belief that if I felt anger the world would explode.

In therapy, people are often afraid of their anger, and when they express this fear it is usually a child-self so apparent there. They are afraid if they feel their anger there will be violence, so I like to work on uncoupling the two. We practice feeling anger, making a little space for it in the body, slowing it down. I ask the questions, does it feel like a volcano, if so, can you feel the lava kind of flowing down instead of exploding out the top? Is it like a rod in your spine? If so, can you imagine it expanding and taking up even more space inside? How does it move? If you were to attend to the anger, what would the expression be? Words? Actions? It doesn’t have to make sense, and nobody is getting hurt in this moment. Often there are specific, forbidden, scary visuals. They say “I want to strangle someone,” or “I imagine ripping their face off.” As a therapist, I welcome these visuals as physiological manifestations of the fight response, and invite the person to just be with that, knowing they are not actually going to do that, but just feeling in the body what happens when they hold that image for a second. Usually there is some relief.

Sometimes I do embodiment exercises and work on conceptualizing anger in a way that does not equate anger with violence, because anger unfelt usually becomes depression, entitlement, self-loathing, anxiety, or it explodes out at a smaller thing, becoming violence. Anger unfelt makes us turn on the people we love, or the people we are in community or connection with. 

Anger is one of the primary emotions, along with joy, fear, disgust, and sadness. It is supposed to be felt in a time limited way - mobilizing the body for a solution, a defense, to uphold a boundary or belief. No one who I’ve worked with to help them feel their anger has ever gone out and been violent. In fact it's the opposite. They become more grounded, more steady, more accepting of the people they love or are in connection with, more clear in their needs and boundaries. More able to feel happiness and fullness of self.

(If you’re in Pittsburgh, I have this in-person group coming up - also 2 other in person groups, one on Mindfulness, stretching, yoga for trauma - 8 sessions, and one that’s called Embodied Boundaries for Care Workers - 4 sessions. Let me know if you want more info about any of them.)