How can you channel your female rage?

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1:55Hello and welcome. I'm Kimberley Wilson, I'm a counselling psychologist and this is Complex. In this episode, I'm exploring anger and in particular, female rage. I think you're going to enjoy this episode and that's partly because for all of us, anger is an emotion that we find really hard to deal with. Either it comes out when it's not supposed to, which is bad, or we don't let it out at all, which is worse. But you know what? I'm going to let you in on a little secret. And this is absolutely true. I love anger.

2:42and in fact today I'm going to give anger a glow up a rebrand I am head of PR why because my friends if understood and used wisely anger can lead to great positive change so let me be your guide through the twisted knots of misinformation to the silky smooth strands of understanding

3:11let's crack on i've invited psychotherapist jennifer cox to explore anger with me what it is why we feel it and how we can learn to use it well hello jennifer hello kimberly thank you so much for being here could you tell me and our listeners a little bit about yourself I'm as you say a psychotherapist and author of a book called Women Are Angry. My professional life actually began working in forensic settings so that is with offenders who were mostly male and mostly very violent and I came to know aggression and anger pretty well. I also I came to know fear I would say but it was when I moved into private practice and started working exclusively more or less with women that I was shocked to discover very similar feelings in myself fearful feelings being stirred as a result of what was coming into the room Okay, so the fear you experienced in relation to violent male offenders felt very similar to your experience of women in the community, professionals Oh absolutely, very together women, very impressive, often highly educated women from all sorts of backgrounds with this sort of theme in common Well it sounds like you are the perfect person for us to be talking about this with And I think this is going to be a little bit of a punchy episode.

4:55Now, for everyone listening, do you know what your anger feels like? And are you able to express it appropriately? Now, it's quite possible that you don't because almost a third of people polled in one study said that they have a close friend or a family member who has trouble controlling their anger. And that's why anger gets such a bad rap. Not because of what it is, but because of what we do with it. So really, it's on us. Anger, in my opinion, hasn't been treated fairly. It's not given equal status with other emotions like sadness, for example. It's often dismissed or ignored, and we tend to misunderstand it, confusing it with aggression, which does sometimes show up with anger, but isn't the same thing.

5:45I think that's brilliant. I love that. I think it's really interesting when you come at this, particularly from a female point of view, just how far away from being able to feel any of those feelings as anger. And that's to do with our conditioning, that's to do with how we're brought up and what we're allowed to feel and to call our feelings. Lots of studies show that women experience or report anger as often, if not a little bit more, than men do. But men are more likely to act out aggressively. Yeah. And it's certainly my experience that a lot of women's anger is turned inwards. It's interesting as well, because if we look at it as a sort of energy that rises up in us as a response to threat or something that feels like injustice, then actually what maybe men are able and boys were able to do with that because of the way that they were brought up typically is kind of discharge it from their bodies faster so you know when you see little kids in the playground how differently we've we've taught them to play so boys kind of rough it out they'll go and play football they'll they'll sort of get it out of their system and i I think when you look at then little girls kind of in groups together and you see what happens with their aggression, already from really young ages, they're starting to call each other names, be mean to each other, leave each other out.

7:24Male aggression is more likely to be expressed physically, whereas female aggression is more likely to be expressed relationally. Absolutely that. The freezing out, the bullying. It's so sophisticated, isn't it? I mean, we're brilliant at it. And I think that also comes with how we're held in these little sort of pens of good behaviour. And it has to go somewhere. I think from what you're describing, actually with so much energy, I can feel your enthusiasm behind this, is that there's a real invitation for us. It's kind of screaming at us to really focus on female rage.

8:05I brought a story to the table today that I think really gets to the heart of the issue. So Jennifer, I'm going to read it out and let me know what you think. And for the sake of this person's privacy, I'm going to call her Vicky, but that's not her real name. Vicky says, I get so cross at work in meetings, usually with men who I feel take advantage or ride roughshod over my opinions. For instance, a senior male officer interrupted me several times in a case meeting. I was livid and I wanted to approach him afterwards and give him a right earful. I didn't on advice from friends, but I'm so close to doing this, I feel I could throw away my career.

8:47Oh. Help. Oh, Vicky. Bloody hell. it comes back to this point of earlier actually about how we're taught to take up very little space like i mean if you think about it kind of almost like geographically in the playground the boys have the whole field and the girls have the little corner and it sort of feels as if that's what then gets replicated through our lives in various different scenarios actually yeah this isn't it because vicky's anger in this instance feels legitimate right but she's the one that has to sit on suppress and withhold her anger because she might be unfairly judged for it she's the one that's at risk even though she's the one that was being a professional in that instance it's true and her friends are chipping in here and they're saying yeah be careful we women have to be careful not to rise up against that kind of behavior because we know what we stand to lose But also it's not just an interpretation or an assumption.

9:53Research shows that men and women are genuinely treated differently based on how they express their anger, right? So an angry, very much an inverted commas, woman in the workplace is given less status, less respect than an angry man. Definitely. She won't be celebrated for her assertiveness. She's bossy, not a boss. that's it yeah and we're minimized once again with these kind of things it's really hard because we're essentially going up against the patriarchy you know good luck

10:31very well godspeed and you would hope that other women in the room would go yeah yeah we agree they don't I have to say typically that isn't what happens because women are scared we're much more scared than we are outwardly angry yes there's the fear from the outside of the interpretation or the judgment but I also think there's a real fear about anger itself what does it mean if I'm angry what kind of person am I if I'm angry yeah will I hurt someone if I'm angry so I think there's something really to be understood about what anger is. And what I really hope is that by the end of this episode, if I do my PR job properly, people will be less afraid of anger and more willing to engage with it.

11:23I love this. Okay, let's get into the complexity.

11:30Alrighty, so I love to start with the clear definition. Jennifer, can you outline what you mean by anger and how would you define female rage in particular? If we're talking biologically what happens when something is making us angry, essentially it's our amygdala in the brain responding to something in the environment that it perceives as threat or injustice. So this doesn't work for me, this situation. And then what gets kicked off is a kind of cascade of adrenal responses. And our body, obviously, is trained to respond to these chemicals with fight or flight response. And this is the interesting bit, because this is where it's about interpretation.

12:24so the same chemical can be experienced a number of different ways and i believe that the way we're conditioned especially as women is to perceive this adrenalized rush like a surge of feeling as fear as flight as i've got to get away and make this stop make this go away yeah let's come back to calm yes and and this is what society tells us isn't it it there's so many messages around calm down dear let's regulate let's go and do some meditation let's go to a yoga retreat we call it stress but for boys experiencing this same set of feelings they are going to be maybe calling it excitement you know let's burn this off but that's fine because we get to run around in our field at right time.

13:21He's just being a bit rowdy. Exactly. He's showing off. And I think a lot of people believe that emotions are just in their minds. They're just thoughts or ideas that they have. Actually, what we know, what the research tells us is that emotions are the labels, the interpretation, the meaning that our brains give to the sensations we're experiencing in our body in response to something that we've seen in the environment. Exactly. In psychoanalysis, we call it the unconscious. But you know, this is an amygdala response. This is a very primitive level response. We may not consciously know something set us off, but our body knows.

13:58And I think the important part about that is to recognise the legitimacy in it. Don't just say, oh, I'm not angry. All this is wrong. Put this away. Because there is a message in there that your body is trying to tell you. And if you shut it down, then you're going to miss that message. That's so true, Kimberley. It's one of the things that I try to talk to patients about really early on in therapy is listen and respect what it is that your body is telling you. I meet a lot of women who, instead of feeling angry, will eat or exercise or overwork or, you know, all sorts of other activities that they use to try to recalibrate, get back to the sense of equilibrium.

14:47And what I would love to do at this stage is to offer a way for people listening to learn to identify and recognize the feelings that we are thinking actually might more likely be anger than anything else. I think for many women, what we experience or what we call all manner of other symptoms, from anxiety to depression, instead of that, we need to kind of reduce it all back to this body experience of sensation, physical messaging. I think all the way through from OCD to eating disorders to recurrent migraine we're repressing the feeling and it's staying in our bodies and it is coming out like it's trying to give us the message but it's coming out in all these ways that are massively off the mark and so far away from the original signals exactly you tell me what What does a gloriously angry woman look like?

15:56The gloriously angry woman is somebody that could be absolutely in her feeling and not doing anything with it other than let it guide her, steer her, so she can speak up. She can claim her space. She doesn't apologise. She doesn't explain herself. She's quite direct. She's quite truthful, I would say. we're worried about offending people aren't we and sort of saying the wrong thing getting into trouble gloriously angry woman is not worried about that yes it's about the comfort and the connection to yourself and if I'm angry about this and this is a reason that I'm angry about it and I don't have to go any further than that and now you and I both know where we are we both know where we stand we both know what I'm going to accept and what my boundaries are and so there's something in there about the capacity.

16:53And when you were talking earlier on about this link between that physiology of fear, I was thinking about that passivity, that invitation to be quiet and sit there versus connecting with the energy of it and the activity of it and using it as that kind of motive force. You're absolutely right. If you were to sit here and tell me, actually, it's made me angry that you said that or did that. And you were able to say it so straightforwardly. I think I could take that. It's not an attack. It's not an attack. Actually, I'm telling you something about me. Exactly. And I don't need to respond with, oh God, I can't believe I've made her angry.

17:32Like, it's okay. You can feel angry and I can think about that. And I might not even apologize to you. It might be that you feel angry and I feel justified and we stay in that position. And that's okay. I think what's beautiful about that is the honesty. I'm not sitting on my anger. I'm not suppressing it. I'm not pretending. Because when that happens, now I'm resentful. Now every time we meet up, I'm like, all right, Jennifer? And you might forget the kind of original sin, but our friendship is forever more scarred by it and we never recover.

18:12There's so much here and I love it all. and I want to clarify for the listener that anger is a feeling, not a behavior. And that's when we start to confuse anger with aggression. And the reason that I want to emphasize this again and again and again is because so many of us believe that our anger is dangerous, that it will harm us or others, and that that's the reason that we suppress it. If we think about how we respond to anger and I think we can probably put it on a scale of suppression through to a lifelong grudge so if we start at suppression what does suppressed anger look like so I mean Vicky is a good working example of this once she leaves that meeting having not given herself what she needs because I think that's really what this comes down to isn't it our body and then our mind is essentially being denied what it's telling us it needs and the more we do that the more we go through life doing that and doing these like micro suppressions all the way along the further away we get from the recognition.

19:37And I really worry about that because if your anger is an indication of injustice, if your anger is telling you something isn't right here, if you can't connect with that, then you can't use that information to change your circumstances. You're really vulnerable. Disconnection from your anger actually increases your vulnerability to whatever circumstances your body is trying to tell you are not right for you are harmful or dangerous or risky this is so true as you disconnect you kind of close down you stop listening to your nervous system or you override it you've been dismissed ignored overridden for so long a it becomes normalized b it's your coping mechanisms now you consider to be part of your personality right and this is the other thing isn't it?

20:31We're so taught to look after others and to prioritise them. It's such a dreadful, perfect storm because not only are we totally sublimating our own responses and needs, we're really prioritising those of others. So it must be my fault. If there's an issue here, oh, I'm so sorry. Are you okay? Yes. It's really measurable. This isn't just about a subjective feeling of unease. We know that people who chronically suppress their emotions have shorter overall mortality. They get sick earlier and they die younger. And this is about the kind of physiology of consistent, persistent chronic stress from that suppression.

21:13So that's suppression. If we move more to the middle of the scale now, what does healthy expression of anger look like? So, I mean, back to this gloriously angry woman. We'll call her Gloria. Gloria. Gloria the angry woman. She uses it as it should be used. So the feelings coming in, I kind of imagine it like a sort of smoothly oiled conveyor belt. She's feeling something, she's responding to it, she's verbalizing it maybe, or she's taking action because she knows something isn't working for her. She knows that this doesn't feel good and she's not letting it lie. Once we start to prioritize them, let's say angry feelings, I think we have so much more freedom actually and a new range of behaviors available to us.

22:02Because if we don't shut it down and sublimate it, then it's a new language. Whether that's words or behaviors. Yeah, it's a repertoire. Yeah, it kind of enhances and adds richness and complexity to your emotional world, I think. Exactly. And then also, if you think about the example of the two of us who were able to say, you tell me what I did made you angry. I tell you, okay, I hear you, but I don't apologize. That's a new way of being with our close relationships that we didn't have available to us before. And as you were saying about, you know, guarding against potentially more abusive relationship and that can be abusive with a small a i mean we know that the the scale on that is vast but if we're able to protect ourselves better because we're in general better at sort of coming to situations with a new take and a new perspective and able to sort of see ourselves as these organisms whose messages need to be respected and carried out it's kind of a sense of trust isn't it i trust myself i trust myself and i trust my feelings and i'm gonna honor them okay beautiful so i think the other end of suppression is grudge holding because to me a grudge is anger kept alive in order to punish the other person let's say we're in a relationship you cheated on me it's shattered my world I've lost trust I'm really really hurt and it's changed who I think I am and who I think you are if I can't bear those things if I can't do that process of grieving and understanding that my reality has changed I can hold on to my anger and I can say, I've been wronged.

24:06It was unfair. I'm the victim. You're the aggressor. And you will have to make it up to me for the rest of your life. And also, you don't get to be happy. I'm never going to forgive you. So you never get the pleasure of my forgiveness. You've really hit the nail on the head because I think there's something about grudge holding and the relationship with anger that the grudge holder has that is quite unique. Actually, we're just engaging in this quite perverse sort of relationship affair with this feeling that we're like harboring. And we're not going to talk about it. It's a bit of a secret. Yeah.

24:48It really does become about what the anger means to me, how tightly I can hold it, how I can feed it. Because that's the other thing that happens with a grudge is that the anger is ready to go home. So instead of saying, you know, whatever happened is the past, I say, do you remember that time that you did that thing? I haven't forgotten. I haven't forgotten. It's a sort of really redundant form of using your mind in a kind of, it's dead end.

25:21so for everyone listening who either already recognizes their anger or is beginning to then we do have some tips for you because it's one thing to follow an online trend and say stand on a hill with a bunch of strangers screaming and it's another to look inwards to look at yourself and say oh that emotion that i'm experiencing the forbidden one the one i'm never allowed to show, do you know what? I'm going to invite it in. Give it a cup of tea, bring it into the light. So Jennifer, what advice do you have for how we can embrace female rage and channel it in a healthy, productive way? I think we need to, first of all, enact the tune in so that in general we are getting better at our feelings so if we're so used to sort of either brushing things off overriding them or calling them something else i think we need to sort of dare ourselves to instead wonder if it's anger just pure and simple where it doesn't need to be apologetic.

26:36It doesn't need to be hidden. It can simply be a statement of a feeling. Yeah, I love that. So maybe if you're someone for whom anger is a very unfamiliar emotion, then you might want to start with a very, very, very tiny question, which is these feelings that I've labelled as whatever it might be, anxiety or worry, just to say, could this be anger open the door to the possibility and then just sit with that so if you take off its mask then you can have a conversation with anger maybe what do you need what do you want what are you telling me and then what is available to you suddenly as a woman that wasn't available to you before it's so empowering yeah it really is jennifer thank you so much.

27:31What I love about this conversation is that I think we've really given anger its rightful, respected place and sent aggression to another room. And I really, really hope that people get that distinction. Feeling angry doesn't necessarily have to take you to a dark, frightening, dangerous, difficult place. It can be really empowering. Thank you so much for having me. I've loved this. and thank you to everyone listening i hope you found this episode engagingly enraging and as you can hear i am on a mission to clean up the mental health space because it's a mess and to create more room for thought and reflection and you are definitely part of the show what would you like me to talk about email your questions and personal stories to complex at bbc.co.uk, if we use your story, we'll be sure to do so anonymously.

28:29But please note that I can't answer you personally, so if you have a concern about a medical or mental health issue, then I'd strongly urge you to seek expert help. And if you want details or further support with some of the issues raised in the podcast, you can find them at bbc.co.uk forward slash action line and the link is also in the show notes on BBC Sounds. and that's it my thanks again to jennifer cox and also to the lovely team at loftus media producer kirsten lass assistant producer katie chalder-clark researcher grace revel technical producer reuben huxtable digital editor richard berry science editor rami zabar studio engineer james nicolau sound engineer ruth rainey and at bbc sounds assistant commissioner izzy lee Poulton and Commissioning Editor Rhian Roberts.

29:22I'm Kimberley Wilson. Thank you for listening. Take care and go gently.

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