Reclaiming Anger as a Woman
Definition
You were taught to do something with your anger before it could be expressed. To turn it into hurt, into niceness, into helpfulness, into silence. You learned that your anger was dangerous, or unfeminine, or that it made people leave, or that it made the room go cold in a way you had to fix. You learned to manage it so quickly and so completely that you eventually lost access to it. What you have instead is anxiety, depression, chronic tension in the body, a flatness where vitality used to be. The anger did not disappear. It went underground. Reclaiming it is not becoming someone who rages. It is recovering the information the anger was carrying and learning to use it.
Origins & Context
Harriet Lerner in The Dance of Anger makes the foundational argument: women's anger is information. It tells you when something is wrong, when a boundary has been crossed, when a relationship is out of balance. The woman who has lost her anger has lost a primary navigation system.
Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider writes about anger as a legitimate and necessary response to injustice, naming the suppression of Black women's anger as a specific tool of oppression. Her framework extends to all women socialized to make their anger invisible for the comfort of those around them.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves reclaims anger as an aspect of the wild woman: the part of the female psyche that is instinctual, protective, and knows the difference between what is life-giving and what is not. The woman who has suppressed her anger has suppressed her instinctual knowing.
The anger did not disappear when you learned to be good. It went underground. Reclaiming it is not becoming someone who rages. It is recovering the information it was carrying all along.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
The reclaiming of anger shows up first as discomfort. The feeling, in the body, of something that has not been felt before, or has not been felt in years. It is uncomfortable. That is correct. It has been held for a long time.
It shows up as the ability to say no without a paragraph of justification. The anger knows what it is protecting. It does not need to explain itself at length.
It shows up as the unexpected vitality. Women who reclaim their anger often describe feeling more alive, more creative, more capable of sustained action. The energy that was being used to suppress the anger is now available for living.
It shows up as the change in relationship dynamics. Some relationships cannot survive the woman's anger becoming visible. Those relationships were organized around her suppression. That information is useful.
Generational Transmission
Through the maternal line: The mother who could not have her anger was trained by her mother's relationship to anger, and her mother before her. Women in the maternal line who survived by being agreeable, who protected themselves through compliance, who learned that anger cost more than it was worth, passed those survival strategies to their daughters as necessity. The daughter inherits not just the behavior but the nervous system state that goes with it: the quick dampening of any rising feeling that might be dangerous. Reclaiming anger in the mother line often requires grieving the mothers who could not have it first.
Through the paternal line: The father's relationship to female anger is formative. The father who could not tolerate his daughter's anger taught her that her anger was intolerable. The father who punished it, who went cold, who left the room, trained her to manage her anger before it could reach him. The father who could receive her anger, who could stay present while she was upset, who demonstrated that her feelings were survivable, gave her a very different internal landscape. Most daughters of critical or volatile fathers have complicated relationships to their own anger because anger in the presence of an unpredictable person was genuinely dangerous.
Nikita's Note
Reclaiming anger is not the same as becoming angry at everyone who ever wronged you. It is not the discharge of decades of suppressed feeling onto the people nearest to you.
It is more like: learning to hear the information again. To notice when you feel it, name it internally, and use it as data before it either suppresses itself or explodes.
The women I have seen do this work become both calmer and clearer. Calmer because the suppression takes enormous energy. Clearer because they can now hear what the anger is telling them about what matters, what needs protection, and what needs to change.
From the work
The anger did not disappear when you learned to be good. It went underground. Reclaiming it is not becoming someone who rages. It is recovering the information it was carrying all along.From Healing the Mother Wound by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Daughter's Lexicon
See all in The Daughter's Lexicon →I wrote about this in Healing the Mother Wound — available on Amazon.