“Betty used to say, ‘Women need to get in touch with their anger and they need to do it all the time,’” Carlin said as the group of us discussed this month’s blog topic over zoom.

“Pleasure connects us to our anger,” said one writer.

“I actually have a really hard time with anger,” said another.

Each one of us shared our different experiences with anger. As we talked we felt we were on top of some connection about anger and being people walking around with vulvas. Then Carlin put it like this:

“If I’m grounded and having orgasms and I’m living in a rape culture, I’m gonna be angry. We’re 51% of the population, we represent 70% of those living in poverty, and we own 1% of the land. That’s a constant gaslight to live with. And if I’m not orgasmic, I can numb out in the face of this information.”

Anger gets me from unsure to exactly where I need to be, and has been the focused first step along the path away from the gaslighting and disempowerment. She comes in like a lightening’s strike, a mountain’s stomp. I love her ferocity and freeing power. When she comes through, sizzling like a shooting star, words find me instantly. I know what’s dear to me and my in vulnerability is strength. I know my boundaries without question. And there is no freedom without a boundary; cells can’t be themselves without their intelligent walls. The trick is to let anger flow through and not get attached, or to have to rely on her as the only mode of transportation from here to there.

I swung the bat as hard as I could, striking the couch cushions repeatedly until I felt release sweep through my body. My support person stood behind me holding space for my rage. I screamed, “Fuuuck youuuuuu!” and I kept swinging even though I was tired. The meadow and forest beyond did not belittle or request that I be smaller but absorbed my cries. In every grief ritual I’ve participated in there has been an anger station, a place where people can hit some cushions with a foam-covered bat and scream. It was the first place I wasn’t told to hide my anger or dress it up in niceness, but to let it out. And it felt wonderful.

There’s this quote I like from Clarissa Pinkola Estes, “I’m really friendly but I’m not quite tame.” The unpredictability, danger, and innocence of this statement puts me in touch with my wild undomesticated self, the one capable of embodying my own wilderness and anger. Though she’s taken a lot of abuse in our training into domestication, anger is just another logical and level-headed emotion in our array of emotional possibilities. In the Gottman’s recent book, Fight Right, Why We Fight the Way We Fight, they talk about how anger is actually an approach emotion. Meaning that when we’re angry we’re actually seeking connection not distance. Essentially, we are angry because we care.

Anger brings us face to face with the undomesticated and undomesticate-able parts of us. Being human can be heartbreaking and it takes courage to human well. We weren’t designed to be humaning alone. We were meant to human as community. And by “community” I mean our intrinsic connection to each other and our beautiful little sliver of the planet. I’m not talking about corporate branding used to sell us crap, or whatever some tech bro can teach an algorithm to spew out to commodify and manipulate we the public. The aloneness and loneliness are capitalism’s design for increased profits, not humanity’s true nature.

Held by each other we can go deep into our rage and heartbreak and not drown. Community is the outrigger that allows the individual to go as far out into the sea of emotion as needed and still be able to get back. We can do a lot of good processing alone, but it’s the group that holds the key to the leaps and bounds possible, the big jumps in our healing and the doing of our work in the world. This is why the Bodysex groups and grief rituals work.

When we allow our anger, we caress order’s other half, chaos: the feral, the backwards, the finality of irreversible sword strikes, and that great teacher of life, Death. Anger’s realm is the kind but not necessarily the nice, the friendly but not the tame. We’re a little bit out of control when we’re angry, a little too in touch with backwards logic than we’re accustomed to; the truth that sometimes the way up is down.

Our society runs on the 4 heart addictions as the strategy for maintaining control: intensity, fixation on what’s not working, perfection, and needing to know. These work in some ways and even provide solace, but they’re addictions after all, so the foundation of them as life strategies or methodologies is sand, not bedrock. As long as we’re suppressing our anger and buying things like good little consumers, we’re lobbing off at least half of who we are.

Betty and Carlin observed that once women did Bodysex and claimed responsibility for giving themselves pleasure and orgasms, they began doing things with their lives other than what they’d been trained was “right.” They stopped behaving as the people they’d been socialized to be and began demanding change, and manifesting their life dreams. They became people who could hold their own pleasure and also their anger. It gives me solace thinking about Betty and the other women before me learning how to express their rage and feel their pleasure and thus changing the fabric of things so that the world I get to live in is different from theirs. My goal is to do that for the coming generations too. We do not have to be victims of the gaslighting of our culture. Once we see it for what it is we can choose differently. We can scream into the meadow on our hands and knees and cry off the puppet strings that keep us tethered to a system of suppression and scarcity. Anger is the match strike that illuminates our clarity.

Photo by Samuel Scrimshaw on Unsplash

Watch my simple technique for releasing anger

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