I have a friend that gives her anger a name and face...in turn she's able to have sympathy and compassion for this "anger." And is willing to do the hard work to dissect and I understand what is really going on - to see the anger for what it is. To walk up to the anger and shake her hand. I think it's a beautiful practice.
This arrived while I am reading "The Guilty Feminist: You Don't Have to Be Perfect to Overthrow the Patriarchy" by Deborah Frances-White, who is the host of the podcast of the same name. I am learning a lot by reading this book and recommend it to other "guilty feminists" who have difficulty finding their voice and expressing their rage. --Barbara Ray
I scrolled through the comments and found that there were no familiarly-male names leaving their thoughts.
Part of me really liked that and wanted to leave it that way. Create space for your rage through my silence.
But, if only because you said you were worried that you’d lose male subscribers, I wanted to chime in that your feelings are valid and don’t deserve to be shamed via men’s sulky ostracism. Your experiences are real. I witness them all the time.
It’s occurring to me that maybe this makes me Will Ferrel’s character, lol. Wanting to use my male identity to uplift women, but not willing to shut up and step aside to do it.
A major reason I meditate is so that I am not causing any harm through my privilege, through my existence… at least for that daily hour. Taking to the cushion to make room for others to shine.
Thanks Geoffe I really appreciate this. Will is here too :) but yes no surprise that it's mostly women in the comments, but I trust that most men (or most parts of all men!) are also pretty peed off with patriarchy and the damage it causes them & others, and are supportive of more equality. I did lose a few subscribers but no more than usual (just something that happens as you get more on your list) and I gained a couple of paid subscribers too. All good! (good to have you here)
Outstanding piece of writing and wonderful comments. The longest job I held guided me into a traditionally male career. In that time I saw the good the bad and the ugly. Sadly women are still the targets for violence, servitude, manipulation and abuse. In the US a segment of our political body are keen to undo much that women have achieved and they appear to have awakened those who understand we won’t go back.
Rage, fear and feelings of never getting it right sometimes plague my nightmares. I try to frame it as my mind clearing out the junk it no longer need.
Thank you Satya for making my life better. Love and light to all ❤️🙏
Ack, sounds like your career was sometimes tough - and yes, things have gone backwards for a little while, hopefully they'll swing back again... always lovely to have you here 💚
This is going to be a controversial comment, and I hope it doesn't offend anyone. I am just pouring it straight out with minimal editing. I have no intention of seeing the movie, so maybe I am not getting the point. I came of age in the 70s. I am an engineer by education. My wounds and my rage do not come from the patriarchy, they are from the women who shunned me in school (because I loved math and science) and quickly outgrew Barbie and all the girly stuff. My wounds came from my mother, who constantly gave me messages that I was not pretty enough, my hair was not right, etc. To this day, I cringe when I look at photos of myself because of those wounds, but I forgave her because I know her love for me was strong. The patriarchy warped her in that post WW2 generation, but I didn't experience that directly.
Who gave me the empowering messages? My very conservative father who made me believe that I could handle a technical education at a college where women were in conspicuously small supply. And believed I was beautiful even when my mother didn't. My uncles, my male cousin were all very supportive. Because of that support from the men in my life, from my husband of 44 years, and from my proud sons, I could dismiss the oppressive and dismissive comments from the other type of men.
In all of my years of work in technical and demanding fields, I never had to fend off oppressive comments, even when there still few women there.
Now in my senior years, I still get the odd looks and a bit of shunning from women my age. They get annoyed that I can chat with men about work related topics. For a while when I retired, I did a lot of masking to fit in, just for the sake of socializing a bit, but I am over that.
We need to build a better way — men and women together, from a foundation of love and forgiveness. Whatever it takes to heal your rage is a good foundation for that.
Hi Jo - hurray for the supportive men in your life, and I'm sorry to hear about the wounding you experienced from women - horrible to have to either mask or be rejected for the wonderfulness of who you are. Your last sentence - YES! Thanks for your contribution - I'm really happy how different people have brought up different angles/points so we get a more and more complete picture of this massively complex subject. 🙏
Powerful piece, Satya. Thank you for holding space for an essential part of change, the part that comes first. At first I thought I might see the Barbie movie, when I heard that it had some commentary about modern society. But now, the more I hear about it .... I think not.
I had an out of control angry and abusive mother so becoming okay with my own rage and recognizing it as a messenger is still something I’m working with. Yet. It has come up for me a lot in the past few years- when my father passed away and certain family members added to the pain instead of alleviating it. As a new mother- encountering allllll the ways patriarchy undermines our power and community while we undergo the labor and love of raising tiny humans.
My rage is sacred. It is powerful. It is protective. It is an alarm bell, warning others when they have crossed a holy boundary. It lets me know when my divinity is being violated. When the dignity of others is being trampled.
I am not ready to contain it yet, but rather channel it. In the way I ask questions of the systems that oppress. In how I declare with fierceness, “This is NOT okay,” even when I don’t have the solutions yet.
My rage is a holy fire that one day will fertilize a new way of being, but first I have to allow it to burn and purify and clarify my voice.
What a beautiful contribution to this conversation, Mariah - thank you. Yes - much harder to work with our own in safe/healthy ways when we've been on the receiving end... Your wee one is lucky to have such a fierce & self-reflective mother. 🙏🏻
Just this year I went to my therapist, asking her for help because I was so angry. I wasn’t supposed to be that angry. I wasn’t allowed to be that angry. I described to her the situation that had caused my rage and she said, “Yes, of course you’re angry.” Then suggested I try some things, like screaming or breaking something. Which was a revelation. I could let my anger out? It was okay to feel angry?
The next time I got angry, I went into our garage and found an old flower pot I was never going to use and I bashed it to bits with a hammer. It felt so amazing. Like a revolution. Here’s to embracing our rage!
I’ve felt more rage this last two years than ever before. Rage at folks being asleep and unaware of the disparity in wealth, rage at not being heard or allowed to take up space and rage at a broken NHS system and compassion for those who work within in. I’ve channeled a lot of it into gardening into my 2023 project; Project Bloom and knowing that we can influence change for our children and challenge the things that make us angry and better understand why! ✨💖 Thank you for writing this piece!
Very interesting but I have never experienced rage. I have been very annoyed, frustrated and like this morning cross. There must be many more synonyms. Just having a morning cuppa after two hours in the garden doing jobs which in earlier days would have taken one hour and I would have done twice the work! Should I be enraged by this? No I am just getting older and slower. Discuss.
I have yet to see this movie but I’ve read several takes on it now. I suppose I will have to watch it at some stage to form my own opinions.
I never had an actual Barbie doll (I had a Cindy and another one that was Barbie’s younger sister I think) but of course I had friends who had them and we played with them together.
I don’t have any particular memories of us caring about what the dolls looked like or comparing them to each other but yet I do wonder that if there were greater diversity how would that have affected us and subsequently how we would have viewed our bodies at a later stage in life?
I think it's a great question Linn. I remember hearing that Barbie's anatomy isn't actually physically feasible - but very much plays into the stereotypical 'ideal women's physique'... my mum just said she didn't understand why this wasn't made more of in the movie, that Barbies were always 'tools of oppression' for little girls - but my spouse just said that they were the first dolls that weren't babies, and so at least they were adult women... it's complicated ; )
Good point too Satya, from your partner that Barbie dolls are grown women and not babies. This in and of it self affects the type of role playing done with them. I must ask my mum who was a play school teacher for 40 years what she’s observed in this capacity when it comes to different types of play.
Rage is like a tornado! I can feel your rage and deep frustration. I have debated wether to see this movie because of these such feeling. I played with Barbie as a little girl growing up in a very Welsh rural farming community and I remember trying to cut her boobs off..they weren’t representative of me, but neither were her long legs (I didn’t chop those off) I did also crop her hair and dyed it red! All at the age of 7.
“My” recent rage followed an incident where I visited a patient in the community and she spat and was outrageously offensive to my black female colleague.( I can’t repeat her language here because it will offend the readers and enrage me all over again).
Needless to say we both walked out of her house and I burst into tears appalled at the offence this lovely unassuming woman and friend had had to endure. I felt retched. She hugged me close and said “ oh don’t worry my lovely I’m used to it”.. I burst into sobs of outrage. I could feel the tornado brewing! And I didn’t know what to do with it. So many things I wanted to say or enact but the aftermath of the tornado left me frozen with despair. I had no idea what to do with that rage!
Thanks for sharing Beth, what a horrible thing to happen. Yes, rage on someone else's behalf... I recognise that. I also recognise something of being the target of abuse (your colleague) and needing to find a way of holding any reactions to the abuse plus being the one who ends up comforting others who were upset on their behalf. It leads me to question how can we find space for everyone to have their own reactions and how, especially as a white person but also as a straight person, a middle class person etc,, I can help to facilitate that... Does that make sense?
I wonder if a lot of this managing of our experience of oppression happens behind the scenes (your colleague was (horribly) 'used to it') but comes at great cost. I always try to be careful when speaking about the oppression other groups experience - there may be similarities with my own experience of being a woman, but I can also never understand what it's like to be a person of colour in a racist world, or trans in a transphobic world etc... there's a whole other conversation there. Thanks for being here x
I, too, can feel rage and it feels so important for oppressed folks to allow these feelings to be present (though, it's often not pleasant!) and to notice when they're trying to deny them or beat themselves up about it. Over the last year I worked with a supervisor who is a body psychotherapist who really relished working with anger - I found her approach really helpful. She would encourage us to not direct it outwards or inwards but into the ground - to let the ground take it, channeling that energy into our legs and feet. I can see the argument for letting it outwards, but there was something really helpful about not perpetuating the cycle of rage by letting it ricochet between people.
Oh I like that. I find it hard to know where to channel the powerful energy of rage. And I do believe it needs to go somewhere, but often outwards or inwards isn’t helpful long term.
Thanks Helen - I totally agree that unleashing our undiluted rage on other people is (maybe never? maybe almost never?) the best thing. Love the sound of that embodied way of working with it, and refreshing to find someone who's up for working with it. Thanks for sharing!
I can honestly say that I don’t do rage. It was never part of my family lexicon & I had a very blessed upbringing surrounded by love.
That’s not to say that I haven’t experienced things to rage about (divorce, degenerative disease anyone?). But I just don’t find it helpful. I put its energy into other emotions; regret, disappointment, sadness. I guess that I feel these more (too?) deeply, so it’s in no way a ‘get out of jail card’.
I hadn’t thought about any of this til today, so thank you 🙏
Thanks for sharing Caroline - it's good to hear other perspectives - it sounds like you're not missing out here - and that other emotions do the 'work' of rage for you. For me, it's not a 'choice' to experience rage - it's just there - but mostly VERY much in the shady shadows. I guess I'm aiming towards making good use of ALL the different emotions that arise, by funneling them into something constructive - but some of them need more careful handling than others! Glad to have you here.
PS. My partner seems to live in a constant state of rage ( we don’t live together thank goodness!). He has deep reasons to do so, from terrible events in his past. But it doesn’t help you ‘ in the now’. But neither do my emotions either. I suppose I balance him out. Life is weird, isn’t it?
I'm always interested in how couples can end up sharing things like this - one person 'does organising' and the other isn't bothered by being disorganised, one 'does anger' and the other doesn't, one 'does stress' and the other is totally laid back...
Thank you thank you for this piece!
I have a friend that gives her anger a name and face...in turn she's able to have sympathy and compassion for this "anger." And is willing to do the hard work to dissect and I understand what is really going on - to see the anger for what it is. To walk up to the anger and shake her hand. I think it's a beautiful practice.
I like it - and very in tune with Internal Family Systems!
This feels so timely, as I've been dealing with my own rage and trying to find healthy ways to be with it. Thank you!
This arrived while I am reading "The Guilty Feminist: You Don't Have to Be Perfect to Overthrow the Patriarchy" by Deborah Frances-White, who is the host of the podcast of the same name. I am learning a lot by reading this book and recommend it to other "guilty feminists" who have difficulty finding their voice and expressing their rage. --Barbara Ray
Thanks Barbara - off to look it up! x
I scrolled through the comments and found that there were no familiarly-male names leaving their thoughts.
Part of me really liked that and wanted to leave it that way. Create space for your rage through my silence.
But, if only because you said you were worried that you’d lose male subscribers, I wanted to chime in that your feelings are valid and don’t deserve to be shamed via men’s sulky ostracism. Your experiences are real. I witness them all the time.
It’s occurring to me that maybe this makes me Will Ferrel’s character, lol. Wanting to use my male identity to uplift women, but not willing to shut up and step aside to do it.
A major reason I meditate is so that I am not causing any harm through my privilege, through my existence… at least for that daily hour. Taking to the cushion to make room for others to shine.
I don’t know. It’s complicated.
But you won’t lose me as a subscriber.
Thanks Geoffe I really appreciate this. Will is here too :) but yes no surprise that it's mostly women in the comments, but I trust that most men (or most parts of all men!) are also pretty peed off with patriarchy and the damage it causes them & others, and are supportive of more equality. I did lose a few subscribers but no more than usual (just something that happens as you get more on your list) and I gained a couple of paid subscribers too. All good! (good to have you here)
Outstanding piece of writing and wonderful comments. The longest job I held guided me into a traditionally male career. In that time I saw the good the bad and the ugly. Sadly women are still the targets for violence, servitude, manipulation and abuse. In the US a segment of our political body are keen to undo much that women have achieved and they appear to have awakened those who understand we won’t go back.
Rage, fear and feelings of never getting it right sometimes plague my nightmares. I try to frame it as my mind clearing out the junk it no longer need.
Thank you Satya for making my life better. Love and light to all ❤️🙏
Ack, sounds like your career was sometimes tough - and yes, things have gone backwards for a little while, hopefully they'll swing back again... always lovely to have you here 💚
This is going to be a controversial comment, and I hope it doesn't offend anyone. I am just pouring it straight out with minimal editing. I have no intention of seeing the movie, so maybe I am not getting the point. I came of age in the 70s. I am an engineer by education. My wounds and my rage do not come from the patriarchy, they are from the women who shunned me in school (because I loved math and science) and quickly outgrew Barbie and all the girly stuff. My wounds came from my mother, who constantly gave me messages that I was not pretty enough, my hair was not right, etc. To this day, I cringe when I look at photos of myself because of those wounds, but I forgave her because I know her love for me was strong. The patriarchy warped her in that post WW2 generation, but I didn't experience that directly.
Who gave me the empowering messages? My very conservative father who made me believe that I could handle a technical education at a college where women were in conspicuously small supply. And believed I was beautiful even when my mother didn't. My uncles, my male cousin were all very supportive. Because of that support from the men in my life, from my husband of 44 years, and from my proud sons, I could dismiss the oppressive and dismissive comments from the other type of men.
In all of my years of work in technical and demanding fields, I never had to fend off oppressive comments, even when there still few women there.
Now in my senior years, I still get the odd looks and a bit of shunning from women my age. They get annoyed that I can chat with men about work related topics. For a while when I retired, I did a lot of masking to fit in, just for the sake of socializing a bit, but I am over that.
We need to build a better way — men and women together, from a foundation of love and forgiveness. Whatever it takes to heal your rage is a good foundation for that.
Hi Jo - hurray for the supportive men in your life, and I'm sorry to hear about the wounding you experienced from women - horrible to have to either mask or be rejected for the wonderfulness of who you are. Your last sentence - YES! Thanks for your contribution - I'm really happy how different people have brought up different angles/points so we get a more and more complete picture of this massively complex subject. 🙏
Powerful piece, Satya. Thank you for holding space for an essential part of change, the part that comes first. At first I thought I might see the Barbie movie, when I heard that it had some commentary about modern society. But now, the more I hear about it .... I think not.
I loved it! But it's not for everyone!
I had an out of control angry and abusive mother so becoming okay with my own rage and recognizing it as a messenger is still something I’m working with. Yet. It has come up for me a lot in the past few years- when my father passed away and certain family members added to the pain instead of alleviating it. As a new mother- encountering allllll the ways patriarchy undermines our power and community while we undergo the labor and love of raising tiny humans.
My rage is sacred. It is powerful. It is protective. It is an alarm bell, warning others when they have crossed a holy boundary. It lets me know when my divinity is being violated. When the dignity of others is being trampled.
I am not ready to contain it yet, but rather channel it. In the way I ask questions of the systems that oppress. In how I declare with fierceness, “This is NOT okay,” even when I don’t have the solutions yet.
My rage is a holy fire that one day will fertilize a new way of being, but first I have to allow it to burn and purify and clarify my voice.
What a beautiful contribution to this conversation, Mariah - thank you. Yes - much harder to work with our own in safe/healthy ways when we've been on the receiving end... Your wee one is lucky to have such a fierce & self-reflective mother. 🙏🏻
Just this year I went to my therapist, asking her for help because I was so angry. I wasn’t supposed to be that angry. I wasn’t allowed to be that angry. I described to her the situation that had caused my rage and she said, “Yes, of course you’re angry.” Then suggested I try some things, like screaming or breaking something. Which was a revelation. I could let my anger out? It was okay to feel angry?
The next time I got angry, I went into our garage and found an old flower pot I was never going to use and I bashed it to bits with a hammer. It felt so amazing. Like a revolution. Here’s to embracing our rage!
Yay to pot smashing!! 🌟
I’ve felt more rage this last two years than ever before. Rage at folks being asleep and unaware of the disparity in wealth, rage at not being heard or allowed to take up space and rage at a broken NHS system and compassion for those who work within in. I’ve channeled a lot of it into gardening into my 2023 project; Project Bloom and knowing that we can influence change for our children and challenge the things that make us angry and better understand why! ✨💖 Thank you for writing this piece!
Your project sounds amazing Claire, do post a link. And yes, NHS, wealth disparity, polycrises... X
https://open.substack.com/pub/creativelyconscious/p/the-soil-web?r=506nf&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post here’s the most recent! Bloom is my word of the year weaving through everything I do. Teaching me a lot too!!
Wow, looks fab! What a beautiful project ☀
Very interesting but I have never experienced rage. I have been very annoyed, frustrated and like this morning cross. There must be many more synonyms. Just having a morning cuppa after two hours in the garden doing jobs which in earlier days would have taken one hour and I would have done twice the work! Should I be enraged by this? No I am just getting older and slower. Discuss.
No shoulds... Just how we are - & we are all different 😊
I have yet to see this movie but I’ve read several takes on it now. I suppose I will have to watch it at some stage to form my own opinions.
I never had an actual Barbie doll (I had a Cindy and another one that was Barbie’s younger sister I think) but of course I had friends who had them and we played with them together.
I don’t have any particular memories of us caring about what the dolls looked like or comparing them to each other but yet I do wonder that if there were greater diversity how would that have affected us and subsequently how we would have viewed our bodies at a later stage in life?
I think it's a great question Linn. I remember hearing that Barbie's anatomy isn't actually physically feasible - but very much plays into the stereotypical 'ideal women's physique'... my mum just said she didn't understand why this wasn't made more of in the movie, that Barbies were always 'tools of oppression' for little girls - but my spouse just said that they were the first dolls that weren't babies, and so at least they were adult women... it's complicated ; )
Good point too Satya, from your partner that Barbie dolls are grown women and not babies. This in and of it self affects the type of role playing done with them. I must ask my mum who was a play school teacher for 40 years what she’s observed in this capacity when it comes to different types of play.
It’s most certainly complicated.
Rage is like a tornado! I can feel your rage and deep frustration. I have debated wether to see this movie because of these such feeling. I played with Barbie as a little girl growing up in a very Welsh rural farming community and I remember trying to cut her boobs off..they weren’t representative of me, but neither were her long legs (I didn’t chop those off) I did also crop her hair and dyed it red! All at the age of 7.
“My” recent rage followed an incident where I visited a patient in the community and she spat and was outrageously offensive to my black female colleague.( I can’t repeat her language here because it will offend the readers and enrage me all over again).
Needless to say we both walked out of her house and I burst into tears appalled at the offence this lovely unassuming woman and friend had had to endure. I felt retched. She hugged me close and said “ oh don’t worry my lovely I’m used to it”.. I burst into sobs of outrage. I could feel the tornado brewing! And I didn’t know what to do with it. So many things I wanted to say or enact but the aftermath of the tornado left me frozen with despair. I had no idea what to do with that rage!
Thanks for sharing Beth, what a horrible thing to happen. Yes, rage on someone else's behalf... I recognise that. I also recognise something of being the target of abuse (your colleague) and needing to find a way of holding any reactions to the abuse plus being the one who ends up comforting others who were upset on their behalf. It leads me to question how can we find space for everyone to have their own reactions and how, especially as a white person but also as a straight person, a middle class person etc,, I can help to facilitate that... Does that make sense?
I wonder if a lot of this managing of our experience of oppression happens behind the scenes (your colleague was (horribly) 'used to it') but comes at great cost. I always try to be careful when speaking about the oppression other groups experience - there may be similarities with my own experience of being a woman, but I can also never understand what it's like to be a person of colour in a racist world, or trans in a transphobic world etc... there's a whole other conversation there. Thanks for being here x
I, too, can feel rage and it feels so important for oppressed folks to allow these feelings to be present (though, it's often not pleasant!) and to notice when they're trying to deny them or beat themselves up about it. Over the last year I worked with a supervisor who is a body psychotherapist who really relished working with anger - I found her approach really helpful. She would encourage us to not direct it outwards or inwards but into the ground - to let the ground take it, channeling that energy into our legs and feet. I can see the argument for letting it outwards, but there was something really helpful about not perpetuating the cycle of rage by letting it ricochet between people.
Oh I like that. I find it hard to know where to channel the powerful energy of rage. And I do believe it needs to go somewhere, but often outwards or inwards isn’t helpful long term.
Thank you for sharing your experience.
Thanks Helen - I totally agree that unleashing our undiluted rage on other people is (maybe never? maybe almost never?) the best thing. Love the sound of that embodied way of working with it, and refreshing to find someone who's up for working with it. Thanks for sharing!
I can honestly say that I don’t do rage. It was never part of my family lexicon & I had a very blessed upbringing surrounded by love.
That’s not to say that I haven’t experienced things to rage about (divorce, degenerative disease anyone?). But I just don’t find it helpful. I put its energy into other emotions; regret, disappointment, sadness. I guess that I feel these more (too?) deeply, so it’s in no way a ‘get out of jail card’.
I hadn’t thought about any of this til today, so thank you 🙏
Thanks for sharing Caroline - it's good to hear other perspectives - it sounds like you're not missing out here - and that other emotions do the 'work' of rage for you. For me, it's not a 'choice' to experience rage - it's just there - but mostly VERY much in the shady shadows. I guess I'm aiming towards making good use of ALL the different emotions that arise, by funneling them into something constructive - but some of them need more careful handling than others! Glad to have you here.
PS. My partner seems to live in a constant state of rage ( we don’t live together thank goodness!). He has deep reasons to do so, from terrible events in his past. But it doesn’t help you ‘ in the now’. But neither do my emotions either. I suppose I balance him out. Life is weird, isn’t it?
I'm always interested in how couples can end up sharing things like this - one person 'does organising' and the other isn't bothered by being disorganised, one 'does anger' and the other doesn't, one 'does stress' and the other is totally laid back...
PS and only history will tell whether it was a £12 investment in change or an enabler of the status quo
And maybe a bit of both!! 🤞🏻