3min chapter

It’s OK That You’re Not OK with Megan Devine cover image

Rage Becomes Her (and by “her” I mean US) with Soraya Chemaly

It’s OK That You’re Not OK with Megan Devine

CHAPTER

The Relationship Between Grief and Anger

There's a lot of relational aggression that girls have, but they don't express it in the same way with boys around them. And so you see a lot of what I think of as horizontal anger among girls and women. They grow up to be women who are very disparaging of other women,. But it's not vertical. It doesn't go along the axes that power flows on. We suppress our anger, we pretend we're not angry. We say that we're tired instead of that we're mad because we're trying to hold on to those social bonds.

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Speaker 2
There's a passage in your, I think was an article I read of your where you were talking about how anger was disparaged in your childhood and that the effect of that was managing your anger in a way that suppressed it and cut you off from it resulted in social isolation, which is what you just described there is like, which is so bizarre because we suppress our anger, we pretend we're not angry. We say that we're tired instead of that we're mad because we're trying to hold on to those social bonds and what you've explored is like actually suppressing your anger is what breaks social bonds. Right. And my point is that you can't really have a
Speaker 1
reciprocal caring relationship with a person if they don't know you and what you need. And anger is an expression of need or want, right? You need people to care about what is hurting you. And if you can't say that, then in essence you're creating a false relationship. If your spouse or your father or whoever it is in your life that you are uncomfortable expressing your anger with. So girls will express anger towards other girls. You know, there's a lot of relational aggression that girls have, but they don't express it in the same way with boys around them, for example. They don't express it the same way to their parents. And so you see a lot of what I think of as horizontal anger among girls and women, they grow up to be women who are very disparaging of other women, very punitive with other women, but it's not vertical. It doesn't go along the axes that power flows on. And that's really important. But what I really learned that is to me the nexus of grief and anger, and this goes along with this idea that we live in such a binary world, is that we locate our emotions in a disembodied mind. We think of them as somehow outside of the body or closer to the body than the mind, but not of the body. But anger and grief are fully embodied. All of our emotions are fully embodied. And I had to unlearn my education. I had to unlearn the education of sort of Western Enlightenment selfhood, which is very much that you're a mind and your body and that rationality is different from emotionality and the superior to emotionality. And we have all of these hierarchies built into our ways of knowing. And those are really damaging to our well-being, our relationships, our health, our ability to cope, to be resilient. All of these things are related.

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