I love rage.
Let me start over.
I believe in rage as a conduit, a marker, a beginner and a beacon for our bodies, nervous systems, very sweet mammalian selves with these big juicy brains and souls expressing and experiencing that something is just not right here.
When someone sits across from me with tears in their eyes and shares that they feel stuck, alone, that they give and give and give and do not get back…I tend to ask ‘tell me your relationship with rage…’
The answers that are returned in deep honesty are as follows:
- I don’t know how
- I am scared of my rage
- I was raised by someone who only expressed rage and I have cut that part off from me
- I hurt people with my rage or I hurt myself
- I’m not allowed to be rageful
I get it. Lord do I get it. I was also raised by a parent that was constantly in unregulated rage, it was fearful and fear based and miserable.
I was also a person born female in this culture that my rage was not welcomed, was unseemly, was disrespectful and ugly and impolite.
Anyone else relate? For many of us we were taught that our expression of rage was unsafe, inconvenient, too much…no wonder our relationship with rage is contentious, non-existent, worrisome and confusing.
Here’s the deal, because rage is a part of the human existence, either we do rage or rage does us. In other words, rage is gonna rage. And sometimes that can look like shoving and shoving and wondering why our sweet little tummies hurt, or it can look like deep explosiveness, destroying and disrupting connection. It can also morph into perfectionism, our attempt to outrun and outpace rage, I’ll show everyone that this does not affect me, I got answers and I got it down, even if I run myself ragged in the process.
It’s a sweet invitation to invite our rage into something akin to birth. Rage is a beginning, rage is an expression of truth and intolerance–a realization that you have tolerated for too long and with too much that which was not to be tolerated or to be put up with.
I love my rage and I love yours as well. It is welcomed in this space, sometimes we have to sort through the noise to get to the fruit of the truth.
If you’d like to hear more about how rage shows up in the therapeutic and healing space, please check out this month’s video for a card pull and a somatic exercise to work through our rage.
Amanda Gorman in her poem ‘Fury and Faith’ says this about our sacred rage (please read it out loud, let the words roll around from your mouth to your heart)
“So when you’re told that your rage is reactionary,
Remind yourself that rage is our right.
It teaches us it is time to fight
In the face of injustice,
Not only is anger natural, but necessary,
Because it helps carry us to our destination.
Our goal is never revenge, just restoration.
Not dominance, just dignity.
Not fear, just freedom.
Just justice.’
So, stay curious, maybe your curiosity of your rage, all those times you were told you were misbehaving, maybe, just maybe your curiosity was pointing you to the truth.
Your healing impacts my healing impacts the world!
With Love,
Amy