Anybody who knew me leading up to Trump’s last election in 2016 and throughout his first term knew that I was a fairly vocal advocate and participant in civic conversation both online and in person. I remember in January before the election people thought I was crazy when I was asserting the high chance that he might be elected and be seen as an eligible candidate.
As I’ve watched the intentional polarization online through disinformation continue to unfold over subsequent years and leading up to this latest election, I took a different approach of silence not to ‘add to the waves’. I was also recovering from severe burnout last year and luxuriating in health, rest & joy which is essential for those of us who are interested in actively participating in making a better world.
I’m seeing again the importance of actually participating in activism & conversation, because something I know to be true as a therapist is that silence about problems does not actually solve the problems.
There are certain topics that are taboo in our society. ‘Religion, Politics, Sex, Money’ It’s likely we all learned some version of what makes ‘polite’ conversation, and what needs to go unsaid. Certainly these can be divisive and uncomfortable topics. And my invitation is to consider the religious, political institutions, rooted in a specific power hierarchy, that wrote the rules on ‘polite conversation’ and what we can and can’t talk about as a society. Why don’t they want us talking about those things?
The base of political discussion is human life and human rights. That includes economic justice of course, cause we all know money makes the world go around and is the foundation for things like food, shelter and the ‘pursuit of happiness’.
Let me just say, as a therapist, not talking about these things publicly drives me NUTS! As a therapist there is no topic that is taboo and I am thoroughly de-sensitized to uncomfortable conversations. I am having thorough conversations about all things taboo all day long.
It seems our culture has delegated ONE place to talk about sensitive topics – therapy, of which most people still avoid like the plague (Yes, I know it’s hard to find a good therapist. That’s another problem for another day.). Of course close friends & family are a space to talk more openly as well, but I’m noticing more and more even those spaces are not available to most people.
Why this inability to have uncomfortable conversations? We are phobic of emotions.
Let me just break the ice and share mine. I’ve been feeling very angry lately. If you look around at the world for two seconds it’s hard not to be. It’s why so many people stick their heads in the sand and don’t pay attention at all, it’s too painful (and there must be a balance. Check out my podcast on coping with Vicarious Traumatization).
Part of my anger is that more people are not activated in effective ways even though I can completely understand why. We are over-extended and exhausted as a society – on purpose. Stick with me, we’re moving through this at the end.
Working for so many years as a therapist & social worker, having a front row seat to the trauma caused by this wealth obsessed, hyper-individualistic, white prioritizing, patriarchal, fundamentalist puritan society, and seeing what is needed for a healthier society (we have the solutions damn it!) …. then watching so many people vote for the exact opposite is a certain kind of torture. Disappointment in people’s values is a huge understatement. Knowing that life for my clients gets much harder now. Feminine rage is an understatement – and I’m perfectly fine with that.
Before I continue further let me say, this is not a ploy for sympathy or needing help. I am VERY comfortable holding anger. You can’t be a therapist and sit with thousands of hours of intense and painful emotions alongside people without developing a capacity for this. I clarify this because I’ve found in the past when I express strong emotions people often respond with concern and wanting to help me do something about it, which is an indicator that they are not comfortable with my strong emotion.
‘Is she OK? Eek! Make it stop (emotion phobia).’ I am very much OK. In fact I love my anger. When channeled effectively it is an important and useful emotion. Many people get this part wrong and react on anger unhelpfully (myself included sometimes) because we’ve never been taught how to cope with emotions. The expectation here cannot be perfection either.
I’m sure that I often shock people with my comfort diving in directly to uncomfortable topics whether in person or online. Because good Goddess, this therapist is BEGGING you – START TALKING ABOUT IT (I’ll be helping you with some ideas for how to do this effectively in an upcoming book, so stay tuned).
Right now, we cannot tolerate the anger, fear, guilt & shame that get triggered by what’s happening in the world, let alone conversations with others about it. And it’s not our fault. We live in a patriarchal world that has been suppressing and minimizing the need or validity of emotion for thousands of years and I want to talk about the function of that. OF COURSE we don’t know how to feel, tolerate and regulate our emotions in a culture that immediately shames you the moment you express them.
This is on purpose.
For women especially, I think the main reason why it feels somewhat terrifying to verbalize anger is because anger is one of the top two unacceptables for women. Between ‘hunger’ and ‘anger’ I’m not sure which one takes the prize for the most shamed thing as a woman. ‘Do not want, and do not say no!’
In hunger, I don’t just mean hunger for food, although that is included. A mechanism meant to keep us small and eternally in a state resembling maidenhood and youth. A young woman is more desirable because she’s less opinionated and still gaining wisdom, she is easier to control. No, a woman must not hunger for food, stay small!
She also must not desire or have needs in any way. It is unbecoming. Contentment and subservience as a woman is a prized character trait. You must not want – anything different, anything more. Desire leads you away on your own path, to a wildness that is less easy to control.
Anger though, anger is perhaps a step beyond. It is a defense, a protection. It is a ‘no’. Anger is an emotion allowed only to men, it is masculine, strong! If you are angry, then you are masculine. A woman who is angry is ‘nasty’. She is ‘rude, controlling and obstinate’. She is unattractive, and attractiveness is a most prized trait. You must not want, but you must be wantable.
(If you can’t tell, I am sarcastically, and also quite literally parroting the patriarchal messages that we have been seeping in in society for millennia. I’ve noticed people have lost the art of nuance & sarcasm lately so I figured I’d clarify).
Saying you are angry out loud as a woman is almost as much of a social death sentence as daring to age and become wiser – daring to speak and demonstrate thought. For centuries women have been labeled ‘too emotional’ to discredit them, to minimize their needs or cries of abuse.
Over the centuries we have been polarizing further and further into hyper-rational thinking & logic in the absence of emotion & empathy. This is how uncaring sociopaths are made. This is how those with more power can say, ‘Ignore their emotions & needs.’ Even in the past century you might get tossed into an insane asylum as a woman if you got too angry about something. The urge to now hide & suppress our emotions is primal for survival.
The question we have to ask ourselves as a species: do we want mobs of unfeeling sociopaths running around and controlling the world? I don’t think that’s a very cute look and it certainly doesn’t end up well for anyone. In fact, I think we are seeing now exactly what that looks like. And it’s not like men don’t also feel emotions. They are also not being taught how to cope with them effectively and well… you can see. If men are only allowed anger, and it’s labeled as ‘masculine’, what do they do with their sadness, shame and fear?
Emotions are a sense in the nervous system, like eyesight, smell or hearing, and their function is to keep us alive and give us action urges when there may be threats or dangers. Our brains have ‘mirror neurons’ that reflect emotions we see in others and give us empathy. This has a survival purpose for our species which is IN FACT collective. You die alone in the wilderness. We need each other, to listen to, help & collaborate with each other. Hyper-individuality will be the death of us.
We can of course suppress those empathy pathways by de-sensitizing ourselves to harming others and repeatedly ignoring others needs or feelings. Again, this is where sociopaths are created. Have you been online recently? The amount of laughing at others’ emotional distress is at an all time high it seems.
Feeling emotions is a natural human response no matter what your gender is. It is not ‘female’ to feel emotions. It is HUMAN. Saying we want to cut out emotions and deny their presence or need is like saying you want to blind everyone. Now, let me think… who benefits from blinding everyone to emotion and empathy? What systems get propped up by that?
So, back to political discussions and tough conversations (‘Shhhhh! We don’t want you talking about that stuff! It’s impolite!’) When we hear an opposing opinion about a topic like poverty, racism, sexism, abuse, education, religion or more, it can signal a direct threat to our nervous system that our safety, the safety of loved ones or members of our group are at risk. Difficult conversations can take us into a primal survival activation of ‘fight, flight, freeze and fold’. This is normal for a healthy nervous system! With all the talk of mindfulness and nervous system regulation online lately, the goal is NOT to become a calm, unfeeling zombie my friend!
The word ‘triggered’ has become weaponized, as if being triggered is a weakness or a bad thing. It is a natural human thing. If there is a tiger chasing you, you better fucking hope your nervous system gets triggered. If someone is about to harm you, your nervous system needs to get triggered. Remember to thank your nervous system next time it gets triggered! As uncomfortable as it is, it’s doing its job to help you. AND we’ve got some amazing skills to help you soothe & settle your nervous system when you need that.
In our Western Culture there is a huge disconnect between our mind & body. In order to learn how to better tune into the wisdom of the body, where emotions live as full-body nervous system responses, we must first un-shame emotions. Stop judging them as weakness, ‘sins’ or bad.
Certainly we want to learn a skillset to be less impulsive on our emotional action urges so that we can be more effective at getting what we want. Most people have a significant deficit in skillset around Distress Tolerance & Emotion Regulation (these skills are taught in depth in DBT). These skills are critical so we can have difficult conversations. Because alas, not talking about things doesn’t solve them. Things don’t magically disappear when you look away (shocking, I know).
Even people who mean well are part of this ‘don’t talk about it’ repression. Those wanting to bring about an enlightened utopia and focus on ‘being the light’, ‘rising above’, ‘not causing waves’ and just ‘not focusing on all that darkness & uncomfortable stuff’ are furthering aspects of puritan religions (which are all patriarchal). By the way have you watched the documentary on Netflix, ‘Keep sweet, pray and obey’? Great extreme example of a strong undercurrent in our religiously dominated society whether it be Christianity, Mormonism or Catholicism (68% of Americans identify as Christian, down from 90% in the early 1990’s) that goes back generations. Just smile and be happy! Don’t show your sadness, anger or fear! Those are ‘evil’ emotions!
That aspect of puritanism has seeped even into New Age movements and modern spirituality. ‘Be perfect and pure. Just focus on the light and create the new utopia.’ It gives this false sense that if we can remain ‘pure’, euphoric, loving and happy enough all the sad stuff (‘ew, low vibe!’) will go away.
OK, yes let’s be loving and positive, AND … we are currently living on this planet and in this matrix. The whole point is to participate, and creating a better world is an ACTIVE process. Ugh, hard, I know. Ignoring others’ pain and suffering, telling them it’s all in their mind, becomes gaslighting and then an actual function of oppression. It is also another aspect of hyper-individualism, ‘Just focus on you and forget everyone else.’
Remember the part in Lord of the Rings when the hobbits are with the tree ents who just want to stay neutral, and Pippen tells Treebeard, ‘But you’re part of this world!’
When you work as a therapist, and you see the many painful problems people face due to living in… you know… society, it’s hard not to be invested in wanting to support societal change. Wanting to create a society that isn’t just centered around wealth & image, although I do understand the need for financial equity along with the rest (end Citizen’s United). Creating a world that is more equitable for women, less violent, less discrimination, a world more equitable for all people who have been marginalized and trampled on by those that benefit from more power in various forms. Trampled on by the systems that benefit from our disconnection to emotion, empathy & values.
When witnessing and supporting people through the traumas this society has enacted, it feels like gross negligence to not care. I wish more people could engage. Caring fucking hurts, but I wouldn’t exchange it for lack of feeling in a million years. And I realize that in order for more people to engage in change, as a society we have to start normalizing emotion and learning the needed skills for tolerating painful emotions and channeling them effectively.
We must learn to hold painful emotions (and work with them effectively), to know that they do not harm us. Anger helps us set boundaries and protect others. Guilt helps us get clear on what our values are and when we’ve violated them. Shame helps us get clear on what community we want to belong to and how we may want to change our community values. Disgust helps us notice where we might be contaminated, even morally by those with starkly different values than us (i.e. People who value bullying/hurting others and have a total disregard for human rights). Sadness helps us grieve, let go & move forward. Envy helps us get clear on what we might really want from life and energizes us to go get it. Jealousy can help us protect what is ours if it is in danger of being lost. Fear helps us stay alert to danger. Love helps us maintain compassion and seek closeness. Joy helps us rest, play & recover.
Most importantly remember that you can also hold multiple emotions at once. You can feel anger about the world and fear about the future, AND at the exact same time embrace joy, love and gratitude. This is another logical fallacy resulting from our emotional illiteracy. Experiencing anger does not make you an angry person. Emotions come and go. Feeling joy, gratitude and love do not make you un-caring or unfeeling. We are an amazing species when we can allow ourselves to expand into our fullness, to feel it all and learn to listen to what each emotion might be saying to us.
So let yourself be angry, it is valid. Ignore the bullies who laugh at your pain, they are uninformed and sadly missing an important aspect of humanity. And feel your joy, it is nothing to be ashamed of in the face of it all.
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Great article. A breath of fresh air since everything these days is so politically focused and AI based. Nice to read an article from a human being. Thank you.
I’m so glad you enjoyed it!