Rage is Medicine
When was the last time you repeatedly punched a pillow while yelling all the swear words in your vocabulary? How about taking a book you don’t care about and tearing it to pieces? Or taking a cheap wooden dresser to the top of a mountain with a sledgehammer and smashing it with all your strength until it’s nothing but a pile of wood chips?
Many people have never in their adult lives allowed themselves to express rage. To these people, it’s never felt like a safe thing to do. Almost always, these people grew up in families that did not tolerate their children expressing anger.
Anger is one of the four core emotions. As children, around the age of two, we begin to experiment with saying NO to our caregivers and expressing ourselves more independently. This marks the beginning of learning how to establish healthy boundaries with others. Anger is the tool that allows us to do that. We need to be allowed to express anger in order to communicate when a boundary has been violated, or when our needs are not being met. This is a healthy and necessary part of social development. We use anger to protect ourselves and create a sense of safety. Imagine a mama bear and her cubs coming across a group of hikers in the woods. We all know that the mama bear is going to be very protective of her cubs in that situation. Her job is to keep them safe, and she will do this by showing her aggression.
It’s the same with humans. We use anger and aggression to show that we mean business, that our needs matter, that our safety is worth protecting, and that we are capable of protecting ourselves. Children begin to learn these skills early in life, unless they are raised by parents who are uncomfortable with anger themselves. These parents will be triggered by their children expressing anger, and will respond by punishing, rejecting, ignoring, or otherwise temporarily abandoning the child for expressing herself in this way. Because young children depend on their parents for their very survival, even a few minutes of feeling abandoned by a caregiver can feel unbearably scary for a young child.
So, what often happens is the young child learns to control his behavior to avoid triggering his parents. If anger triggers my parents to reject me or punish me, I’m going to learn not to express my anger. I start to believe that anger = BAD. I have now joined the ‘anger = BAD’ club, which is unfortunately a very large club with millions of members. Whenever I feel anger, I will disconnect from it. I will become so good at this, that eventually I start doing this automatically without any conscious awareness.
The problem is that all that anger that we are disconnecting from doesn’t just disappear. We have to store it somewhere out of view, where we don’t have to feel it or think about it. Our unconscious minds are very good at doing this. Over many years of regularly disconnecting from anger and storing it somewhere in our bodies and our minds that we aren’t in touch with, we develop such a large reservoir of anger that it starts to overwhelm us.
This can lead to experiences of suddenly losing control of ourselves and “blowing up” at someone in a way that causes real damage. It can also lead to anxiety and depression. Anxiety is an emotional state that signals that we don’t feel safe. Anger is the tool we use to make ourselves feel safe, so if we can’t express anger, we won’t feel safe, and chronic anxiety is almost guaranteed. Additionally, depression is a common symptom when we can’t express anger because when we aren’t allowed to express anger, we lose touch with our feelings of aliveness and vitality. This kills joy and also makes it hard to experience sadness, and we end up feeling numb and empty instead.
When we begin to explore aggression in ourselves, we start to awaken to a feeling of aliveness, vitality and safety that we’ve been missing for most, if not all of our lives. We become more capable of expressing our needs and communicating our boundaries. We soothe our nervous system and heal chronic anxiety. We also heal chronic depression, and self-criticism/self-esteem issues. When we learn to use aggression to keep ourselves safe, we can use that energy externally and internally. If we have a critical voice inside who won’t leave us alone, we can use that mama bear protective energy with that critical voice, to stop it from torturing us. This is often a hidden dynamic in depression that completely resolves once we are comfortable using aggression in its full range of expression.
Aggression is an energy that exists on a spectrum of intensity, and therefore to truly master the use of it, we have to learn how to express it at every point on that spectrum. There are mild forms of anger that consist of firmly saying “no” to someone, or saying “I didn’t like when you did that”. There are more intense versions of anger, for example when we feel physically threatened by someone, where we might say “don’t come any closer to me” as a warning that we are ready to defend ourselves. Then there is the most intense expression of anger, which is full-on murderous rage. This level of anger is necessary for those rare life-threatening situations that we all hope to never find ourselves in.
Although murderous rage may not ever be something we have to express to others to protect our own lives, it is a very useful energy to get familiar with and to practice expressing on our own, in a controlled environment, because it gives our body and mind and nervous system the experience of knowing that we are *capable* of murderous rage if we ever *need* to be. This gives us a sense of safety that we badly need in order to feel calm and grounded. It can do wonders for our mental health to experience ourselves becoming murderous monsters in a controlled environment, and learning that we can trust this energy in ourselves. As we master the use of aggression, we begin to trust that we will not lose control of ourselves and get triggered to “blow up” at people in ways that hurt us or them. We gain confidence that we are able to keep ourselves and others safe when they are around us. This creates more connection and intimacy and makes it safer to be vulnerable.
Rage is medicine, when we learn how to use it safely. Just like learning how to use a sharp knife, there is risk involved. But the cost of never learning how to use that sharp knife is much more dangerous.
