What I’ve found is that, yes, we all have the right and need to feel and own our anger. One response to this is “Get angry and stay angry!” I haven’t seen that advice borne out in the research. There are a lot of coded shame messages in the rhetoric of “Why so hostile?” “Don’t get hysterical,” “I’m sensing so much anger!” and “Don’t take it so personally.” All of these responses are normally code for Your emotion or opinion is making me uncomfortable or Suck it up and stay quiet. When we deny ourselves the right to be angry, we deny our pain. Sometimes owning our pain and bearing witness to struggle means getting angry. When we own our emotion, we can rebuild and find our way through the pain. But what we know now is that when we deny our emotion, it owns us. Our families and culture believed that the vulnerability that it takes to acknowledge pain was weakness, so we were taught anger, rage, and denial instead.
Most of us were not taught how to recognize pain, name it, and be with it. Addressing it with love and compassion would take only a minuscule percentage of the energy it takes to fight it, but approaching pain head-on is terrifying. Pain will subside only when we acknowledge it and care for it. Despite our attempts to drown it in addiction, to physically beat it out of one another, to suffocate it with success and material trappings, or to strangle it with our hate, pain will find a way to make itself known. How much longer are we willing to keep pulling drowning people out of the river one by one, rather than walking to the headwaters of the river to find the source of the pain? What will it take for us to let go of that earned self-righteousness and travel together to the cradle of the pain that is throwing all of us in at such a rate that we couldn’t possibly save everyone? Pain is unrelenting. “Not caring about our own pain and the pain of others is not working.
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