Use your anger to recover yourself.

My commitment is to encourage you to lead, yourself and others, by discovering, developing, and being yourself.  Inviting you to see the movie “Women Talking” coupled with sharing Sonya Chemaly’s well-researched, conscious-raising Rage Becomes Her: The power of women’s anger does that in spades for me.

Take 5 minutes to hear Chemaly speak about women’s anger.

Chemaly lifts many veils of our learned way of being: “For women, healthy anger management doesn’t require us to exert more control but, rather, less.   … [Women] are managing anger all the time without even realizing it.  … Anger is an emotion, neither good nor bad.  … Most of the anger-related problems we encounter come from the social construct and how our emotions are filtered through our identities relative to others.”

My last blog ended with “What do you do with all the rage?”  Thankfully, Sonya Chemaly answers that question. Rather than anger management, Chemaly suggests 10 avenues to develop an anger competence. I list them in hopes that the mere naming of a strategy will lift a veil and move you to discover more about your own anger and how to use it to recover yourself.

10 Strategies

1. Develop self-awareness. (Audre Lorde reminds us: “Anger is loaded with information and energy.” Use it to understand and liberate yourself and others.)
2. Differentiate three terms that get unhealthily lumped together: anger, assertiveness, aggression. (All are related by the word “no” – not a word that girls and women are taught to embrace.)
3. Be brave enough to stop pleasing people, to be disliked.
4. Take deliberate care. (Set clear boundaries. Ask for help. See your anger as a way to recover yourself. Rethink forgiveness. Teach people around you to name and talk about their anger. Consider a therapist.)
5. Cultivate body confidence. (Consciously balance how your body looks with your body’s health.)
6. Take your anger to work. (Talk about anger. Find allies.  Get a mentor.)
7. Cultivate communities and accountabilities. (Seek collective activism. Connect virtually.)
8. Challenge binaries. (Examine how we’re supposed to emotionally act in public versus private.)
9. Trust other women. (Resist a fundamental lesson of misogyny: women are untrustworthy.)
10. Accept desire for power. (Women seek balance in the distribution of power, not dominance.)

Chemaly: “Your anger is a gift you give to yourself and the world that is yours. If ever there was a time not to silence yourself, to channel your anger into healthy places and choices, this is it.”

Thank you for listening to and trusting yourself.