CW abuse
Anger can be a healing and restorative thing. It's an emotion I've struggled to handle for most of my life, and I'm finally coming to see what it can do when used well, and not simply turned inwards.
Anger is protective. It's a response to harm or to invaded boundaries that allows you to reassert your own personhood. If you aren't in a situation where you can get angry about things that hurt and harm you, then your whole identity, humanity and self esteem will be undermined. This is an issue for people experiencing domestic abuse and workplace bullying. People who are trafficked and dealing with modern slavery are not in a position to express anger. Here in the UK, the government is criminalising actions that used to allow us to express our anger at injustice.
When you just have to shut up and put up with things, and you aren't allowed to protect yourself, the psychological damage is huge. Added to this, is the burden that these experiences come in situations of power imbalance and genuine threat. Fear of what will happen if you express fair and appropriate anger is a crushing thing to deal with. Whether that's poverty from the loss of work and having to accept an unreasonable workplace in order to survive, or fear of violence from a partner, if it isn't safe to be angry you are in a really problematic situation.
If you go through a lot of this, it can take you into places of apathy and feelings of futility. There's a terrible experiment that I ran into when studying psychology. (Trigger warning for animal cruelty in this paragraph, but I'm going to go over it quickly). Put a dog in a room and have some part of the floor give the dog electric shocks, and the dog will quickly learn where to run to and will try to escape from suffering. If there's nowhere to go, the dog will learn to give up and will just lie there. People are much the same.
When there's nothing you can do about what's being done to you, then it's all too easy to slide into a numb place and not even try to function. Often, injustice doesn't result in people rising up in anger, it results in a protective shutting down and you learn to just lie there and take it.
Being able to feel anger can therefore be a result of being safer. It might be something you can only have after the event, if you're fortunate enough to get out. That can be disorienting - emotions turning up long after what caused them are not easy to deal with. Anger and grief often go together, and anger is often part of a normal grief process. I suspect grief may often be part of a normal anger process and if you haven't had the space to feel protective of yourself then when the anger comes you will also need to deal with grief over whatever has happened to you.
There are a few things I hope people will take away from this. The first one is that we tend to judge people who don't get out - especially from domestic abuse situations. It can seem from the outside that the victim is fine with what's happening to them, invites it, likes it, wants it, gets something out of being a victim. Not feeling safe expressing anger will make you passive, it's not consent or wanting to be in a situation, it's being overwhelmed with powerlessness. Understanding this process helps to counter victim blaming.
The second takeaway is that anger isn't necessarily a problem - your own or other people's. It can be an important part of healing, because it's what allows a person to re-establish their own sense of self and their boundaries. Supportive listening can be a good response to this. Acknowledging harm caused and injustice experienced is something we can all do to support people who need to be angry. Anger doesn't have to be destructive, in fact when handled this way it can be a healing and restorative thing.
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