DAY 13 - Body Keeps The Score (21 DAYS OF RAGE)

This is the 13th instalment of a 21 day writing series about maternal rage and anger.

After I had grown two humans inside my body for nine months each, I had to relearn basic movement patterns. Even walking felt strange, with my centre of gravity shifted and my pelvic floor affecting the shape of my spine and how I moved my legs and feet. I recruited the wrong parts to help me move, something had to compensate for something else. Two years on since I last gave birth, I still am not sure I’m “recovered”. I’m not sure I know what that means any more, or at least it’s a more relative concept than I previously thought.

We carry our children in our bodies and we carry everything else, all our emotions and experiences living there in complex, clever, wild and mind-blowing ways. The physiological is interconnected with the psychological in a manner that make it impossible to separate the two. What came first, a thought or a change in the body that triggered a thought? Can a thought even exist without a physical response? 

Rage is a signal emotion, telling us that something is amiss. It’s there to keep us safe, switching on when capacity is low - perhaps due to overwhelm or exhaustion, grief or anxiety, frustration or sensory overload. It comes and it masks complexity, making us think we are simply cross and unreasonable when instead we are human animals, needing something more.

That rage is so physical - that it’s felt so violently in the rush of blood, the hammer of the heart, that it comes out in the throat and through the eyeballs and in the hands - shows us the urgency of the message from the body, something that’s calling out loudly to be heard.

If we are products of the emotions we have (which are themselves responses to the things that happen to us!), there are many questions to ask and explore with both the both and the mind. 

Exactly what is the feeling, both emotional and physical? Where is it and what is it like - before, during, after? Is there a sense of being trapped or ignored or belittled? What are your triggers? What about family history - what was modelled to you? Were all emotions accepted as healthy or was there some dampening down? Was there shame felt after rage, suggesting anger is innately shameful? Was there repair - apologies, communication, connection?

What are you missing at the moment? What do you need, big or small? Is it sleep, someone to listen to you, to feel seen, to have more headspace and body space, to express yourself creatively? Who are you not asking for help? Who are you not communicating with?

I am not saying these kind of questions are easy or quick to answer, or that they will solve everything forever, or that we are responsible for answering them alone. Trying to solve everything alone is slower, harder and less effective. It feeds the lie that we are responsible for caring for ourselves rather than caring for each other.

And listening to the body can be complex. It makes sense to have someone to share and compare with, to help us interpret, to champion us. Listening to the body must be done holistically, creatively, understanding the metaphors our body has hatched in response to everything that has happened to us. 

When we find threads of clarity or resonance - answers, or on the way to being an answer - they need to be felt in the body. It’s not enough to tell it with our minds. The body needs to practice it, believe it, be able to move with it and move things through, in its own unique way.