DAY 3 - Activate (21 DAYS OF RAGE)

This is the 3rd instalment of a 21 day writing series about maternal rage and anger.

In my late 20s I took part in a women’s self-defence class. The instructor taught us where and how to grab, kick and punch: we breathed deep into our bellies, we screamed NOOOOOOO into the face of the partner we were working with, then giggled and apologised profusely.

When a violent crime is committed against a woman, the police or someone in power often suggests that it’s women who need to change their behaviour to stop this kind of thing happening. Don’t walk alone after dark, don’t drink too much alcohol, don’t take the shortcut, don’t listen to music when you’re walking, carry a rape alarm, dress modestly, stay vigiliant, learn how to defend yourself.

There’s usually an understandable outcry, and of course it shouldn’t be on women to ensure their basic right to safety on streets and in bars and bedrooms. But in that class, physical self-defence was only one element of what we were learning. We were also remembering how to be a little bit less nice, polite and good. We were changing how we viewed ourselves - rather than a person who existed to please others through the traits we displayed, we could be someone who could shout and gouge and elbow our way to a different reality.

The somatic practitioner and writer Kimberley Johnson runs a course she calls “finding your inner jaguar”. She says that society teaches women to be prey animals and that we need to refind our inner predator. She teaches this through the body. If you do a class with her you might watch videos of a rabbit being stalked by a wolf then escaping and shaking its body all over, releasing the trauma of the chase then going about its day.

You might find yourself crawling on the floor, acting out the predator role, roaring or howling, dropping back into your animal body (with whatever degree of self-consciousness!) Her teaching is a reminder that we’re not supposed to calm down all the time. She characterises “good stress” - the “healthy sympathetic” branch of the nervous system that, in safety, allows us to get up in the morning, complete a task quickly or compete against another person. A healthy nervous system moves between states and recovers from stress, it moves on and then it inhabits the present.

If I get to the point where rage explodes out of me, there must have been warning signs that I didn’t or couldn’t spot. Or maybe I saw them but could not rest or be supported in order to change how I was feeling. I sometimes wonder if I had been more in touch with anger as a girl then young woman then mother, if I accessed the healthy sympathetic in my body more frequently, if there was not stigma and shame and judgement around angry women, would it be less inevitable that I’d reach the last outpost of anger: rage?

I take responsibility for any anger that results in a situation that is to the detriment of those around me. And also, these feelings don’t emerge in a vacuum, and the way they are processed and expressed are related to social factors, not just individual ones.