Through the Fire
Suppressed anger, righteous rage, and the alchemical flames of death and birth.
For a long time, I was terrified to use my voice in a way that shattered the perceived, consensual reality of the world around me. I feared that the semblance of belonging that I managed to cobble together by mirroring the articulated beliefs and observable behaviors of others was the best I could hope for. To maintain that, I told myself that what I felt, what I knew to be true inside of me, wasn’t real unless others agreed that it was. Unless it was spoken by someone else, made into evidence by someone else’s voice.
If I didn’t hear someone name or discuss what ached inside of me, I convinced myself that it was better left unsaid. Because to speak it aloud might mean to speak it alone. I was terrified that no one else would meet me in the new reality that emerged after my speaking. I chose what felt like safety in numbers.
As a child, when I did speak with too much fire, too much truth about something no one else wanted to address, too much urgency that no one else seemed to feel, it was not rewarded. I was made to feel awkward, misunderstood, judged. I learned to pre-assess every word that I spoke, to measure it against what others had affirmed as real through the shared reality created by what had already been said.
Even now, as an adult, I sometimes flinch at the sound of a tone. Sharpness, sarcasm, impatience. These tones were forbidden for me to express in the home in which I grew up. We weren’t allowed to express anger. And we also weren’t allowed to use the word hate. To this day, I hardly ever say it. When I do, it still feels like I’m breaking a rule.
This conditioning was both a burden and blessing. Both a constraint out of which I created a reality that limited my emotional range, and a power that I now access in a way that affirms the truth of who I am.
I don’t hate people. That’s true about me. Even those who have caused the most heinous forms of harm. I don’t hate people because I know myself to be a vessel for love.
But the flipside of this truth is that, because I wasn’t allowed to say hate, I never got to explore my own relationship to it. To come to my own understanding for myself of why hatred isn’t something that I feel.
Years ago, I babysat my friends’ child when he was about four or five years old. We went through a brief phase during which he didn’t like me. One day, he told me that he hated me and wished that I would get run over by a truck. I knew that he didn’t actually want me to die. And he knew that, too. But there is something developmentally important about the way that a child learns to explore the limits when it comes to expressing their emotions. They learn what is not only acceptable, but conducive to our ability to live well together, when it comes to how we voice our feelings. I didn’t take it personally, though I did share with him the impact of his language. I understood that he was exploring, practicing, testing the limits of how to find the language of anger.
I couldn’t do that as a child. The tones, the words, and therefore, the emotion itself, were not allowed. I didn’t get to practice feeling angry. My growing child brain created a false equation: Hatred is not allowed. Anger is why people hate. Therefore, anger is not allowed. And without the ability to know that I was allowed to access anger, I had no resources to turn to for naming what hurt.
We teach children what's allowed. We’re always teaching them, and not just through the words we say. We’re teaching them through the discrepancies between the words we say and the actions we take. Through the discrepancies between what they see, what they feel, and what they’re told to believe about both. Through what is never acknowledged or spoken to them at all.
A lot of my life experience has involved feeling things that I couldn’t articulate, feeling things in other people and the environment that others could not, or chose not, to feel. And then being told, both implicitly and explicitly, that what I felt was not real. I couldn’t access my anger about that, so I suppressed it. I directed it internally, toward myself.
An integral layer of my healing was about unlearning this. Reconnecting to the deep knowing that what I felt was real, even when others couldn’t see or speak it. Practicing what it felt like to allow my anger to rise when that truth was denied. Because that dynamic kept coming back around so that it could be felt, so that I could face it, so that I could decide how I wanted to be in relationship with it, in a way that led to the creation of more love.
I didn’t call people out of their names when I allowed myself to be angry. I didn’t insult or injure people. I didn’t tell people they were stupid or to shut up. I never told anyone that I wished they would get run over by a truck. But I was loud. Often I cried. I needed to be heard. And when I wasn’t—when I was told that I was exaggerating, overreacting, imagining things—I got louder and cried harder.
I received a lot of feedback that this, my loudness and my tears, signaled emotional immaturity. I had needed to scream and cry for a long time. These were deep, old yells and sobs inside of me that were not allowed to be felt and released when I was a child. Once I felt safe enough within myself and my relationships, they came up. And in the face of negative feedback, I felt ashamed. The shame reinforced for me that I couldn’t trust my own body to feel and articulate anger in ways that would be heard and received, in ways that others wouldn’t perceive as too much.
My anger in relationships has almost always come up because I was trying to articulate myself about something that I experienced in a way that would allow the other person to take it in and consider it. To believe me. And to then meet me in a shared reality that held the information that my anger demanded I express.
I experienced things in relationships that made me, rightfully, very angry. But I also experienced moments when I felt like I wasn't being heard or understood or believed about something that was relatively insignificant or small, but triggered a big emotional response.
Every time that dynamic got triggered again, I was more and more equipped to meet the moment, to face the opportunity to either adhere to the way that I was conditioned – to be obedient – or to practice. I learned through practice to be able to trust myself to be angry in ways that I knew were not violent, not harmful. Ways that were clear and grounded. So that the information under my anger could become a part of the articulated evidence present in my connections.
There were also times, lots of them, when people assumed that I was angry because I spoke with any amount of fire. Even when that passion was an expression of my compassion. When people hear fire in my voice when I speak about our world, they might perceive it as anger. But what they’re actually hearing is the love that I am. The way that that love makes it absolutely inconceivable that I could tolerate and accept a life like this for us. It is the magnitude of my refusal to consent to that reality.
Now, I recognize that my journey with anger as an adult has been about finding this same place of love and compassion for myself. I was always able to find that fire on behalf of my love for others. What I have learned over time is how to find that same fire, that same love and compassion, for own being. To be able to speak with that same clarity and force when I’m speaking on my own behalf.
Because if I love the people and the planet, guess what? I'm also the people and the planet. And I dishonor my love for the people and the planet when I allow myself to be treated as less than what I know to be loving.
If I’m not in a relationship with someone in which I’m allowed to be angry, then we are not able to exist in a truly shared reality. Because I'm not able to express that which would shift and shape what we both understand to be real about our connection, should I express it.
I was raised to be obedient. And obedience necessitates the suppression of anger.
We have all been conditioned into obedience to the state, to the powers that were, to the architects of this false reality. Conditioned into a relationship in which any expression of our anger is prohibited. Conditioned into a dynamic in which the information we convey through anger doesn’t seem to have the power to meaningfully reconfigure the existing structure. Conditioned into a distortion that mischaracterizes and dismisses the ferocity of our love as anger.
Your anger is necessary. It is sacred. It is a force that supports the shaping of our new reality.
Too often, though, we misdirect this necessary anger toward each other.
There have been moments in recent years when I’ve needed to scream. Maybe you have, too. The grief and pain have felt that big in my body. But dominant culture doesn't make safe space for that kind of open, uncensored emotion. We stifle it until it leaks out, sideways, into horizontal harm that we project onto our friends, our families, our lovers, our comrades, in ways that are out of proportion to the moment.
The intensity that I feel in a disagreement often isn’t really about what’s happening in that moment. It’s about every other time that I wasn’t allowed to feel that way. It’s my body screaming, I can’t keep burying this.
How can we support ourselves when we realize that the anger we’re expressing toward someone we love is coming from an old wound – perhaps triggered by something in the now, but ultimately rooted in something that has nothing to do with this interaction?
We can practice pausing, recognizing the scale of our feeling, and naming it. Saying, What I’m feeling right now is big. Bigger than just this. I know that. And I’m expressing it because I know it needs to be felt. But I also know that you are not the target, and you do not deserve to catch strays or be the surface upon which I project what I can’t yet grasp in myself.
We can honor the roots of the feeling, while still recognizing our responsibility to not blow it up and throw it up all over someone who is here to love us.
In the same way that our personal patterns of suppressing anger for the sake of obedience play out on larger scales, so, too, does our misdirection and super-sizing of old anger.
I may be feeling old feelings about the circumstances of my childhood, yes. And. Those circumstances exist in the context of a system that conditioned them into being. I can recognize the roots of said circumstances in that system, and feel angry about it, without demonizing the individuals who enacted upon me what of the system they’d internalized.
Because if I demonize those people, I risk missing the necessary information that points toward what is calling for a larger shift. I risk turning our collective, systemic pain into singular, interpersonal beef. I risk making a person the problem, rather than seeing the forces that shaped that person as the space aching for change. And I risk remaining in my own ignorance of the conditioned parts of me that have perpetuated that same systemic pain.
I have witnessed us turn our collective rage into outsized anger wielded against each other. Rage that predates our trauma. Rage that is ancestral. Primordial. Holy.
This righteous rage is not about being right. It is the fire of our deepest love, in defense of what is most sacred. It is our bodies’ remembrance of a truer world.
What is the difference between your righteous rage and your need to be right? How do you feel in your body when you move deeper, beyond the necessary layer of anger, toward the information contained in the righteous rage beneath? What does it sound like when you speak from this place?
That righteous rage is love. Let it be loving. Let it be the part of you that never forgets that we are not here to be obedient. We are here to be free.
Some of us are here to be warriors. To be the defense. To be on the frontlines in this way. We need you.
Some of us are here to be peacemakers. To be the refuge. To be on the frontlines in this way. We need you.
Some of us are a bridge. Shifting between the two. Translating the experiences of each to the other. We need you.
We hinder our ability to contribute from our unique locations when we misdirect our anger toward those who hold a different role than ours, who fall on a different point of this spectrum.
This false structure is a fabrication of a violent imagination. But the violence it enacts is real. As it crumbles, it seeks to wreak as much havoc as it can on its way down.
Some of us are needed to shout our no! to the old as it crumbles.
Some of us are needed to receive our yes! to the new that begs to be created.
Both are necessary.
Those on the no end of the spectrum may believe that their anger, if loud enough, can shape a dying thing into something livable. Because, from where they stand, they don’t yet see the emerging possibility of the new. This is an illusion that is falling away.
Those on the yes end of the spectrum may believe that their peace means they can bypass the pain of what is dying. Because, from where they stand, they don’t yet feel the crushing impact of the collapse. And this illusion must fall away, too.
Those on the bridge are called to feel the war and the peace. The death and the birth. To hold and name them both as real.
There's no one way to be, no one experience to have, as we live through this. This is not the time to listen to those who dictate where you should be and what you should be doing.
This moment asks us to ask ourselves, where on this spectrum do I find myself? What do I see from where I stand? What illusion is falling away from my visage? What is the generative response that feels the most aligned with who I am, why I know that I'm here, what's most important to me now?
When we take the risk to feel into and openly express the truth of our responses to these questions, we will align with other people who exist there, too, where we are. We will find and validate each other. And we will feel our way together.
Something is dying. And something new is being born. There is the pain of death, at times unbearable. And there is the pain of birth, at times unbearable.
Where we are today may not be where we are tomorrow. We all contain parts that exist at various points on this spectrum. We are all dying and being born, moment to moment. Some days you may be the ash, and some days you may be the seed.
But wherever you are today, be there. Speak from that place. Notice how it feels to find others who meet you there. Where you are your most present. Suppressing nothing, projecting nothing.
We must support each other through the grief of the dying of the old. We must support each other through the wonder of the birthing of the new. And we must do both, from wherever we are positioned on this spectrum, from a place of love. From a place fueled by the sacred fire of our righteous rage and the rooted remembrance of our capacity to create. A place that honors anger without weaponizing it, that honors peace without hiding in it.
A place that refuses to turn any of us into kindling.
