by Anne Dickson
The value of feelings As we learn to identify our feelings, we discover how valuable they are. Feelings can act as a vehicle of understanding the truth of what is really going on in a situation even though our heads may be telling us something different. It is easy to dismiss what we feel because we do not have concrete evidence.
Yet our feelings give us important clues. You may have met someone for the first time and sensing with an absolute certainty that this person could be trusted. You may have felt suspicious or uncomfortable with someone’s request even though you couldn’t put your finger on exactly what was wrong. You may have made a decision in your life because you knew it felt right for you even though you could not offer a satisfactory verbal explanation to anyone else, maybe not even to yourself.
These perceptions are not accompanied by any real evidence of the sort that would stand up in court. Yet you know what you feel to be true: you just feel it. Recent research has indicated that within the physical heart apparatus, neurons have been identified within the cardiac muscle, referred to as ‘the little brain’. Information obtained in this manner can complement what we can learn through our powers of reasoning and logic. When we cut ourselves off from what we feel, we cut ourselves off from our emotional intelligence and thus from an essential source of personal insight and guidance.
I should add that although I used this exact phrase in my original text for this book, ‘emotional intelligence’ is now a far more widely-used and familiar phrase, thanks to Daniel Goleman’s book of the same name. In this context, I mean something a little different. I do not believe the subjective experience of emotion can be reduced to scientific measurement: obviously, research into the physiology of emotion is helpful but personal discernment of emotion is affected by other, less straightforward factors.
A checklist of indications of anger, for example, overlooks our profound reluctance to acknowledge this emotion because of its negative connotations; it ignores the consequence that many people feel symptoms of fear when they are angry and many women are likely to cry when they are in fact feeling anger.
Understanding emotional intelligence as a linear and rational set of attributes reduces the significance of the fact that every one of us carries around a personal emotional ragbag of a million memories from the past: some good, some not so good and some extremely traumatic. In the normal course of our psychological histories, some memories are repressed forever in the unconscious but many hover in the sub-conscious layers of our psyches. Their presence accounts for those occurrences I described earlier where we over- or under- react. The arc from stimulus to response is not nearly as straightforward for humans as it is for mice: the potential for distortion is ever present. Finally, the effect of accumulation is not given much prominence and yet this phenomenon exerts a huge influence on what we perceive and how we respond to those perceptions.
Emotional intelligence, in this context, refers to a facility that incorporates the skills already described in this chapter but also involves aspects of our being that are more complex and probably impossible to measure. When we say, for example: ‘I am in two minds about what to do but, in my heart, I know the answer,’ we allude to the essential difference between the rational and emotional realms.
Attitudes to feelings have changed in some ways. The need to address feelings in the aftermath of traumatic incidents is considered more relevant than thirty years ago. However, the underlying associations of emotion with negative occurrences – for example, abuse, natural or man-made disasters, terrorist violence or traffic accidents – are more deeply reinforced than ever. The emphasis is on recovery through professional help – like a physical illness – and although such help can certainly be beneficial in these circumstances, I believe there is an equally important role for emotion to be seen also as relevant to normal, everyday relationships. Negativity surrounding certain feelings remains: unwanted feelings are still as unwanted as ever. Even though we don’t surgically remove parts of the brain to eliminate them any longer, we suppress them (on a frighteningly colossal scale) with, for instance, Ritalin, HRT and anti-depressants.
With the information in this chapter and with practice in expression, we can learn to trust our bodily cues and feelings and to see and enjoy them as an invaluable and reliable source of information and learning.
Instead of insisting that the head rule the heart, I believe that we would do better to foster a productive collaboration between the two. The use of self-disclosure acts as a bridge between short-term emotional management and a longer term approach. Its practice puts us very much in touch with our physical sensations and helps to correlate these sensations with a nameable feeling or emotion.
Choosing to ‘have it out’ with the person concerned, talking things through with a close and trusted friend or even arranging to do this with a professional are an important and vital part of emotional management and can help us move on from a place where we’ve previously felt very ‘stuck’ as we’ll see in the following chapters.
12
The Two Faces of Anger
Of all our complex and powerful emotions, anger remains the most misunderstood. Whereas love is regarded as beautiful and enhancing, anger is considered ugly and degrading. We associate anger with the baser side of human nature which appears dark, sinister and threatening: a side we would rather not see or talk about. We control angry feelings in whatever way we can and we encourage others to do the same. It is because we neither acknowledge nor understand our anger that it remains for many men and women the most difficult of all the emotions to address and handle assertively.
In the last chapter we saw that the range of feelings connected with frustration and anger was connected to the energy for survival and self-direction. In order to understand this in more depth, we need to look at two aspects of anger: a deep layer which exists as a powerful source of energy and a top layer caused by past and present hurts and frustrations. Look at the diagram on page 119. Try to imagine yourself on the inside looking for a way through the maze. The very fact that you want to find a way through shows that the first and deepest layer is operating inside you. Without it you would give up, lie down and die. But with it you feel a wish to engage with others and the world, to move forward, to develop, to change, to overcome difficulties and achieve fulfilment. This movement is fuelled by a very deep and fundamental energy which keeps you going.
You may not be aware of it as a force inside you but you will feel its effects from time to time. It provides the impetus to learn new skills: to master a complicated recipe, pass an exam or learn to communicate in another language; it pushes you to express yourself in writing or singing or painting and it can push you on in a career or to some goal that you see as fulfilling. This anger helps you survive crises, disasters, set-backs, illness or handicaps. You may choose to read this book, to leave an unhealthy relationship, to take care of your body when it needs it, to set up a business, overcome a setback, write a poem, attend a class or to say ‘no’ or ‘yes’ for yourself. You respond to the frustration of a meaningless job by deciding to study for a new career: you know it’s going to be tough but this energy will fuel your determination. You may protest or campaign against outside barriers such as cruelty, racism, inequality or injustice.
This anger, which I call root anger, has, at its source, the basic you, the person under all the roles and responsibilities you assume in your life. Imagine the figure in the diagram starting off through the maze. The signposts give an idea of the confusion of directions and conflict of goals ahead. Most of us use our response to the model represented by our mothers or other women as a starting point for our own journey. We may choose to follow suit or take a totally contradictory direction, depending on how we felt about what we perceived and experienced. But as you can see from the diagram, many of the choices can be self-limiting. The woman in the maze may feel that marriage and motherhood is the right direction for her to take and then find herself, a few years later, unable to move any fur
ther. Or she may opt for a career or intellectual status and still find herself unchallenged and unfulfilled. Or she may choose to go in more than one direction or follow the routes which promise status and approval and still find herself at another dead end.
Within these walls we also encounter the source of the second kind of anger: reactive anger. Our awareness of angry feelings of this kind will fall broadly into two categories: one stems from the desire to tear down the walls and the other describes the despair at feeling the walls are immovable. On some occasions we feel powerfully driven to engage and challenge: at other times we feel overwhelmed by the odds and sink into helplessness. We may find ourselves wanting to hit out at those walls, whatever they represent in our lives. We may see them as society, our parents, our children, our rivals, the government or maybe just fate: whoever we see as responsible for blocking our movement, impeding our progress, stopping us from doing what we want, holding us back and restricting our freedom and blocking our path. We want to break the obstacles down and destroy whatever stands in our way.
At other times, we get tired of banging away at those walls and feel very alone. We feel helpless, convinced that it is futile to keep trying; we lose heart, we stop fighting, become immobile and tend to sink back in despair and resignation. The world closes in.
Most of us alternate between these two extremes of aggressive or passive. Either way we remain ineffectual. A major problem is that reactive anger becomes entwined with root anger. Some of the stress we feel enables us to move forward: it motivates us to change our lives and we certainly don’t want to lose an ounce of that energy. It becomes so bound up with wanting to hit out and blame and take revenge that, in fear of our violence, we can repress everything. The combination of the general taboo on the expression of anger in our culture plus a further discouragement, as women, from showing the more powerful facets of ourselves, has meant that many of us have lost contact with not only our destructive anger but also a fundamental source of energy and purpose.
What are your particular anxieties about expressing anger: do you fear losing control and showing some unpleasant and destructive side of yourself ? Do you fear provoking a violent response in the other person? Is the emotion of anger a friend or stranger to you? Have you ever witnessed a woman expressing anger in a clear and effective but unaggressive manner, in a way that inspired you?
Teaching the skill of self-disclosure, I have many times witnessed the struggle to voice angry feelings: we even try to avoid the use of the word itself and opt instead for ‘upset’ or ‘hurt’ or ‘surprised’. It always seems so difficult to pinpoint this particular emotion: we tiptoe around it as if it were some unpredictable and terrifying monster. I believe we are frightened because of our confusion between anger and aggression. Since we have all been on the receiving end of aggression in some form and inevitably on the issuing end as well, we end up thinking of anger as dangerous rather than informative. As an emotion, anger reveals our own (and others’) emotional and physical boundaries. Anger signals to us (and others) when enough is enough; when a limit has been reached, when something in us says ‘Stop!’ ‘No!’ ‘That’s enough!’
As an exercise in understanding the relevance of this particular emotion in your life, consider the following questions.
What makes you angry? Injustice? Stupidity? Incompetence? Insensitivity? Lies? Bureaucracy? Snobbery? Untidiness? Prejudice? Waste? Cruelty? Hypocrisy? Corruption? Gossip? Being taken for granted? Being ignored? Being excluded? Not being listened to?
Who makes you angry? Do you feel most strongly affected by people close to you? Those in your immediate family? Friends? Parents? Relatives? People far removed from you? People in authority? Particular professionals?
What are the signs that your body gives you when you are angry? Do you feel hot? Does your heart pound? Do you feel sweaty? Tension in your jaw or shoulders? Do you feel like grabbing something or hitting out? Do you feel powerful? Frightened? Do you feel like stamping on something (or someone)? Are your fists clenched? Do you feel physically like breaking out? Needing air or space? Do you feel a rush of adrenalin? Restlessness?
When and with whom do you feel safe enough to express angry feelings? On your own, miles away from anywhere? With your family? A close friend? Your partner? Men? Women? Your cat? With no one? With a large amount of alcohol inside you? In a letter? By email? Never?
Before we look at the assertive expression of anger let’s look more closely at the aggressive, passive and indirect approaches which are far more familiar. How do Agnes, Dulcie and Ivy handle their anger and frustration: how does it make itself felt in their lives?
Agnes uses aggressive tactics to express her rage. On the receiving end, the effect is the psychological equivalent of being punched hard by a heavyweight boxer. You know exactly where it is coming from, you reel under the force of it: you may try and retaliate and protest or you may shield yourself from further damage. Agnes is quick to flare up: her resentment simmers just below the surface so the slightest provocation can trigger the actual eruption although the hurt and frustration has been accumulating inside her for quite a while. When someone moves out of line, says the wrong thing, makes a silly mistake or has a particular facial expression, she over-reacts and attacks before she can be hurt any more. She often goes over the top and then feels remorseful afterwards when she surveys the damage. She feels helpless, angry, hurt and guilty. Furthermore she knows that the other person did not really hear what she was saying so she continues to nurse her grievances. This confusion can tip her into a complementary Dulcie-like mood of despair and futility.
Dulcie wonders what the point is anyway. She has lost sight of her frustration. She does not have the energy to make much of a fuss any more. She still complains and moans about how she is treated unfairly but never to the person concerned. Dulcie’s anger lies deeply buried like the winter earth under successive layers of snow. Occasionally she may lash out like Agnes but will then feel guilty and reinforced in her conviction that it is pointless to try and change things. Her unexpressed anger becomes a burden to herself and a burden to others. Like a ball and chain, she drags her unexpressed anger along, clinging on to those around her, slowing down their progress in turn. Her anger is conveyed through her silence and she often closes off from physical affection or sexual contact.
The more her anger grows, the more Ivy tightens the reins of control on herself and others. Her unexpressed anger takes the shape of invisible poison darts: quick, apparently coming from nowhere, sudden, difficult to spot in flight but very painful on impact. They may appear as put-downs, be transmitted as ‘a look that could kill’ or feel more like a slap in the face. Her strategies of expression might include forgetting something important to you, not turning up to an agreed meeting, betraying a confidence, making a fool of you in front of others, letting you know exactly how inadequate or disappointing you are in her eyes.
It should be emphasised that although this book is specifically looking at women’s problems with anger, these kinds of strategies are not a female prerogative: men use the same tactics, with the same devastating effects. One tactic is to disrupt the status quo by making an apparently innocent remark or ‘accidentally’ letting slip a snippet of information which, very subtly, sows seeds of doubt and anxiety among others. Another is sabotage: finding the means to wreck well-laid plans or intentions, butting in on an enjoyable conversation between two other people, managing to spoil the moment with an ill-timed remark or gesture. Similar to sabotage is the behaviour of the person who feels compelled to make a comment that is guaranteed to deflate someone else’s pleasure or sense of achievement. Finally, there are those who find a channel for their frustration by driving everyone else up the wall with their complaints until they are goaded to a point where they explode while the person who actually stokes the flames sits innocently in the background.
Before we look at the assertive expression of anger, I want to identify one very clear difference between ange
r and aggression because they have become synonymous in so many people’s minds to the extent that they are very surprised to hear there is any distinction between the two. Given the potential for confusion, we start with a crucial distinction between aggression and assertiveness.
Aggression always requires an object. This is true whether the aggressive behaviour is overt . . .
Violence (physical or verbal)
Revenge
Blame
Punishment
Humiliation
Cruelty
Murder
. . . indirect . . .
Sarcasm
Constant criticism
Sabotage
Put-downs
Malicious gossip
Covert cruelty
Second-hand criticism
. . . or even passive, when the object is no longer external but internal and we attack ourselves:
Self- blame
Self-harm
Withdrawal
Self-destructive behaviours
Depression
Addictive behaviours
Suicide
Once you understand this, it is easier to tell the difference between aggression and anger because aggression, in all its forms, exists only in relation to a target: it entails attacking something or somebody (including oneself). The object will vary enormously but the dynamic is always the same: aggression cannot exist in a vacuum.