Rage Becomes Her (and by “her” I mean US) with Soraya Chemaly

What do we lose when we’re not allowed to be angry? 

 

In a lot of ways, anger is more taboo than grief. They’re deeply related, as you’ll hear in this two-part episode: both grief and anger are considered “negative” emotions, things you shouldn’t feel, and definitely shouldn’t express in polite company. But what if reclaiming our anger was the way to build the world - and the relationships - we most want?

All of that and more with the best selling author of Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly. 

 

In this two-part episode we cover: 

 

• What is the right amount of anger?
• Why deciding some emotions are “good” and some are “bad” isn’t really helpful 
• What would “anger competence” or “anger literacy” look like? (and why would you want that??) 
• Why Soraya says “most grief is ambiguous grief”
• Is anger the most social emotion?
• How the old split between the head (logic) and the heart (emotion) cuts us off from what we most want
• Finding your best community by embracing your anger

 

About our guest:

 

Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion, and media. She is the Director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project and an advocate for women’s freedom of expression and expanded civic and political engagement. A prolific writer and speaker, her articles appear in Time, the Verge, The Guardian, The Nation, HuffPost, and The Atlantic. Find her best selling book, Rage Becomes Her at sorayachemaly.com. Follow her on social media @sorayachemaly

Additional resources

 

We mention Pauline Boss in this episode. If you’re not familiar with her excellent work on ambiguous loss (a term she coined in the 1970s), check out her website at ambiguousloss.com

 

To read more about anger and how it relates to grief, check out It’s OK that You’re Not OK. If you want to explore your anger with creative prompts and exercises, check out the guided journal for grief, How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed. 

 

Get in touch:

 

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Here After with Megan Devine. Tune in, subscribe, leave a review, send in your questions, and share the show with everyone you know. Together, we can make things better, even when they can’t be made right. 

 

Have a question, comment, or a topic you’d like us to cover? call us at [phone] or visit megandevine.co

 

For more information, including clinical training and consulting, visit us at www.Megandevine.co

 

For grief support & education, follow us at @refugeingrief on IG, FB, TW, and @hereafterpod on TT

 

Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s Okay That You're Not Okay and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you google the words anger management, most of the
images you get are white man yelling or pointing or
breaking things or yelling at each other. And that's how
we think about anger and anger management. But in fact,
the rest of us are managing our anger. This is
Here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of
the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay.

(00:23):
This week on Here After Anger, Friends, we are talking
about anger, that much maligned, much needed emotion. My guest
this week is Saya Shmali, author of the incredible book
Rage Becomes Her Settle in Friends, this hot topic coming
up right after this first break. Before we get started,

(00:51):
one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional,
relational angry territory in our time here together, this show
is not a substitute skill support with a licensed mental
health provider or for professional supervision related to your work.
Hey friends, I am so excited for this episode. Getting

(01:14):
to talk to Sarria Shmali is a bucket list item
for me, to be honest, one of the main reasons
this show exists at all is so that I have
a legit reason to talk to interesting people about difficult things.
Now you're going to hear about it in the episode itself,
but I spent a lot of my twenties exploring the
connections between grief, anger, women's rights, colorism, and environmental destruction,

(01:39):
just like your average light topics. But getting to talk
with somebody who also finds those topics fascinating and deeply
interrelated was just a joy. Now, that is another thing
you don't hear very often connected to anger. Joy. SAA
and I cover a lot of territory in our time together,

(02:00):
and I wanted to preface the entire conversation by saying
that when you unleash your anger, you also access joy, connection, creativity,
and all the things we've been taught will never happen
if you allow yourself to be angry for more than
a hot second. Sara and I had such a great
time together and talked for so long. This episode is

(02:22):
now a two parter. The joy stuff comes in part two,
so be sure to come back for that next week
because it's important and it's an awesome conversation. Part one.
Here we definitely dunk on the stages of grief. I mean,
how could we not when we are talking about both
anger and grief, But more than that, we get into
the real reasons why anger is considered an unevolved negative,

(02:46):
dark emotions, something you're supposed to move through very quickly,
and something you should definitely not express if you've ever
found yourself swallowing your rage, because it wouldn't be polite,
and honestly, who hasn't done that? You are going to
get so much out of this conver station. Now we
start fast, and we cover a lot. Part one right now,
next week's part two. Both of them go into the

(03:08):
listen several times full sir for sure, So welcome to
the show. I am so thrilled to talk with you today.
Now anger Anger is actually one of my absolute favorite
topics in the world. It's really tied to grief, of course,
and we'll get into that later, but I kind of

(03:29):
want to start out by saying the most common complaint
that I get from my own work is that I'm
too angry. And I really appreciate that feedback from people
because to me, that says like, if if you think
I'm too angry, that I'm doing my job, I'm just wondering,
what's the right amount of anger for them? Right? What
is the right amount of anger which is like this this,
I feel like we're going to probably spend our entire
time together talking about the bullshit around the right amount

(03:53):
of anger. But what is it about anger that freaks
people out? I think it depends on who's getting angry,
m right, So I think it particularly freaks people out
if the dispossessed, oppressed, powerless get angry. That's one kind
of freak out, right, because anger is an entitlement. You
get your entitled to be angry. Some people don't have

(04:15):
that entitlement. I think it causes discomfort, and we don't
like discomfort. You know, it causes sadness, it causes shame,
it causes guilt, It elicits all of these negative and
fearful emotions. In fact, it'll is it's anger when the
angry person is violating norms. So gender norms, in particular

(04:38):
angry women are an oxymoron. We understand angry men, We
really don't want to understand angry women. No, And honestly,
I'm I think we we excuse and allow angry men,
but I don't think we understand angry men because we don't.
It's like there's one channel for anger and it's like
this violent explosive, piste off, destructive thing, which I just

(05:02):
I think that really dis is anger. Yeah, and also
it's the one emotional channel that men have the right
to without challenge, right, I mean, the fact is we
attribute emotionality to women, and then we use women's emotionality
to punish and discipline and regulate them. But in fact,
the result for men is that if they feel emotions

(05:24):
that are softer, that are more feminine, they're conflicted, they
feel shame, they're punished. You know, little boys who are
sad or anxious or fearful are bullied by homophobes. I mean,
it starts so early. And so the one form of
emotional expression that is complated with masculinity is anger, and

(05:45):
that's super dangerous and damaging. It's damaging to the individual,
it's dangerous for society. But you know, even in adulthood,
we really see the ways in which it gets distributed.
So for a white guy to get angry is understandable
to people because it's how we define certain type of leadership.
It's how we think of certain type of god, right,

(06:05):
the angry, vengeful father, and so that confirms our stereotypes.
So it doesn't make people so uncomfortable. Yeah, it's bizarre
that something so violent, punitive, oppressive doesn't bug people, right
as long as that comes from the right source, the
right source. I mean, if a black man, a black leader,
a black president articulates anger, people are not comfortable. I mean,

(06:29):
when Obama was president, we had an entire comedy routine
sketch that the anger translator, the key, Key and Peel
had an entire uver that was just based on that.
You know, and for men who don't have that kind
of power. You know, a black man who sounds angry
or looks angry doesn't even have to sound or look angry.
He just needs to be a black man much more
likely to be criminalized for that, you know, that followed

(06:54):
as a leader in the broader community. Yeah, And I
think this comes back to something we hinted out a
little bit when we first got started, which is like
the the uses of anger, What anger expresses, what it
points to. Can we talk about that maybe a little
bit for folks who are like, Okay, the only anger
I know is like the anger that burns the world

(07:15):
down that white men have access to. So when we
talk about anger, what are we talking about? I mean,
I think, first of all, we could have lived in
a culture that thinks they are good emotions and bad emotions, right,
that are very sort of binary and oppositional understanding of
the world, and emotions fit into that framework. So the
first thing I would say is there are no good

(07:36):
or bad emotions. And anger in particular is a signal emotion.
It's the emotion that warns us of threat or trouble
or problems. And so from that perspective, we evolved to
have anger so that we could survive, right. And so
the question that I sort of asked in the book

(07:57):
is why do we sever this key emotion from entity?
Because when we do that, we take away the ability
for a girl turning into a woman to identify the problem,
name the problem, labeled the problem, figure out the relationships
that matter to the problem, and then seek to change it.

(08:18):
We're far far more comfortable pathologizing an angry girl or woman,
or silencing her or medicating her then listening to what
she has to say, right, But in fact, if she
can't do any of those things, she can't really help herself,
you know. And so I think by the time you
get to what you describe the explosive destructive, violent anger.

(08:41):
The angers are ready dysfunctional. It's already been suppressed or
repressed or sort of tessellated into a really corrosive force
in a person's life. Yeah, that backlog of anger only
has escape and explosion as its root. Like you know,
the the image of sort of volcanic rage, right, Like,
there's this constant pressure, push this down. Don't name it,

(09:04):
don't say it. Don't say that you don't like something,
don't say that something isn't working for you. I often
say or talk about how you know, for me, anger
is a sense of injustice. It's a message that something
is not right for you. And we don't get to
say those things right. And if you don't get to
say those things, they don't go away. They just get
squished down and squished down and squished down. And they

(09:26):
they are going to find a way to speak those
those feelings of transgression and injustice. And I think it's
interesting too because you use the term anger management. And
I wrote a lot about this because if you google
the words anger management, most of the images you get
are white man yelling or pointing or breaking things or
yelling at each other. And that's how we think about

(09:47):
anger and anger management. But in fact, the rest of
us are managing our anger seven and we're often mismanaging
our anger. And that mismanagement of the anger is I
think what you're talking about when it turns into poor
emotional regulation, bad physical health, long term illness. I mean,

(10:08):
there's no direct correlations between the suppression of anger and
a variety of illnesses, but there are clear relationships between them,
clear correlations between them that we don't understand very well.
And so in fact, for most of us, we need
less anger management. We need better anger competence, better anger understanding.

(10:33):
I love that. I love that that juxtaposition, or that
that definition of management as repression in a way, like
how can you keep this quiet? That's I love that
I hadn't thought about it that way, that management is
really suppression and quieting. And you know, I'm all about
grief literacy, but anger literacy is so closely tied with that.

(10:57):
So I mean, we're we're going here now. I had
some other questions, but I think this is a good
time to go to this, Like what what's your relationship
with grief and does it overlap with your relationship with anger?
My relationship with anger evolved over my life. I was
really socialized to ignore anger, to feel shame about anger.

(11:17):
I lost the ability to recognize anger. I had so
distanced myself from that. And it wasn't until I got
to the point where I thought, why am I exhausted
all the time? Why am I tired all the time?
Why am I feeling the way I'm feeling. I didn't
have words for that, and I really came to understand

(11:38):
a couple of things which is related to grief, which
I'll explain in a minute. But once I was like, oh,
I forgot anger in my life. When I started to
really realize it, it felt like I had felt myself.
I found myself again. I was like, I remember this,
I remember seven eight nine before I went into good

(12:00):
oral mode. I remember what it felt like to be
angry and to say something about it as opposed to
not say anything about it. Right, And what happens to
a lot of women because we self objectify or very
early in our culture, is we lose the ability to
feel what anger feels like in our bodies and to
recognize it. And that's really the first step for many women.

(12:21):
It's literally saying what is that? And then when we
recognize it. The second step is to use the right language,
because we are also really often taught in many families
and cultures to minimize the anger that women have. So
we say we're tired, or we're stressed, or we're irritated,
or you know, you find all of these ways that

(12:43):
women minimize the thing that is bothering them because in fact,
they have learned that nobody really wants to hear what's
bothering them, and that to say what's bothering them with
force or with determination risks doing the one thing that
men and girls are supposed to do, which is maintained
these relationships, and you break a relationship, which is the

(13:06):
real threat. Yeah, there's a passage in your I think
it was in an article I read of yours where
you were talking about how anger was disparaged in your
childhood and that the effect of that was managing your
your anger in a way that suppressed it and cut
you off from it resulted in social isolation, which is

(13:28):
what you just described. There is like which is so bizarre,
because we suppress our anger. We pretend we're not angry.
We say that we're tired instead of that we're mad.
Because we're trying to hold onto those social bonds. And
what you've what you've explored as like actually suppressing your
anger is what breaks social bonds. And my point is
that you can't really have a reciprocal, caring relationship with

(13:51):
a person if they don't know you and what you need,
and anger is an expression of need or want right,
you need people to care about what is hurting you.
And if you can't say that, then in essence, you're
creating a false relationship. If your spouse or your father,
or whoever it is in your life that you are

(14:14):
uncomfortable expressing your anger with. So girls will express anger
towards other girls. You know, there's a lot of relational
aggression that girls have, but they don't express it in
the same way with boys around them, for example, they
don't express it the same way to their parents. And
so you see a lot of what I think of

(14:34):
as horizontal anger among girls and women. They grow up
to be women who are very disparaging of other women,
very punitive with other women. But it's not vertical. It
doesn't go along the axes that power flows on. And
that's really important. But what I really learned that is
to me the nexus of grief and anger. And this

(14:56):
goes along with this idea that we live in such
a binary world, is that we locate our emotions in
a disembodied mind. We think of them as somehow outside
of the body, or closer to the body than the mind,
but not of the body. But anger and grief are
fully embodied. All of our emotions are fully embodied. And

(15:19):
I had to unlearn my education. I had to unlearn
the education of sort of Western Enlightenment selfhood, which is
very much that you're a mind and your body, and
that rationality is different from emotionality and the superior to emotionality.
And you know, we have all of these hierarchies built
into our ways of knowing, and those are really damaging

(15:40):
to our our well being, our relationships, our health, our
ability to cope, to be resilient, all of these things
you know, are related. Yeah, that Cartesian split between the
head and the heart, and the head is prioritized above
all else. Right, like that are just such trash and
in charge. And so this idea that intellectualism and stoicism

(16:04):
and distance from the carnal body is what we choose.
And you know, I spent a lot of my undergrad undo,
like following the links in the chain between that separation
and why we demonize women and why we demonize darker.
You know, the darker you are, the closer you are
to the earth, and that's terrifying for us. And like
there's it's really the link that ties everything together, that

(16:27):
demonization of the body and all of the carnal emotion
that comes with with being embodied creatures, right, Like grief
and love and sadness and anger and all of those
things are just they're not cool because we don't see
them as clean. We don't see them as pure or
clean or in control. Like our our philosophy or science

(16:51):
or selfhood is very much built around this idea of
an agenic person in control. But anger and grief are
out about control, you know, they actually highlight the ways
in which we are not in control. And I would
say to that everything that you just described, everything we're
talking about, the denigration of black bodies, the denigration of

(17:16):
brown bodies, the denigration of women's bodies, it's a form
of terror management because the fear of mortality, the fear
of decay, the fear of illness, like all of the
things that are part of being alive and being a
being have been put into these containers of people, and

(17:36):
so what you end up with is a worldview in
which mind full, full of mind, able body white man
becomes the idealized human being and then the universalized human being.
And in fact, in terms of anger, is the holder
of anger that we are supposed to emulate or that

(17:58):
we're supposed to put our trust in. M hm. It's
all about avoidance of pain, isn't it. I mean, all
of the structures that we've created, all of the structures
of oppression, and who's okay and who's not okay if
that whole impetus is around. I don't like the things
that remind me that I that I and the people

(18:19):
I love and the things I care about are all
temporary and subject to pain and injury and loss and suffering.
If I don't want to feel those things, I need
to make sure anything that reminds me of that is
demonized shun suppressed, because I don't want to know. Yeah,
I want to know that I am safe from pain.

(18:41):
And seriously like this, that whole avoidance of the reality
of relatedness and pain is what has built the entire
dominant repressive culture. It's like it's and that ship. Yeah,
and we haven't even talked about the sort of teleology
of of Christianity. Sanity created a linear time frame in

(19:07):
which we are ultimately without and right, there's a limitlessness
and and it's a it's a movement towards perfection and
and and growth. And it's all based on a renunciation
of the flesh and a mortification of the flesh. And
in fact, all it really does is disconnect us from

(19:28):
living right. And I don't think we can really talk
about any of these things, whether it's white supremacy and
male supremacy, fear, grief, anger, without thinking about just the
material reality of life that our belief systems renounce. Yeah,
that separation and that rising above, and the the amount

(19:49):
of shame in religious systems if you are grieving, right, like, oh,
don't be sad because you'll see them again later, like
this whole overcoming of death. And I don't mean to
shame anybody's religion or traditions that give them comfort, but
we do need to name that. So much of the

(20:11):
mechanics of religion is about nothing should hurt you because
there's something better. It's it's still part of that avoidance
of the embodied reality of pain and grief and related nous,
Like you can't be fully related and fully connected and
fully in relationship with self, other or the world if

(20:33):
you don't allow yourself to feel what it feels to
lose that connection. Right. And also I think, you know,
if we go back to this notion, that's sort of
inexorable assumption that we will get to a better place.
So you need to just trust that. Like I think
a lot about the stages stages of grief, like you

(20:53):
should be moving through those stages. Aren't you at stage
three yet? Like, you know, aren't you done with that yet?
And in fact, that's just not the way grief works.
It's not the way emotions work, it's not the way
human beings work. And yet we hold people to that
standard absolutely, and that's really dam damaging to them. Yeah,
I mean, the stages of grief are trash and I've

(21:15):
certainly talked about that a lot before. What I find
super fascinating about people who are are looking at the
world through the stages of grief lens like there are
definitely favorite children in the stages, right, Like anger is
part of the stages of grief, but don't stay there
for too long. You have to get to acceptance. Like
we we made this whole system to make the messiness

(21:38):
of human emotion approachable and measurable, and even within that system,
anger is unwelcome, right. We we get that you might
be a little bit angry, but it's not very evolved
to feel it. And you know, it's interesting because I
know this is more. This is definitely spiral thinking what

(21:59):
we're going through. It Again, there's this idea of a
trajectory like trauma and post traumatic growth, right, And in fact,
most grief is ambiguous grief. And so we have to
go back to this notion of why control is so important,
because things like the stages or the propulsion, or the

(22:21):
linearity and the progress, those are just about the illusion
of control. And I just think it would be better
if we could culturally, philosophically, religiously, which I know many
people try and do, give up that pressure to be
in control, give up the really an illusion of control,

(22:44):
because it is an illusion, right, And so having the
cognitive flexibility to say, actually, I am grieving. I don't
know when it will end. I cannot force myself not
to feel this and just being in the space being
and recognizing it, which is hard. It's hard. It's hard
for so many reasons. It's hard because we're not taught

(23:05):
that that is normal and healthy and wise. And we
also don't have the tools cultural and interpersonal. We don't
have the tools to navigate that. We've been talking with
bestselling authors s riyah Shmali. Let's get back to it.

(23:29):
And you said something really interesting a minute ago, and
I'd love to hear more about it. You said that
most grief is ambiguous grief. Can you tell me what
you mean by that. I think a lot of grief
is ambiguous. I think that it's open ended. I certainly
know this. In my life. There was a period which
I thought, well, grief is what you experienced when someone dies.
Someone dies in you experience grief. All of us will

(23:50):
experience that grief. Everybody will experience that kind of grief.
But in fact, we grieve for so many other things,
and we gree in circumstances where a death hasn't happened.
And maybe it's the grief of mass incarceration killing a community.
Maybe it's the grief of refugees who have had to

(24:11):
leave their entire experiences and memories and loved ones and
belonging somewhere else. Maybe it's the grief of climate disaster
right losing the world as we know it. None of
that grief is the kind of closed grief of death.
Death is grievous, but it's it's a moment, you know,

(24:33):
it's again a moment in time that happens. It has
a sort of a beginning and then a middle and
an end. And we have traditions and we go through
the process of mourning in ways that can bring great comfort.
But if you are experiencing ambiguous grief, like my my
dad had dementia, So we've lost my father, and this

(24:53):
is the case for millions of families. We lost my
father over years, in small increments, and as we lost him,
we lost parts of our relationships with him and with
each other. We lost parts of our identities. Like no
one talks about that kind of open ended ambiguity. It
happens without you even realizing it, and then you wake

(25:15):
up one morning and you're a different person, or you
feel a satiness, or you don't even have the words
for what it looks like. Yeah, I think that's the
big thing, and it's It's one of the things that
I have tried to do with this show is to
broaden our understanding of what grief is. You know, the
grief connected to the death of somebody you love is

(25:37):
difficult and emotional and challenging and has no endpoint and
all of these things. And we have language to talk
about that, like we under we recognize how, you know,
the short shelf life that we allow people grieving a
death set to the side for a second, Like we
get it that you're grieving when your sister dies, or

(25:59):
your mom dies, or your best friend dies. We don't
have language, ritual support structure for the grief that happens
as you lose somebody by degrees, the grief that happens
when your career does not go the way that you
wanted to. I think we start getting really possessive of
what the word grief is allowed to be used for. Yeah,

(26:20):
I think that's right, and I think to like, I
don't know if you're familiar with Pauline Boss's work, right,
So I came to her work because I was studying
trauma and resilience. At the very beginning of COVID, there
was a lot being talked about in terms of trauma

(26:40):
and resilience and what was to come, And what really
struck me was that in fact, it wasn't trauma, it
was grief, and that we were grieving in this open
ended way for things we couldn't name, and she has
a good framework for that. And what's interesting to me
is that we're in such an individualistic culture that most

(27:01):
people perceive resilience is a trait that they have or
that they can develop, when in fact, in terms of
grief in particular and ambiguous grief even more so, the
thing that enables you to adapt and survive and maybe
eventually come to a new place is your relationships. Right.
It's it's the community that you form around you and

(27:24):
the belonging that you can cultivate or the meaning that
you drive. So that's a relational resilience, yeah, which is
different than this like buck up, little camper, be strong,
don't let the world bug you, don't let things get
you down. Just pow ahead, endless for real movement, Yes,
optimism by demand. Right, it's that thing of like the

(27:45):
whole resilience narrative really irks me. And resilient resilience resilience, Oh, yeah,
I cannot wait. Yeah, Oh my gosh, I'm so glad
to hear that. Like the resilience, we could well, we
could totally nerd out about this one, but like, resilience
just really irks me because resilient, this is the thing
that we demand of people, Like, yes, difficult things happen,
but we don't want to hear about it. We only

(28:06):
want to hear you rise above Like it's another It's
another way to silence somebody's experience and to to separate
them attitude. Can't you? Yeah, yeah, how dare you? How
dare you have feelings that aren't forward moving positive thinking?
It goes back to what we were talking about a
few minutes ago of like, you know, the entire capitalistic

(28:29):
structure of forward human progress would collapse if we allowed
ourselves to be sad and angry, like hello, another thing.
We've been dancing around this, But productivity culture is a tool,
but it's used against us, right, Like I think a
lot about pregnancy loss and even childbirth as a process

(28:50):
of grief that women sometimes go to. You can work
to a child and then you realize what you've lost,
right you You realize I'm not the person I was
before work, and I'm at this new person or I
have these new relationships, and that doesn't mean you don't
love your child, but there is a difference in your life, right,
And so there's no recognition of any of that. There's

(29:14):
no recognition of what women go through anyway, or people
who have children. There's there's no sense in the culture,
particularly American culture, that it's tiring, it's hard work, we
need rest, right, because in fact, the goal is to
get back to normal, which means optimizing yourself, peak performance,

(29:35):
positive attitudes. Like all this bullshit endless, endless bullshit, and
we just are not kind to people. We just don't
have a caring ethic. Yeah, Like the the whole medicalization
of grief is about a return to productivity, right, Like
when can you go back to work and complete your
job without being distracted? When can you go back to

(29:58):
consumer culture and being up and positive and optimistic? Like
when can we package you and your grief? Your emotions,
your anger, your sadness, your disappointment are all way too
messy for us to make productive hours out of and
that is terrifying for the systems that exists are not interested. No,

(30:21):
there's something else that I want to bring in here,
like this territory has been my preferred ground since I
was a teenager, Like I love this stuff, And when
my partner drowned, I no longer gave a shit about this.
Obviously I care about it again now. But I think
when loss erupts into your life, these conversations feel very

(30:44):
distant and very theoretical. Despondence is the response. I agree
with you, because it like nothing matters, and that that
these conversations about the larger cultural and interpersonal sweeps have
no bearing on the actual intimate life that I am
living at this time. And and I get that, and

(31:04):
I think these conversations are really really important because the
culture that we create together, the structures that we create together,
have a direct impact on how your emotional experience after
a big loss, how that gets seen, and how that
gets supported. And maybe, like in that tight orb of

(31:25):
a big catastrophic loss or a catastrophic injury or illness,
like maybe that is not the time for philosophical conversations
for you. And knowing that your personal experience sits within
a culture that is armed against you, hostile to you.
You're right, hostile to you is part of why it's

(31:46):
so difficult to be a grieving person in this culture,
because the systems are in place to make the world
a very hostile place for grievers. And I think like
situating yourself in that and and understanding that that it's
not just you, it's not just you, it's the world,
the world. And also we're in the culture. We can't
be out of the culture. Really, we have to live

(32:07):
in the world. We it's a capitalist society. Most of
us have to earn money to feed ourselves and our families.
Like these are realities, right, But the other thing too
is when when like this is the case with anger.
Part of the real reason I wrote the book was
to show how social anger is, to show how constructed
it is. Same thing with grief, right, Same thing with

(32:28):
the idea of emotions. We think of emotions as an
internal state of an individual, as opposed to the way
we communicate between individuals as inter persons. Emotions make us
inter persons, we enter into we we've become a new
thing when we're sharing emotions with with a person or

(32:49):
with a community. But because we are so individualistic, we
fail to think, for example, in terms of communal grief.
Historic grief called srural grief, sort of loss experienced over
time periods that are way outside the average lifespan, and
why those are still relevant. It's like the diagnosis of PTSD.

(33:13):
Diagnosis of PTSD is an individual diagnosis of trauma, and
when the diagnosis was made, it helped a lot of people,
mainly soldiers coming back from wars Vietnam. But in fact
it's simultaneously by saying trauma is resident in an individual's mind,

(33:35):
it's simultaneously erased historic trauma of indigenous people's or trauma
related to racism. For example, it ignored the grief and
trauma of women who experienced rape because it said trauma
of this sort, grief of this sort, anger of this
sort comes from a violent attack by a stranger or

(33:59):
in a war, which nobody could conceive a woman experiencing
that in her own home. Yeah. This idea that making
a making the diagnosis, making a definition legitimizes certain kinds
of emotional, relational, neurological response and at the same time
erases any other expression of it. Yeah, because it it

(34:23):
invalidates everything else, you know, and so we still For example,
in the DSM, the manual diagnostics used in the United
States complex PTSD, which was suggested by Judith Herman like
in the late seventies early eighties to describe the experiences,
particularly of women living with domestic violence or sexual violence.

(34:46):
It's still not part of the DSM. No, it's starting
to get some airtime with authors like Stephanie Foo and
I mean Neat Fails, who we've had on the show
earlier this season. But that's the that's the thing, right, Like,
how do we how helloe like can we start talking
about the lives of girls and women and the you know,

(35:07):
the the effects of millennia of trauma, violence, displacement and
what does that do to a body with like, you know,
sort of a post enslavement syndrome, like the affects the
intergenerational effects of violence and enslavement on American Black communities

(35:29):
doesn't quite fit into the definition of PSD. Doesn't quite
know when there's there's no clear five step plan to
get yourself out of those things to go be a
productive American, Like there's just it starts to get really
overwhelming when you start to see how big the web is.
I remember when I was in grad school, I remember

(35:52):
that an adviser of mine was a psychiatrist within one
of the last remaining in patient long term residential psych units,
and she said, I never checked this out, So if this,
if this wasn't accurate, and she was talent tales, I
don't know, but one of the things she said was that,
you know, there's a tendency to romanticize psychosis. But I

(36:12):
can tell you that a lot of my current patients
are women who were researching deep women's history and the
history of people of color, and it broke their brains
and they couldn't they couldn't mesh the pain and suffering
that they were seeing, like how far that rabbit hole
goes with daily lived culture, and it broke something in them.

(36:35):
And I think that this is one of the reasons
that we don't always explore this stuff is one in
our own pain, This bigger sweep of pain feels distant
and irrelevant. And I think another thing that really it
strikes me sometimes and I love this stuff, but I
think another thing that really strikes people is it's so
immense and so violent and so hostile, and it's everywhere,

(37:02):
and how do we find a corner of that to
hold onto and not lose our minds. Well, that's funny.
I've been talking about this, actually this exact topic now,
talking to myself about it, but also to friends I
know that would understand this. You know, for years I
I wrote almost exclusively about sexual violence, and what happened

(37:25):
in that process was not only did I know my
own experience of sexual violence in the culture, which I
really always known, like really from the age of eight
or nine, but I then experienced secondary trauma from the
process of listening to other people's stories, studying, writing. And

(37:46):
I don't think people understand enough about secondary trauma and
the grief you feel like you just described the grief
you feel when you realize what a massive task we
have ahead of us. So I struggle a lot with
the notion of hope, because in fact, the despondence that
can settle on you is honestly in some ways, I

(38:07):
think in my case it felt self indulgent because I
could afford to be despondent. I read a lot, and
I think a lot about people who have gone through
this process over the last century and written about it
and talked about it, and they've come to a place
of hope and hopefulness as a practice, as as what
has to happen and try and learn from them, because

(38:29):
it is easy to fall down that rabbit hole and think,
my god, how will we dig ourselves out? And I
will say this, I've done many podcasts in the last
ten years, five years, ten years, but very few people
ever want to go down this path because in fact,
they want to give people something positive, you know, they

(38:52):
want to end on a high note. And I'm like, well,
maybe I'm not your gal right now. I'm like, okay,
but did you know that before you asked me? Because
in fact, there's some things where you just have to
sit with the badness, which isn't really fun for people
at a dinner party. I understand. I've been talking with

(39:16):
Sarriah Shmali, author of the best selling book Rage Becomes Her.
Part two of our conversation is out next week. Be
sure to check the show notes for ways to learn
more about Sarah's work, and stick around for your questions
to carry with you for part one of this episode
right after this break. Each week, I leave you with

(39:45):
some questions to carry with you until we meet again.
Now you know what really struck me in this conversation? Okay, well,
two things lots of things, but I'm only going to
share two. One. It has been nearly two decades since
my twenties. Actually, quick, Ma, it's more than that. Whatever,
But that was the time when I was really diving
into research on anger and oppression and how that intersects

(40:07):
with women's rights and environmental destruction and activism. So it
was really cool to go back there with soriah number
two things for this part of the episode. At one
point I think it I think it is maybe in
part two of our conversation, but Sria and I were
talking about books and how anger itself is an endless

(40:27):
well of material. So if you have a book on
anger in you, please do it. Please please write that book.
There's just so much to say. There's so much to
say about anger. There's a part two of this conversation
coming up next week, so don't miss that one, and
be sure to let us know what came up for
you during this conversation on anger and grief and connection.

(40:52):
Everyone's going to take something different from today's show, but
I do hope you find something to hold onto. Check
out Refuge and Grief on Instagram or here after pod
on TikTok to see video clips from the show and
leave your thoughts in the comments on those posts, and
be sure to tag us in your own anger conversation
starting posts on your own social media. Use the hashtag

(41:13):
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want more Hereafter Brief education doesn't just belong to end
of life issues. Life is full of losses, from everyday

(41:36):
disappointments to events that clearoughly divide life into before and after.
Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or
platitudes or simplistic think positive posters is an important skill
for everyone. Find trainings, workshops, books and resources for every
human trying to make their way in the world after
something goes horribly wrong at Megan Divine dot c. O.

(42:01):
Hereafter with Mega Divine is written and produced by me
Mega Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, who produced by
Tonya Juhaus and Elizabeth Fossio, Edited by Houston Tilly, and
studio support by Chris Uren. Music provided by Wave Crush