Positive Expression of RAGE
Convenor: Lisa Heft
Participants: Joelle Everett, Allison Baensch
Discussion:
LH: We’re not very good about making it safe to express rage. We don’t form outlets for people to use / go to / interact with to express rage. I facilitated a post-performance discussion of a theatre-in-education piece on teen-to-teen homophobic hate violence. Most of the audience that day were teens from / in / recently having left gangs. When I asked them why they think it is that we identify “others” and want to harm them, of course the conversation turned to anger and rage as a reason / cause. And why did they think people do this to others? They need to feel Power. And why do you have to harm someone to feel power? Feeling small / scared / powerless / fearful. And the conversation went on in that way, as they were unfolding / identifying where rage and wanting to hurt people comes from. What I was struck by was not only how gang members were so eloquently discussing fear at the root of violence, but they were in a positive expression of rage moment – one of the ways is to put it into words. I don’t think we let people a talk about rage, even, very much. Just creating the safe space for that can happen more. Often the only way we know to express rage is by damaging something – ourselves, another, crockery, or by distracting/separating ourselves from it (drinking, going out to find sex, medicating). What are the productive ways to express rage? All: Expression through the arts, martial arts, sports and other physical exercise, asking permission to talk about it, making appointments to talk later after the rage subsides a bit… LH: My parents didn’t express rage – my family culture is that you express yourself, you communicate, you let it out, you tell someone when you are angry with them; you express what you’re feeling. JE: My parents were different than that – I actually feel my father didn’t ever hold or feel a lot of rage. Therefore we didn’t show feelings like that. I came to know that my mother felt rage but didn’t feel she could express it. So it all simmers. Someone I know says we must learn to separate anger from violence and to express the anger. It’s interesting to think about how you express anger to others, and how you allow others to express anger to you. LH: We are afraid of anger. So what if we have conflict? What if we get angry? Is conflict necessarily bad? Something to be facilitated / soothed / settled? JE: Conflict is a big issue in organizations. But some organizations can create positive ways to express rage: in one organization I worked with a woman was having a lot going on in her life; she was really stressed, and it was playing out all over the workplace. The supervisor had a face to face (no table in-between) meeting with her, saying this is not okay – you are hurting other people and this is also creating a lot of anxiety in the workplace. You are really under a lot of stress, aren’t you? I understand. You have so much – perhaps you could use some time off? Also, we have arranged for paid counseling sessions if you wish to use that. This organization, in other words, is in a learning mode about how to find ways to safely express rage. Included in a facilitator’s job is to create space where I can feel safe about any way they may express rage. AB: What about the possibility of them doing physical violence to you? JE: I’ve never had that happen. Sometimes I say I want to hear what you have to say but I’m not willing to have you be violent to people. Sometimes I say tell us what you want to say but tell it without being violent. Put usually I don’t have to say anything. AB: You are creating a space where people are / feel respectful of each other. I have done some work with land use issues, and there is always high tension / passion in those meetings. The first group met outside and they yelled the whole time. But I let them yell without intervening (I would bang a judges gavel every time the noise got really too loud so others couldn’t hear in their groups) – yelling is the normal mode for guys who work outside and are always yelling up the driveway to their fellows who are also working outside.
It’s all about creating a safe space. Sometimes I walk the space before they come.
LH: Once I had an Open Space with union representatives, non-union, managers, government, minority training programs, construction workers, teamsters, and more, all talking about money to / support of federal highway construction project programs. For the first whole day whatever group would meet in this one area of the room was yelling the whole session (even if the session topics and the people would change – that was a very thick and intense side of the room, for some reason). One guy would be up standing and all the others would be yelling at him (along a union/non-union dynamic) – the client came to me and said save Bill! Can’t you intervene and save Bill? They’re all beating up on him. I said that’s hard for me and I want to save Bill, too but I cannot or Bill will not be able to do what he needs to – he knows the Law of Two Feet so clearly he feels his is being served by being there in some way (as are all the other guys who keep walking back and forth angrily muttering about Bill).
That night I was talking about somehow cleansing the room when a participant who was an indigenous man asked if he could smudge the room (burn sage to purify it from the negative spirits). Of course I said oh yes please! He smudged the room, and he also smudged me. The next morning he burned sweetgrass to bring in the good energy. The next thing that happened is that music burst over the loudspeakers and James Brown sang out “I Feel GOOD” and we all burst into song and dance, dancing away the bad spirits. It was what the catering guy had wanted to add to the ritual. Then we all looked at each other and said now the room is ready, and we opened the doors to the participants. Don’t know which part worked but they had obviously had enough of the chest-thumping and yelling the first day and went directly into solution orientation the second day.
I also felt the need to say a few framing words in Evening News and Morning News…but I suspect if I had not said anything it would have all happened just fine.
JE: I worked with a group working on occupational safety. We always measure safety by how many accidents there have been, I said – can’t there be a positive, proactive way to measure safety? Like measuring preventing accidents. One manager went on and on about why it wasn’t going to work back at the plant. Client asked me are you going to let him go on? I said perhaps he represents some others and I let him go on for a long time – after a while I said I think what you are saying is very important AND I’d like to hear what others like to say.
LH: I was doing an open space and there was so much pain about only being advisory and not the implementers that when we came back to close this one woman talked with such anger and passion and frustration – and everyone else got exhausted by it (I think they’d heard it all before from her and felt ‘held hostage’ by it). And I let it go quite a bit and then I walked across the circle and sat down on the ground directly in front of her to listen and nod and offer words of affirmation. And just to go love her up. And finally she came to a point where she felt heard and she relaxed and stopped. And I thanked her for her sharing and her honesty and her authenticity and then turned back the focus to who might like to speak next. Later a fellow facilitator told me he thought it was amazing that HE just wanted to wring her neck or tell her to shut up already and he laughed that I just went over and loved her so much and focused on her so much that she wound down. And that’s why we work with a diverse team, eh?
But it’s just as anyone in customer service knows: the complainer doesn’t want you to SOLVE their problem, at least right away – they need you to HEAR their problem – to WITNESS for them. Then they can move through onto the next part if they’re ready. JE: One guy in one of my groups goes on and on and on and everybody feels held hostage – and I was letting him go on and listening and I realized that he does that all the time, but each time he has a really good thing to say – he has really good thinking. And it struck me that he’s probably never had a job that used all his intellectual capacity and talents. So therefore there is a piece of him that’s always just dying. So I just began affirming him and thanking him and it worked just the same: some people have to know they’ve been heard before they can stop talking.
AB: Often if just anyone in the group can make any connection at all to what the person is saying and how they themselves take personal responsibility – say yes I can see how that might feel and I wonder if maybe I have done that to someone in the same way somewhere in my life (even if the taking responsibility is not for that guy’s situation but for one like it – ownership of how we each contribute) – it totally changes things. It is terribly important that responsibility be picked up – not just gee it’s terrible what was done to the aboriginal people isn’t it awful – no one owns it and the buck doesn’t stop – it just keeps circulating.
(we talked about how we hold space for all this)
AB: When I take my knitting it really makes a difference. And it keeps me busy; gives me something to do.
LH: Your knitting is also your weaving, holding, loving.
JE: It has a meditative quality. And they look over and you look okay so they don’t have to panic (!). I did an OS with my husband, who’d seen OS but never facilitated it – he’d never seen one in an organizational setting. He chose his role as co-facilitator: He held space. I did all the talking things and he just held space for the entire meeting.
Group question: Do you have to be in the room? To hold space? We agreed it is about intention – don’t have to be in the room. Some people go off and meditate – some take walks, some do xeroxing, one of us really likes to stay in the room to hold space. It’s about attention…and intention.
JE: Harrison once told me he (he’s one who spends a lot of the time not in the room) he stays in a meditative state and intuition works very well in that state and if there’s a place he needs to be he’ll know to go there.
I asked him…what are you doing from a participants point of view?
Group said: that’s not saying ‘do you have to look like you’re holding space / be there for them to feel it’ – we mean that from a participants point of view it feels like a safe space- a space to breathe and be their fuller selves – we set that with intention, meditation, being in or out of the room according to our style. They feel it the space being held anyway. It FEELS different.
LH: I work in prison, too. And some of even our interactive curriculum / learning workshops (training inmates to be peer health educators among each other – subjects like immune system, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, peer counseling, cultural differences in health values) creates the same space as Open Space. It’s how you hold the space and how you invite and welcome and respect each person’s value and wisdom. And always, a circle helps.
JE: As a facilitator you are coming into the room knowing you can hold whatever anybody else expresses. Which I guess is intention.
AB: What are some other productive ways to express rage – ways that move you / propel you forward?
All: Artwork is a very passionate way to express anger and rage.
LH: Expressing rage (being able to, not being able to) is so closely linked with expressing joy and passion. The ability to / lack of / tools for joy and passion are so connected to / the other side of feeling / expressing rage.
AB: I was thinking of not OS – I’ve got this fire in my belly thing in my guts and how do I find ways of engaging that rage and using it to thrust forward into action? Into getting action out into the world to change what I’m raging at?
All: You ARE doing that. You are founding groups, pushing further research, sharing information for activism…Rage is often how movements start.
LH: Interesting about rage: do you go there? Do you soothe it? Love it up? Bathe it? Take some self-loving quiet time right then to replenish? Neither direction when you feel rage is wrong, I think…
As I child I would go to my mother and say ‘I’m going into the closet to scream now’ and she’d look over from the dishes and say ‘okay, dear’ and I would go to the thickest deepest coat closet and just scream and scream until I got it all out. I was such a wise child: In that way I could let go the worry about breaking something or scaring someone and put that right out of the way and still go someplace (literally and figuratively) where I could be as wildly expressing my rage and frustration as I needed to. When I came out of the closet I would feel great, though my throat would be rather raw…
(laughs) So I now find myself thinking ‘that was a good idea how can you replicate that in your adult life what do you need to do’ I laugh and say ‘don’t analyze it or transfer it – do exactly what you said you did: go find a closet and scream in it when you need to!’
We ended the session by taking great handfuls of eucalyptus branches and rustling them very very hard so they made a lot of noise and movement and rustled them at each other making rage-y faces and spinning them overhead so they sounded like a wild flock of birds and that all felt like very productive