We People Pleasers Have Got To Stop Avoiding Feeling Angry
Plus a hard pass and a quick recommendation.
Hard pass: Forcing things
Yesterday was one of those days that felt like, despite the best of intentions, it came off the rails. A mix of just not being in the zone, dodgy ‘time management’, and letting other people’s needs gradually infiltrate the day. In the end, I let the day be the washout it was, addressed all the other things, and started today afresh. Voila, here’s the newsletter
Recommendation: I had a gorgeous chat with my pal Claire Venus on her
podcast about my almost twenty-year creative journey online. Listen here.Recently, during a kinesiology session, the subject of anger came up yet again, and But I don’t want to feel angry about this! popped into my head. It immediately caught my attention, causing me to be curious ever since about what was behind it. Where did that desire come from?
I don’t want to feel angry about this because I feel like I’ve worked through it and gained perspective.
OR
I don’t want to feel angry about this because I want to feel something else so that I don’t have to feel the anger and confront what’s behind it.
In both instances, there’s no doubt a desire to move on, but I acknowledged a necessary truth:
It doesn’t matter that I don’t want to feel angry; what matters is acknowledging that I do and any motivations for not wanting to feel it.
In my first kinesiology session, nearly nineteen years ago, where I’d assumed we’d talk about nutrition and remedies, we quickly got on to the topic of emotions. I felt seized by a familiar urge to flee and claimed I’d forgotten a work meeting. The embarrassment of my obvious lie combined with being seriously ill and afraid of dying meant I opted to stay, which meant also deciding to allow myself to feel.
Specifically, it meant allowing myself to acknowledge, recognise and express something I tried very hard to suppress and repress with people pleasing and perfectionism: anger. And, jaysus, it poured out of me.
Instead of feeling steeped in shame or overwhelmed by rage like I always, on some level, imagined would happen, I felt relief. Grief was in there too, sure, but I felt lighter. Over time, as I continued to reconnect with and reclaim myself, I wondered how I’d sat on so much anger (and hurt, fear, pain, shame, and guilt) my entire life. Anger, over the years, has also shown me I’m very practised at being calm, rational, even unbothered.
In The Joy of Saying No, I liken being a people pleaser to being like a swan “calm on the surface while furiously paddling underneath.” Except for you can be so used to your way of being that what’s going on beneath the surface is your ‘normal’. You don’t question it or recognise that your body’s in deep stress, which means it has to send distress signals through what I call imploding (e.g. burnout, raging at yourself, feeling low, mystery illness) and exploding (e.g. erupting, behaving uncharacteristically, lashing out, derailing your life, upheaval).
Our bodies are always trying to dialogue with us. ‘Hello, are you there? Are you listening? Did you feel that? You need to take care.’
Anger is a necessary and valid emotion on equal footing with all the others. Lots of us don’t want to feel angry, though, because we have a complicated relationship with it.
If you’re not a child right now, you were raised during what I call The Age of Obedience, where, for several hundred years, the disciplining, interacting and communicating with children centred on making us excessively compliant, particularly around authorities. We learned to be disassociated from our feelings, which disconnected us from our bodies, boundaries, needs and wants, but we also learned that certain feelings, particularly anger, were ‘bad’. You know, not pleasing. It’s why lots of us are adults who only became acquainted with our feelings, boundaries, ourselves, because of distress signals.
The paid version of this post includes two guides, Get to Grips with Anger and Demystifying Aggressive Behaviour.