To read more stories by Lesley White, click on panel of links, below left
”That counsellor I’ve been seeing…” That was his opening. I nodded, carefully.
I’m sure I also smiled.
“She’d like you to come into our next session.”
“Of course,” I said, warmly. “Is there a particular reason?”
I must have raised an eyebrow.
“Yes,” he said. “She’d like to discuss your anger.”
“My anger?” I’m afraid I began to lose my cool at that point. “Why would this
woman want to talk to me about my anger?”
“Because of what it’s doing to us,” he said.
Now that really hurt my feelings. No, worse than that. It confused me. Here I
was, thinking we were happier than we’d ever been in all our 19 years
together, and there he was, going to this counsellor woman and painting me
as some sort of…
Which I might have been, once upon a time. Well, more than once. I’ll be the
first to admit it. For most of my life, anger has been my fuel. According to
my mother, I was such an aggressive little girl that her friends refused to
bring their children to my first birthday party unless she promised to keep
me in my playpen.
So they asked her: “What are you going to do to curb your daughter’s
aggression?” It is to my mother’s credit that she responded to the question,
and the subtext, by choosing to do nothing. Which may explain why I was so
confident at school. Although it might also explain why…
But let’s not go there. Let me just say that when I look back at the years
when I was anger personified, I have to struggle to remember why. My guess
is that a lot of it had to do with expecting life to be fair. Now that I’m
older, I know that it just isn’t. Or, to put it differently, I know why
there is almost always such a great distance between life as it might be and
life as it really is. This means I don’t resent friends or loved ones who
let me down. Instead I try to accept them as they are, and try to understand
them. Which is why I agreed to go along to see this counsellor of his.
Because I knew that – even if it was absolutely preposterous, this harridan
blaming everything on “my” anger – it was clearly a problem for him for some
reason, and where better to discuss it than in a neutral space in front of a
witness?
That said, I was still smarting from the implied insult. I had other qualms,
too. What if I was walking into a trap? This woman was bound to be biased.
He was her client, after all. She had to be. On the other hand, I was no
spring chicken. I knew how to hold my own. I would make it clear that I had
arrived with an open mind. While also letting the counsellor woman know,
just by the way I placed my hands oh so gently on my lap, that I wasn’t to
be trifled with.
Because at my age, the one thing I don’t have time for is time-wasting. And in
my book the greatest waste of time is anger. Which is why, when I was
leafing through a magazine that evening, I was so happy – relieved,
delighted even – to read that many women felt less anger as they got older
for this precise reason, at least according to Sally Stabb, professor of
counselling psychology at Texas Woman’s University.
He was away that night, which meant I could do all the little things I could
never do when he was around because they drove him crazy.
I went to bed early with a big cup of hot chocolate, which I drank noisily. I
turned on the television to watch the news and then I put a cushion under
the covers to prop up my feet, even though the lotion I had put on them had
not quite dried yet. As I drifted towards sleep, still surrounded by the
books and magazines and tissues that I would have been obliged to clear away
had I been sharing the bed with him, I thought about my angry years and the
long line of betrayals that had so undone me. And how it comforted me to
recall the wicked perpetrators with such equanimity.
The Ex. I could wish even him well these days. The boss who had sacked me – I
could, if I strained my imagination, almost see his side. The school friend
who had not invited me to her Famous Ancestors birthday party because I
didn’t have any – she’d been under terrible strain at home at the time. As
was the boyfriend who had told me, after we’d had sex, that thanks to me he
had transcended it.
What a relief it was to watch them parade through my head without feeling the
slightest shudder of resentment. To know, that, in this sense at least, I
was happy to be my age. Or so I told myself, as I went hurtling into one of
the most disturbing dreams I can ever remember.Everyone was in it. Each time
I turned a corner, there was another editor with his arms akimbo, telling me
my writing was hormonal, and behind him would be a righteous neighbour
standing with her arms akimbo, saying: “You know why your family is such a
mess, don’t you? It’s because you work.”
What did all this signify? I asked myself the next morning. Could it be that
nobody ever got over anything? No, I thought. There was no escape. Even if
we buried them, our betrayals and humiliations and broken hearts lived on.
On my way to work the next day, I stopped off at a bookshop. Later I did some
research on the internet and made a few phone calls. After which I was able
to confirm three things. The first was that women these days had a lot of
anger, and with good reason. In the words of Mike Fisher, founder of the
British Association of Anger Management, we were more independent and had to
“cope with juggling the stress of home life, work and financial
responsibilities”, so no wonder it got to us. The second thing was that all
those who considered themselves experts on women and anger were of the view
that women tended to bury it, because it was considered unfeminine. The
third thing was that to bury anger was to turn that anger against oneself,
thereby inviting depression, eating disorders, alcoholism and all the forms
of substance abuse known to man.
Put the three things together and you had a dilemma. Or so it seemed, as I was
chatting with a male colleague later that same day at lunch. I suppose I
should explain that we had just come out of a meeting that had gone rather
badly, in part because of the way I had handled a disagreement with another
male colleague. It had been simmering for a long time, and when you’ve been
biting your tongue for months, because you’ve been doing his job for him,
only to see him take all the credit – what I am trying to say is that when
you are that angry with someone, striving for a neutral tone is like hiking
to Mount Everest Base Camp in the wrong shoes. Why I bothered, I do not
know. Did anyone even hear me? No. The male colleague who took me out to
coffee was kind enough to confirm that. “I’m afraid you’re right,” he said.
“These things do tend to be gendered. There are certain situations in which
a man can express anger and get respect.”
“And a woman?”
He smiled and shook his head. Between you and me, I felt like screaming. But I
gritted my teeth – no, I’ll be honest here. I ground my teeth. There might
well be people in the world who could relax by ironing their husbands’
shirts. There were others who found it more relaxing to go to the gym, get
on the step machine and imagine that a whole series of heads, belonging to
any number of people, including their husbands, were underneath. My own
preference would have been swimming. But since he had the car, there was no
way I could get to the pool and back by bus and also make it to the business
appointment that was threatening to ruin my evening. So instead I went to
visit my friend Laila, which turned out to be perfect, even though she was
ironing, because she hadn’t spoken to her husband for four weeks. And quite
right too. During a late-night argument he had called her a Muslim dwarf. “I
don’t think I’ll ever forgive him,” she said.
Her friend Markie, who was leaning disconsolately on the kitchen table, said:
“I don’t think you should.” She’d had a hard day, too. She’d been trying to
close some sort of business deal, and her prospective partner had been
extraordinarily rude to her. “It was because I’m a woman, you know. That’s
why he thought he could get away with it. You wouldn’t catch him talking to
the men that way!” She sighed and took a dangerously large swig from her
wine glass. And then she was telling us about her last boyfriend, and the
one before that. It was just terrible hearing what they had done to her, but
(strangely) it was also relaxing.
So much so that when I went off to my appointment, I felt almost
light-hearted. I could barely remember why I’d been dreading it. What was
there to complain about? The woman I was meeting was about my age, and she
had an excellent sense of humour. And when she mentioned that in a previous
life she’d been a therapist, I brought up this anger thing. I shared my
latest thoughts. Yes, women were brought up to bury their anger. Yes, this
social habit exacted a heavy psychic price. Yes, it was still socially
unacceptable for women to express anger. But there were ways around it. Just
because you couldn’t express your anger directly and in public, that didn’t
mean you couldn’t have a very good time expressing it behind closed doors.
And what fun that was. And how dull life would be without those delicious
jokes at men’s expense. She smiled.
In a judicious voice she told me that what I had just described was
triangulation. This meant venting to a third party to ease the tension. “But
it means you forgo the chance to use your anger adaptively, by which I mean
using your anger to hold your ground, assert your values, and deepen your
relationships through honest, open communication.”
Oh, no, I thought. Here we go. But at that very moment, a group came in. There
were eight or nine of them, men and women in their mid-thirties, all
wielding pints and wearing red shirts that said “Shagalluf” and cursing
whatever team it was their own benighted team had just lost to. They settled
in the sofas at the far end and began to play with some sort of mechanical
toy. Clack clack clack. It was ear-splitting. After another judicious pause,
my drinking partner stood up, walked over and explained to the clacking
Shagalluf brigade that some people in the room were trying to have a serious
conversation.
“That should do it!” she said brightly when she sat down again. She had not
seen the hand signals that they’d given her behind her back.
But I had. So I glared at them. I glared at them again when they walked past
us – single file – with their forefingers pressed against their lips, saying
“Shhhhh”. We just ignored them, but then they did it a second time, and then
a third. The idiots were making fun of us for standing up for ourselves. Was
I really going to let this pass?
In my most forbidding voice, I said: “If you continue with this behaviour, I’m
afraid I’m going to have to make a complaint.” He imitated my voice and his
friends jeered. I don’t know what came over me. I gave them the finger.
“Now, that’s just not on,” said the ringleader. “No middle-aged woman is going
to give me the finger and get away with it.”
“Oh, f*** off,” I said.
That really got me thinking. What I mean is, it got me thinking about where
all this thinking about anger had got me. It seemed to me that the more I
had thought about anger, the angrier I got. And the more I talked about it
to other women, the angrier they got too. But how refreshed I felt after
letting off a bit of steam. Well, maybe I let off more than a bit. But it
was fun. Though my pleasure was somewhat diluted when I went down to the
post office several days later to collect a package. It was a book. The
Anger Advantage. From You Know Who. The business associate who understood
her anger better than I did mine.
“I hope this helps,” said the inscription.
Chastened, I made myself a cup of camomile tea. Okay, I thought, as I leafed
through its earnest introduction. I could, if I wished, pull this book to
pieces. But it was grounded in the best research and full of information
that might just help me, focusing as it did on the special problems women
had with anger on account of society giving them no acceptable way to vent
it. I would read it with an open mind, I decided. And how glad I am I did.
Like all such books, it was speckled with multiple-choice quizzes designed
to help you see which categories you fell into. To my appalled surprise, I
fell into almost all of them. Like so many women, I sometimes diverted anger
by internalising it, eventually making myself ill and depressed. Like so
many other women, I sometimes externalised it. But all too often I contained
it, saying nothing while waiting for it to blow over, and ultimately failing
to stand up for myself or my beliefs.
Worst of all, I had gone through long stretches of my life segmenting my
anger. In other words, disowning it to such a degree that I didn’t even know
it was there, but still expressing it in veiled and insidious ways.
The thing to remember about anger, the authors reminded me, was that you
couldn’t make it go away. Veiled or not, it always found some way to express
itself. Now that really chilled me. So of course I was open to any
suggestions about learning new ways to express anger honestly, respectfully,
and responsibly, to use it as valuable information about where my boundaries
were. But the more I read, the more my responsibilities weighed on me.
Especially when I got to the bit when they said that even when I had mastered
all of the above, people would still have a hard time dealing with my anger,
on account of not accepting anger in any form from a woman. The thing that
really irked me was that I did care, deeply, about the troubled
relationships in my life and sincerely wished to fix them. So I read on,
dutifully addressing issues with my spouse, my family of origin, my
children, my colleagues and my friends.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have a chapter on counsellors. So the day before
our first appointment, I sat down to prepare. I would go in to this
counsellor’s office with an open mind and a smile. I would look the woman in
the eye and say: “How glad I am to be here. Even though – I’ll be honest –
when I first received this second-hand invitation to come in and speak to
you about my anger, well, frankly, I just didn’t know what to think.”
I’d pause, to let her take it in. But also to feel my anger. See its colours.
Cherish its fire and its power. And then I’d go straight to the heart of it.
I’d lean forward and say: “If you never allow yourself to feel angry –
because women aren’t supposed to – and if you never allow yourself to
express anger – because angry women don’t get respect – then you’re just
going to be a doormat, aren’t you? You’re never going to have much fun.
Never going to be much fun, either.” And then I’d turn to my other half and
say, “And where would we be then, my love? You’d be dragging me in here to
talk about how boring I am. You’ll never be content, will you? Not until I’m
the whore and the Madonna all rolled into one.”
Oh, what fun I had, imagining the look on his face when I said that. There it
would be, for all to see. And I was angry about it. Why shouldn’t I be? That
would teach him. Teach her too. This counsellor woman would never dare to
ask another woman to come in to talk about her anger, ever again.
But I had so much fun planning the showdown that by the time I actually walked
into the room the next morning and set eyes on the counsellor – who did not
in any way resemble the harridan I had been expecting – my script deserted
me. I was forced back into my old ways. When she asked me about my anger, I
said I felt none at all.
Maureen Freely
Controlled and conciliatory in everyday life, Lesley White gets her kicks
from body combat
I have just chosen my Christmas present. It is soft and baby blue; it is
generously padded and delicately stitched. My gift, a pair of beautiful
leather boxing mitts, is my best chance for a thinner, fitter, braver New
Year spent pummelling passive men (consensually, of course) whenever I get
the chance. By nature I am a lazy exerciser. Health clubs depress me: the
humming of the machinery and the smell of old sweat make me nauseous; but
when I punch I am happy, lost to myself. I want to go on and on. Only
fatigue stops me. If you added a sociopathic tendency and an injection of
brute strength, I could be a very worrying woman. In life I am controlled.
I’m conciliatory. And then I go to Body Combat.
I’m a weakling southpaw, but my jabs and crosses are improving, while my hooks
still fade in mid-air and my upper cuts couldn’t cut a baby tooth.
Monitoring my moves in the full-length mirrors as I strike out at nobody in
particular to the strains of Eye of the Tiger, I suddenly notice myself and
want to laugh.
My friend Kate, elfin and artistic, sends me a text on a Saturday morning:
“Are you coming to kick some ass later?” When we are kept from our arena by
injury (her: twisted ankle from high heels; me: worn-and-torn kneecap), we
veer from panic to depression. Who will we fight this week? Our husbands
shake with laughter at all this; when there is talk of a body-combat social,
they imagine a bouncers’ pub crawl, drunkenness, swearing and fisticuffs on
the streets.
Is what my husband calls my “Kill Men class” really an outlet for my own
latent rage? It certainly taps into a darker instinct. In one sequence we
have him (the putative enemy is always male) down on the floor and are
punching into oblivion. In real life this would be bloody, brutal,
brain-damaging violence, but this is make-believe, and it works.
Where does it come from, this well of aggression, this desire to overcome? I
have never fought in the street. Road rage appals me. Why, then, do I love
it?
It’s not just me. Even the most respected London boxing gyms have been filling
with women. Now I have a trainer who struggles to motivate me on the bench
press; after 10 minutes he says “Let’s box”, and fetches the mitts and pads.
Suddenly the tired, resentful woman in front of him starts smiling. “What is
it about women and boxing?” I ask, genuinely puzzled. At home I persuade my
husband to hold the pads and coach me; our five-year-old son wanders into
the room, bemused, seeing from the laughter that this hitting is a good
game. I stop. Aren’t I always telling him that fighting is never the answer?
The pat theory is that women like me are expressing a sublimated anger at
daily life. Actually, it’s men who aren’t allowed to be angry any more, with
our hyper-vigilance about their domestic violence and anger management. The
desire to hit comes from deeper within, somewhere atavistic, to do with
survival. It is compounded by the thrill of taboo-breaking: our hands are
for nurturing, for soothing, for revealing our age, not for giving bloody
noses. Does throwing toy punches make me feel safer as I walk the mean
streets? Would I raise even my voice to anyone who attempted to mug me? No,
I’d hand over the phone, then offer the watch, the earrings, the cash, and
then I’d cry. But a good box the next day would help me get over it.
When it comes to healthy rage, women have the upper hand, says AA Gill. Men
go into sulks instead
Watching a stage production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, I was bathed in
a small revelation. It wasn’t what the arguing couple were saying, but how
they were saying it that mattered. There were times when they were lying and
times when they were telling the truth, and sometimes they were pretending
to lie when in fact they were telling the truth and vice versa. And even
though I’d only come across these people on stage a few minutes before, and
knew no more about them than the author had allowed me to see, I could, with
absolute assurance, tell the difference between the truth and the lies, the
demi-lies and the half-truths. The whole audience could tell. We could
separate veracity from mendacity because they were having an argument. If
they’d been quiet and rational and reasonable, it would have been
impossible.
In the film The Lives of Others, an East German secret police interrogator
points out the truth that innocent people get angry: it’s the guilty who
remain calm, who never contradict themselves, whose alibis never falter.
It’s not in the vino that the veritas lies; it’s in the anger the alcohol
disinhibits.
And here is a sober truth: women are better at venting anger than we are. It’s
a truth that’s not an observation from stage or screen, but from experience
at
the parapet. The model of women as ideally demure, simpering creatures
constantly searching for compromise, harmony and a quiet life was only ever
true in dreadful Edwardian novels. Any man who’s ever had a mother, sister,
girlfriend, wife, daughter or female co-worker — in fact anyone who’s lived
outside a public school, a monastery or the Brigade of Guards — knows that
women have rages like Wales has weather. They can start an argument faster
than we can say “I’ll do it tomorrow”. If rows were gunfights, they are
Annie Oakley and we’re all lying in Main Street with holes the size of
doughnuts in our peace of mind.
How many men’s last words have been, “But darling, that’s so irrational”, as
if the only things in the whole damn world that ought to be rational are
traffic lights and women? We men talk about anger as if it were a bad thing,
a failing thing, a loss of control and face. We talk about dealing with
anger, anger management, channelling anger, avoiding anger altogether, and
we’ve got it all wrong. The best thing you can do with anger is to be angry
with it. It is part of our emotional palette — it grabs us for a reason.
It’s not irrational. Like traffic lights, it’s a good way of attracting
attention, and you ignore it at your peril. And I can’t do it. Like most
men, I have real trouble being angry in public. I have it, I know what it
feels like. But I’m not comfortable getting it out in front of people. So
like most men I wrap it up, I transform it into something more palatable,
something that’s easier to swallow, something altogether more manly. I sulk.
Sulking is an almost exclusively male accomplishment. It comes garnished
with a delicate grievance and a bruised dignity. Women get angry; men offer
the vainglorious comeback of shouting “You’re not making any sense” before
retreating to the garden shed of sulks. The problem is of course that, 20
minutes later, women are purged, cleansed, relieved, and have moved on.
While three hours later, we’re still in the shed with our self-administered
emotional indigestion, which over the years will give us ulcers, heart
attacks, strokes and hangovers.
The unfair, infuriating truth is that women live longer, healthier, happier
lives than us, with better digestions and orgasms, because they can fly into
a healthy rage over the fact that they can’t read a map and we should have
known they meant right when they said left, or because we said we liked
their hair when it was the dress we were supposed to notice.
There's no shame in being an angry person, argues Ariel Leve. Anger is
valuable, so why not embrace it?
There is a common misconception about anger. People, especially Brits, tend to
think getting angry means losing one’s temper and shouting. I’ve always
thought of that as communicating. Real anger is never that overt. Real anger
— the deep, dark, seething rage that derails lives, poisons
relationships — simmers beneath the surface.
It’s colourless, odourless and, like the toxic gas radon, undetectable.
It contaminates silently.
I’ve never had a problem expressing anger, providing it’s about something
specific. If I can tell you why I’m angry, it’s not the kind of anger you
should be worried about. The kind of anger to worry about has built up over
the years, like plaque that can’t be scraped off. It plays out, over and
over, in self-defeating ways. Like not being in healthy relationships. Or
feeling I don’t deserve to be happy. There is an alchemy to this anger that
makes it infinite. Often, it can’t be explained. It’s confusing and
frustrating to the people who are on the receiving end, because I have
insight as to why it’s there and yet am unable to change.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more aware of its roots. There are certain
things I will never get over being angry about; the challenge is not to let
the residue take over.
So it’s not that I’ve become angrier; it’s that the resentments have been
there all along, gestating.
Many of my girlfriends feel a similar helplessness when it comes to their
anger. They know it has increased, but these feelings get managed, not
eliminated. It’s never about just one thing. It’s the cumulative effect of
life being unfair.
Because life hasn’t delivered what they expected. Because they’ve been knocked
down and let down, and each time that happens it’s harder to get up. But
they do. So anger is an armour they wear to protect themselves from future
wounds. Occasionally they become haters. They blame men for having crushed
their spirit. But usually that’s a fleeting moment. Most don’t hate; they’re
disappointed. They understand that to get by without being angry all the
time, they’ve had to systematically lower their expectations.
Which might be the process of growing up. One by one, expectations get
decimated, and when you’re sufficiently disillusioned and have come to terms
with the fact that things don’t work out just because you want them to, when
that process is complete, you’re an adult. Except we don’t quite accept it
and continue to hold out hope.
One thing we have in common is that our anger is mainly directed within. For
some there is drinking, or starving, or overeating, or taking drugs, or
casual sex, or co-dependency — anything to numb the pain. Which is why,
until the wound is explored and the anger is confronted, people who are
driven to self-destruct won’t stray from that path. No job or man or amount
of money will quell the anger. It is, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous,
“an inside job”.
So why should anger be something to be afraid of? If it’s not a catalyst for
abusive behaviour — emotionally or physically — it can be constructive and
useful.
Anger is a facet of who I am. It does not define me. I’ve never felt ashamed
of being an angry person. I’ve embraced it, because anger is valuable. The
angriest people I know are also the funniest. Anger focuses and spurs
action; it fosters ambition. I don’t envy people who don’t get angry or feel
anger — I’m incredulous. How is that possible? It’s one thing not to raise
your voice or be rude, but not to feel angry — that’s an entire symphony of
emotions locked away, not being played. I went out with someone once who
said: “I was never an angry person until I met you.” I always took that as a
compliment.
Men — and the law — bend over backwards for women, complains rod liddle,
Yet still they’re angry
They do seem to be terribly angry these days, don’t they, women? I’ve always
assumed it’s because of something we’ve done, we men. But that’s a sexist
and solipsistic response which only makes them all the angrier. “How dare
you try to appropriate my anger! It’s mine. It has nothing to do with you,”
they say, but you know they’re lying somehow. And through experience
I find it’s no use putting your arm around their shoulder and saying in a calm
and affectionate tone: “Come on, little Miss Crosspatch, don’t get yourself
in a tizzy.” Inexplicably, that only makes things worse, I find. My
girlfriend gets angry quite a lot at a whole bunch of diffuse stuff, but
always claims its hormone-related. Premenstrual, menstrual or post-menstrual
fury.
There’s a window of about five days in the month when she acts like a normal
person, smiles, says please and thank you, doesn’t wander around with the
bread knife held aloft. For the rest of the time you just tiptoe around her
with a haunted expression. I know it’s something I’ve done, or not done. Or
something we’ve done, we men.
There was a woman I used to work with at the BBC who used to get incredibly
angry, pretty much every day. But the lucky thing was you knew when the rage
was about to pour forth, because she would start to smell weird. A sort of
rich, yeasty tang, like a loaf of rye bread being made in Hell’s Bakery. At
which point we’d all edge away, head for the toilets or the canteen or the
pub, or just repeat to ourselves over and over again: duck and cover, duck
and cover.
If you were a reactionary — and I’m not saying you are — you might put it down
to an existential angst occasioned by the fact that women do not quite know
what they are here for. Three decades of progressive legislation have meant
that 70% of women now work for a living, and not only as nurses, whores or
air hostesses. Their penetration of the job market has been absolute;
discriminate against a woman on account of her gender — or even, some argue,
because she is simply absolutely f***ing useless —and she will have
tribunals and lawyers lined up to sue your ass off, as the Americans put it.
They have the law — and the zeitgeist — on their side. When they decide to
have a child, they will be given full-paid leave for the duration of their
pregnancy, or the first nine months afterwards, whatever they so choose. Men
get two weeks if they’re lucky. There is no longer even the vaguest
glimmering of discrimination against women in the job market (quite the
reverse, in fact), yet they still do not, on the whole, make it to the
boardrooms. The various quangos devoted to improving the lot of women insist
it really is down to discrimination, against overwhelming evidence to the
contrary. The real reason might be that when push comes to shove,
insufficient numbers of women either wish to achieve high office or are
capable of so doing.
One or the other.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that they are equal partners in the job market, it
is nonetheless the case that in the family courts they still rule supreme:
in a divorce case, the woman will end up with the lion’s share of the
capital: a guaranteed income, the house, the kids, everything. Even if she
worked for a living too. And yet women, having been given all of this, are
still angry. You wonder if that is because they don’t really want it after
all.You might argue all that if you were a reactionary, but I’m not a
reactionary, so I’d like to dissociate myself from such a misogynistic point
of view.
And also because my girlfriend will be reading this. She reads the Style
section first, then the Magazine. You all do that, don’t you, you ladies? We
men read the news, then sport. We kid ourselves we’re all the same, men and
women, but we’re not. I wonder if the anger has been occasioned by the
pretence.
