Want to be a more courageous leader? Reclaim your rage

I noticed that on several occasions, without that being the agenda a large part of my first few coaching sessions with clients has been spent on returning to a core emotion. One that I spent countless sessions reclaiming for myself. And one most people I meet are cut off from: anger and/or rage.

In my experience, as well as my understanding of modern neuroscience, without rage and anger, there can be little vulnerability, courage and new, healthy forward momentum in our lives. Understandably, people are often skeptical when I tell them this. It usually takes a powerful experience involving a conscious re-integrating of rage and anger for themselves, in their own bodies where they can verify this for themselves. 

What’s fascinating to me is that there is that “rage” is literally contained within “courage”, with the old meaning of it in Middle English being “wrath, pride, confidence, lustiness,”. 

The alienation of anger and rage

Many of us have been alienated from our rage through experiences where people close to us could not support us in holding and expressing that emotion. As a result, we want to avoid feeling or seeming angry or in rage at all costs. When we come in contact with it, it is usually when we are intensely triggered and act out of rage and anger unconsciously, which tends to turn into violence, hitting, raping, killing. That dynamic only perpetuates our belief that rage and anger are bad. Most of us see and feel a sticky connection between rage and violence. That confusion is understandable. When we look closely, however, we can see, that rage and violence don’t belong together. They just happen to coincide frequently when they live in our unconscious.

Reclaiming rage

The conscious rage that has been reclaimed has the power to transform our lives. The path to doing so is to find a way to stay awake as a powerful anger response arises in your body so that it can move through you in a gentle way. Once the excess is flown out of you and experienced, usually a powerful, inner strength remains. This then creates the basis for our courageous and vulnerable actions, where we fully live in our power and are not afraid to step into it and shape the world around us from that place. 

Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing uses the term “healthy aggression” and writes:

 

“The restoration of defensive responses has the effect of automatically titrating the energies of rage. In other words, the explosive energy that would be expressed as rage and non-directed flight was now channeled into effective, directed healthy aggression.”

Peter Levine, In an Unspoken Voice

 

he adds: 

“Healthy aggression is about protecting ourselves and those who are close to us. It is also about setting clear boundaries and getting the things we need, including food, shelter and mating partners. It is what empowers our lust for life. This passion for life must be supported by a capacity to embody a range of purposeful emotions.”

Peter Levine, In an Unspoken Voice

 

No access to rage often means a feeling of being invaded or threatened

From a nervous system perspective, not having access to anger means we don’t have access to our own protection. This means we will constantly feel scared, even if subtly and unconsciously and with a sense of feeling threatened. We may have the experience that other people’s realities invade our spaces, if not physically then at least psychologically. Although it is more likely that they are just living their lives and expressing themselves and us being triggered strongly by them because we don’t know how to set boundaries and defend ourselves.

This is painful and our creativity and strength suffer and we can’t really establish our reality for ourselves meaningfully. Once anger is back, reintegrated and turned into healthy aggression, we can do so.

My own experience in taking steps and welcoming anger and rage back in

Over the last 3 years, I’ve spent a number of sessions working with my rage and anger and gradually welcoming it back into my inner world from the unconscious. I personally don’t think I’d have been able to reclaim anger on my own, I recommend doing this with a second human nervous system that you trust and that has access to their own anger. The most powerful experiences I’ve had include the following: 

• Several Grinberg sessions focusing on reclaiming anger and rage

• Several Somatic Experiencing sessions focusing on reclaiming anger and rage. 

• Going to the forest without anyone in sight to explore some of the most explosive elements of my anger and rage consciously, including 2-3 conscious screams, pushing against trees, throwing of rocks. 

• Tracking my “no’s” and boundary setting with the Kawhi Leonard method: A brief backstory on this. Kawhi Leonard is an American NBA player who, in his College years had a way of trash-talking other players where he would only say individual words to build his own confidence and irritate the others, with examples of “Nope”, “Buckets”, “Layup”. I thought this was a great way to support myself by saying no and setting clear boundaries. I made a to-do list that just had 10 times the item “boundary” on it and whenever I set a boundary successfully and consciously (that part is important!) by either saying no or stating my needs clearly without agreeing to something that I normally would. In my head, I would say “boundary, boundary, boundary” whenever I looked at the list in the morning. This may seem silly, but it was powerful in restructuring my day, reclaiming my time and letting my anger support me in being courageous for what I wanted to do every day. 

• Journaling about anger and rage, particularly by using extremely profane language that I felt uncomfortable expressing in person. I found this very effective. 

• Role-playing situations using NVC (Nonviolent Communication) with a person looking similar to the person I was triggered by, stating my anger, followed by my needs clearly and safely and then receiving empathy for it. (This generally requires a bit of instruction and/or knowledge of NVC from the other person)

If you’ve explored reclaiming and reintegrating anger and rage back into your own conscious awareness and letting it fuel your courage and zest for life, what has worked for you? I’d love to hear about it. 

Where to go from here?

I leave you with this question: How would your life change if your anger was reclaimed and became your friend? Ponder it, journal about it, get angry about it, then see what happens next.