March 27, 2024 • 41 mins
Anger can move us towards our purpose in powerful ways. This discussion explores the liberating power of anger and how to cultivate a healthy relationship with it.
I get personal in this one, sharing my real feelings about being gaslit regarding the acute betrayal trauma I experienced in my religious deconstruction.
Bronwyn Schweigerdt is a psychotherapist specializing in anger and its impact on mental health: "I have found that depression, anxiety, panic attacks, mania, psychosis…much of it is ANGER TURNED INWARD."
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The importance of DEVELOPING A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP with ANGER (instead of suppressing or externalizing it)
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Why ANGER MANAGEMENT techniques don’t usually work (they reinforce the idea that the individual is "the problem" and don't address root causes)
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The path to becoming an INTEGRATED WHOLE person by expressing anger authentically through assertive speech and boundaries
WATCH this episode on Cherie’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SoulRoseShow
..
Join our new MINDBODY Soul Membership: https://www.cherieburton.com/mindbody-membership
Get Cherie’s Free WHOLE BODY Healing Mini-Course: https://www.cherieburton.com/freeminicourse
SACRED RAGE presentation that Cherie mentioned (blog post): https://www.cherieburton.com/blog/sacred-rage
Cherie’s SACRED RAGE audio episode: https://breakingdownpatriarchy.com/episode-4-breaking-down-patriarchy-and-sacred-rage-with-cherie-burton/
Book that Bronwyn mentioned--The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended by Sheila Gregoire
Follow Bronwyn on her Angry at the Right Things Podcast: https://angryattherightthings.podbean.com/
Follow Cherie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cherie.burton/
Ask to join our private Facebook group, Soul Rose Community, for exclusive content and free monthly, live sessions & classes! https://www.facebook.com/groups/353442392180748/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Bronwyn, welcome to the Soul Rose
Show. Thank you, Cherie. I am happy to be
here.
(01:01):
A lot of the illnesses that we're seeing, these chronic illnesses,
and, I mean, you could say autoimmune. You could say there's just a
myriad of things showing up in bodies right now that are
mystery illnesses. And I think you and I would both agree that they can
be linked to unexpressed emotion.
(01:21):
But we're going to focus on anger today and
why there is a stigma, maybe especially with women.
I know there's things you see in your practice, but just as a woman yourself,
what have you noticed with that
stigmatization of anger itself and the expressing of it in the
feminine? Yeah. Well,
(01:44):
I don't know as far as women versus men, because I've
never been a man, but I can reflect on my own
journey and how I discovered this for myself firsthand.
You say I have this expertise on the body and the mind, which
insinuates that those graduate programs actually taught me much,
and they really didn't some
(02:06):
basic principles, but I actually
learned the most through my own very severe
depression that I fell into about 15 years
ago. My family had just had to move
due to the Great Recession 2009 and
relocate about an hour and a half away. But it was like the
(02:29):
dark side of the moon to me. I might as well have been in outer
space because that's how it felt. And I just felt
so lonely. I just remember it was right when I put my daughter
in school. So she was now five entering kindergarten,
and I didn't have my job anymore. I didn't have my community.
My husband seemed a million miles away, and I just
(02:51):
felt so, so alone. And I sank
into the most profound depression
I've ever heard of, honestly, because what I was doing is my body was just
throwing up involuntarily and spontaneously, like, all the time.
I would be driving on the freeway, and I just couldn't pull over because
it just would happen. Or I'd be walking down the street,
(03:13):
which is really humiliating. A car is, like, a much safer place to
be vomiting involuntarily than walking down the street. It was
humiliating. And so my body was just reacting.
So that was the first extreme
depressive episode I had. Like that. I had a few more after that.
But the thing was, I went to
(03:36):
several different therapists at the time because I desperately needed it.
And even though I was hardly functioning, I remember sitting there. This is
when we did in person, thinking, you know,
I'm barely functioning, but I'm pretty sure I would be a better therapist than
this person. And I went to multiple people having the exact same
experience. So that kind of
(03:58):
exacerbated the depression. I wonder why. So, looking back, I
see how every one of my depressive episodes, in retrospect,
was all suppressed anger, and it's usually by a
betrayal. So the suppressed anger, as the
therapist, was a betrayal because you're supposed to be someone who
attunes to me. You're supposed to be someone who
(04:19):
really listens and believes me and trusts me and that
I can trust someone who really prioritizes my feelings, doesn't try
to talk me out of them. So that was a
betrayal. The big depression that I
had, though, was at my husband. In retrospect, I see that, that
I was so lonely with this move, and I felt like he
(04:42):
wasn't attuning to me, like he was kind of like, what's wrong? Get
over it. And so that was the ultimate betrayal in my
partner not really looking me in the eyes and just going,
wow, Bronwyn, I see how lonely you are. I see how hard
this is for you. If he had just done that, I would have
felt a lot better. But because he wasn't doing that and I
(05:04):
wasn't able to see this betrayal and to be
angry and to feel my anger and connect to it and say,
you know, Steve, I'm feeling betrayed by you. And it's okay for me
to feel angry because I didn't allow myself to do that and to
validate that. That's when the depression hit.
So interesting, because as I feel into how that
(05:27):
expresses itself in the collective that we feel this generalized
betrayal of the feminine,
that we haven't known how to even advocate
for our own emotionality, especially when it's an
uncomfortable emotion like anger. And men
oftentimes don't know what to do with that.
(05:49):
Well, okay, if they had a mother who was expressing healthy
anger or women around them that they grew up
with who had some kind of skill, I guess you could say, around the
healthy expression of that. But most women, we've been
conditioned to be nice.
As if that's the right. Like, I'm not saying be mean,
(06:12):
but let's be honest. We've been conditioned
to be nice and sweet. Well, beyond that is just like,
what do I do with that? But I love that you just use those terms,
because all my clients say, well, I want to be nice, not mean. And I'm
like, wait, what's nice? Do you really want
to be nice, or do you want to be good? Yeah.
(06:35):
Is enabling people being good,
or is it being nice and then mean? Like,
if you bring someone some kind of
accountability, is that mean or is that good? And if
it doesn't sound nice to everyone's ears, whose problem
is that? Yeah, you're just being a
(06:58):
mirror. You're just reflecting the truth. And if that's an ugly truth,
that's not your fault, and that certainly doesn't make you mean.
Yeah, it's almost like
you were saying, holding up that mirror and reflecting back to them. But it's not
up to us to manage their response to our own self
advocacy. Right, so that's. You brought me
(07:21):
right into. It's like I plan, I do here. Cherie, I love it.
The number one principle. We talk about boundaries a lot, and I love how
boundaries have entered into the vernacular of our society
now. But the most important boundary is the one that we will
never see. It's invisible. It's that we are only
responsible for our own feelings. And there's this big,
(07:44):
invisible boundary that. Cherie, if you're disappointed with this interview right
now, your feelings of disappointment are your
responsibility, not mine. And so when we see that,
like, your feelings belong to you, my feelings belong to
me. I am responsible for my feelings. And if
I'm disappointed, I need to do something about that. That's not your
(08:06):
job. And if I'm disappointed with you, then my
job is to use my words and be a grown up and say, you know,
I'm feeling disappointed. Is there something we can do? And if I'm not willing to
do that, then I'm playing a game with you. I'm being manipulative. I
am wanting you to see that I'm disappointed without being willing to
articulate it like a grown up. And now I'm expecting
(08:28):
you to feel responsible for my feelings.
And I think as parents, we make that misstep often.
We make our children responsible for the way that we're showing up or feeling.
I know it takes a lot of
centeredness and awareness
to not throw that out to other people and project
(08:51):
that. I'm curious, though, if we could
just backtrack with your story a little bit. When you were feeling that betrayal
and it was really up for you and you named it, and you're like, this
is betrayal. And I have a right to feel this anger
because I have been betrayed. I think we get gaslit a
lot when we try to name the betrayal.
(09:12):
And I'll give you an example, and you can tell me if this
resonates with. Because I know that you work with women. In religion. You work
with women. Most of them are secular, but
some are. Yeah, for sure. But you are aware of
some of the issues surrounding women who are now kind of waking up into these
old patriarchal spaces. Evangelicals. In my
(09:34):
religion of origin was Mormonism. And
when I started to
explore my feelings of
unease, let's just say. And I really started to do kind of
a historical databased
looking at documents, public records. And I
(09:56):
was really coming into a very
disturbing pattern that I wasn't told
about. There were some historical facts that were
left out of the narrative of my religion of origin that I felt
were so incredibly important that people know. So
in my naivety with these new discoveries, I started to
(10:18):
talk about it, and people were very uncomfortable
with that. And rightly so, I was uncomfortable discovering
it. The reason I bring this up is I felt acute
betrayal trauma that I was not shown this. I
was so, like, had served a mission. I had
spent my life around a certain kind of narrative and a certain kind
(10:40):
of, let's just say, trajectory that I
was on. And when I found out that there were a lot of discrepancies
with that, what I was told versus what the reality was,
it was really jolting. And
so because other people were
uncomfortable with what I was discovering, I had to go, like you were saying,
(11:01):
like that. It was almost like a depressive, like, oh, my
goodness, this is my quote
unquote "cross to bear." This is something I have to internalize and fix
inside of myself and come to terms with. And
so, yeah, acute betrayal trauma.
So you're saying you felt betrayal from the
(11:24):
historical piece, facts being left out, but then
additional betrayal when you shared it with people you thought
would feel with you and resonate with, you
weren't willing to. Is that what I'm hearing? Yes, but it's not so much
the people that I try to be transparent with.
It was the institution itself that didn't offer transparency,
(11:45):
but had all the list of expectations without
providing the transparency. And so I felt the
betrayal from that institution, from the religion itself, from the people who
were withholding the information. So the
allegiance to the institution then became in question
for me. And that's what kind of started me on my path of deconstruction.
(12:07):
So I had
a lot of people saying, oh, you shouldn't be upset by that, or what's
the big deal? Tons of people. It
was just absolutely staggering to me that I was being sort of gaslit
around. "Nothing to see here, folks." It's
okay. Or they would take
(12:30):
some concept that I had explored and deconstructed and then change
it after the fact.
Okay, let me backtrack. So certain
policies were in place, certain doctrines were in place when I was
growing up, and as I was having children and as I was kind of moving
along my religious path of devotion,
(12:52):
I was on a certain path and
with certain policies in place. And then during my deconstruction
process, they changed those policies, not due to me,
but other people who were disturbed by those policies, but
they never offered why they changed it. What, the
accountability? Right. No transparency, no accountability. It's like,
(13:15):
we're just going to go ahead and change that. And so for those of you
who have walked through it before, we're not going to offer why we changed it.
Just God's changing it. So there was just a lot of gaslighting and
pain around. Well, this was not the narrative
I was told, and these were not the policies. These policies were in place when
I was making certain decisions in my life that shaped those decisions. Had I
(13:35):
known that you were going to change it later, I would have made a different
[choice] And, yeah, so what you're describing, though,
I mean, it's so interesting because we see that on an individual
level, too. So to me, it's synonymous or analogous
to someone like, let's say you're like, well, Bronwyn, I need
to talk to you about something you said at the party the other day. It
(13:56):
was really hurtful. And if I'm like, oh, yeah, well, I was just
having a really hard day, Cherie, and I'm not going to say that again. So
that's the betrayal. Because maybe I'm saying
I won't do that moving forward, but I'm actually not holding myself
accountable. I'm showing no ownership, no insight, no self
awareness, no apology. So it's the same thing.
(14:18):
And when we feel betrayed, our feelings tell us what we need.
No matter what our feelings are, when we feel betrayed,
it's giving our brains information.
Like, well, if this person is consistently betraying you, and now they're
not even admitting that they betrayed you, then what do I need?
I need to not trust this person, this institution
(14:40):
again. I guess that the violation of trust was the most
disturbing piece of it. Yeah, I
was providing my full trust and my full devotion, but
that was not being fully reciprocated. And, yeah,
it's interesting. So I know that you have worked
with different groups, and you're saying, I were talking before how there's kind
(15:03):
of this upswell of women within religions. You could say
evangelicals. And I was not raised in the
evangelical religion, but it was pretty intensely patriarchal.
Very intensely patriarchal. What are you seeing?
What are women's voices? What are they needing now within religious spaces
that you're noticing? I'm just seeing a whole lot of
(15:24):
women, which I am so impressed by,
who are, like, holding on to their faith
still, but holding everyone else
accountable for a bunch of. And how are they
doing that? How are they navigating that? Well, I am on one Facebook group
called the Bear Marriage Facebook group. And Bear Marriage is
(15:46):
a podcast I subscribe to at a friend's inspiration. And
it is
a group of evangelical women led by some leaders who,
like the leader, Sheila Gregoir, wrote a
book called The Great Sex Rescue. So
basically, she did
(16:07):
very comprehensive research on
all these evangelical women across the spectrum. So from
fundamentalist to the more progressive, the whole thing. And
what they found, among other things, one thing they found is that
the most fundamentalist women who subscribe to
this notion that evangelicals promote, which is basically
(16:30):
sex on demand.
Like, basically, you need to have sex as much
as possible to make your husband happy. That's your job.
Mandatory sex, kind of. So those women had about
twice the rate of vaginismus as women in the
(16:52):
general population. Interesting. Yeah. And they
go through why this is, but their bodies are
reacting to this kind of systematic false teaching.
And so what Sheila Rae Gregoir and
her research team showed is like, okay, this isn't even
in the Bible, so it's bullshit. And look,
(17:14):
it's harming women. And the whole
idea that women's job is just to put out to make their husbands feel emotionally
connected somehow and that
men and women are inherently different. This is nowhere in our
sacred text. So where's it coming
from? Where did it start? Yeah, let's get some
(17:36):
accountability. So it's super refreshing. I don't consider
myself an evangelical, but I am Judeo Christian. And I
just love to see this movement because in the Jewish tradition,
women are known for having "hutzpah." And I relate more
to jewish women, and I am racially jewish, but I love
the hutzpah, and I want to see that pervade all women, just
(17:58):
like, you know what? Why do we have to apologize
for being women? We get the same voice as anyone else, and
we get to hold accountability just like everyone else and show us
the money. Where is this in the Bible anyway?
Trace this back. Where did it start? As you
were sharing that, it reminded me of when I took my daughter, who was then
(18:21):
19, she's 25 now, to Africa six years ago this month.
And we visited a very remote village, which was
very. It was quite disturbing. They actually circumcised females at age
four. And the women just
look very despondent to me, very detached. But also they have a measure of joy
in what they're doing, what they're creating. But there was a village elder,
(18:43):
and he would spend his time between, I
think, about five different wives or women that he claimed were giving
him children. And so I was the person in her group who was,
like, raising her hand because I was disturbed not
only by the female circumcision, but the
polygamy, the aspect of, like, we can talk to the tribal
(19:05):
elder, but we can't talk to the women. And so
I asked, and I will never forget what his answer was. He
said, it's sacred. It's a sacred tradition that
we do this, that we circumcise the girls in the isla, and then it's exactly
what we're talking about. I'm like, where did this start? In my
estimation, in the group that I was processing with after, it was like there was
(19:27):
probably some village elder x amount of years and years and years
ago who maybe he was betrayed and maybe
his wife stepped out on. I don't know. But it's just like
somewhere, somehow, this tradition started
in this remote village in Africa that women are not
to have pleasure, that women are the vehicle, like, you're kind of describing with this
(19:49):
fundamentalism that women are somehow at the
whim or control of their partner, and that he presides and that
he's the one that. And it's like, I think now we're just kind
of waking up to all of these old ideologies kind of going,
yeah, where did this start? And why is it still being
perpetuated in the 21st century here? I don't
(20:11):
know. Yeah, I agree. There is a waking up
going on, and I am very grateful to be alive right now
because even I'm 53. And, yeah, there are words
entering the vernacular that
didn't enter it until very recently. Not only boundaries, but, like,
accountability. You hear all these people talking about these
(20:33):
mental health people seeking therapy. Even ten years ago, it
wasn't like this. There's just a huge shift forward
into, like, I don't know. I want to say
spirituality, but also, like, mental health. I don't even know.
It's almost like we're reclaiming ourselves.
Yeah. So what have you seen with the link between someone not expressing, like, externalizing
(20:55):
their anger and depression, let's just say. Yes,
so Freud actually is the
one who came up with depression as anger turned
inward, and he couldn't have
been more right on the money. I have found not only depression is anger turned
inward. Anxiety, panic attacks, mania, psychosis. And
(21:16):
I've worked with all
of that. It's all anger turned inward. So our bodies feel
anger at some level. Even when we're
little children. We just know instinctually
when something's wrong, when our parent is betraying us in some way,
even if we don't know it cognitively, even if we don't have words for it,
(21:39):
we just know, like, it's wrong. And we feel the anger,
but we hold it within our bodies, usually. And so then
we tend, as a society, unfortunately, to
associate anger with the people who have the outbursts.
Okay, that's one type of anger we see,
but that's actually people who are chronically angry at other
(22:02):
things and or people who are suppressing anger
at the very thing they're most angry at. And then it
comes up, bubbling up, volcanoing out
at everyone and everything else. My
goal, because that's my expertise, is anger, is to help
people connect with their anger, to develop a healthy
(22:25):
relationship with their anger. We all have anger. What we all need
is a healthy relationship with it. So
suppressing it's not healthy. Externalizing it all the time is not
healthy. And it starts with just saying, you know what?
I'm okay to feel angry right now, because this is not okay
doesn't mean I'm going to explode. It's just okay to feel it. So it
(22:47):
starts, number one, with just that self validation that awareness.
It's okay. Even if I don't say anything to this person right
now, I'm going to feel the anger. Even if no one else knows
that's there. I do. I know it. I'm not going to suppress it. I'm not
going to ignore it. I'm going to feel it. And then the second is,
okay, so our feelings tell us what we need. I feel angry. What do I
(23:10):
need right now? Okay, so the basic two things are assertive
speech and boundaries. So, Cherie, if you just said something really out
of left field, that's not okay. Me channeling my anger out
of my body in a healthy way looks like this. Cherie, that's not
okay to say that. I'm not okay with it. That's it.
That's my anger. I don't have to explode. I don't have to
(23:33):
attack your character. I don't have to attack anyone.
I'm just like, hey. Or with my husband sometimes, of
course, hey, Steve. I'm not liking that tone of
voice. That's not working for me. That's my
anger. That's the expression of.
To just put a little bookmark here with a mask in. I've been married almost
(23:54):
30 years, and I have three sons and three brothers and a
husband. And it's like, it's so interesting, because
I think as women, we are really terrified of male
rage. And a lot of us had fathers
who were explosive. I mean, my dad was amazing
in a lot of respects, but his father was this irish
(24:17):
temper guy, and it kind of just went generationally.
And I read somewhere else, too, that women, we do internalize anger more than
men because it's more socially acceptable for a man to express
anger, almost like it makes him a man to kind of be
in that energy. And so there's twice as
(24:37):
much depression in women than there is in men.
I believe that. I also think, unfortunately, boys are taught not
to cry. That makes them a sissy or a baby or whatever. And
so I think a lot of men, by their angry
outbursts, are actually. That's their version of crying, too. Yeah, good
point. That's true. Because they haven't had healthy
(25:00):
emotion expression either. It's not been safe for them to show the
tender emotion that women are validated for.
Okay, cool. So we start with. Just starting
to interrupt your process. So the first step was,
just know. It'S okay to feel it. Feel it in your
body. Like some people feel it in their chest. This is usually
(25:23):
where it is. If you feel it in your head, what I would do
is tell yourself, you know what, Bronwyn? You
don't need to shut it down, because this is usually our head is fighting our
body's expression of anger. So if you get a headache or
tension your head, I would say, it's okay, Bronwyn, it's so
okay to feel the anger. You don't have to fight it. You don't have to
(25:44):
resist it. You don't have to talk yourself out of it. Just let it
be felt in your body. And usually people's tension in their head will go
away then, and they'll feel it more in their chest. Sometimes we feel it in
our shoulders. Like, our shoulders want to rise up and fight,
and then a lot of people will feel it in their gut. And what I
think they're really feeling their gut is disgust. So that's
(26:05):
just another variety of anger. It's a response to
something objectively disgusting. So when we're really
being gaslit or if we see
a parent neglecting a child, it feels, like, in
our gut, and it's like, that's hatred. That's disgust and
hatred. Talk about. We're not allowed to feel that. That's something I talk
(26:28):
about on my own podcast. Like, you know what? Hatred is just a
normal human reaction or response to
something that is objectively evil
or detestable. There's no shame with feeling
disgust or hatred. If you have a little child and you're walking down
the street and the child sees roadkill and they feel
(26:50):
disgust, you don't say, hey, Johnny, don't feel disgust. That's a
bad feeling to have. So then they run and scoop
it up. No, feel the disgust. It's telling you something. It's
there to inform you, right? Yeah.
So allowing yourself to feel it, locating where it is
in your body, talking to yourself,
(27:13):
or having that aware conversation with yourself, that it's okay to feel this
way. This is part of being human, that kind of thing. I'm also reminded of,
and I did a podcast episode on this a few years ago, of when Jesus
flipped over the tables in front of the temple.
In our religion of origin. We called it righteous indignation,
which is like a very healthy expression of anger.
(27:35):
And people don't want to see Jesus that way. They don't want to see Jesus
flipping over tables. But that was
epic because he was using
his platform to the platform
of being like the Im. Like, you're
saying with the disgust that he felt with the money changers in front of the
(27:57):
temple as a means to say, no,
not on my watch, this is just not okay.
So I think sometimes we can be
even too nice with our anger, if that makes
sense. Jesus wasn't nice. He was good. He wasn't.
So that's what he. In
(28:19):
his goodness, in his I am. There was still an
expression, an outward expression, that was honestly quite
shocking to a lot of people. Well, but then, if you think about it,
if you think, do we want a God or
a Jesus that is detached and apathetic,
I'm sorry, but I don't want that. No, we want passion. We want
(28:42):
a God who's like, that makes me disgusted because it's corrupt,
it's wrong, blah, blah, blah. He was not violent.
He overthrew the temples. He did not hurt a person.
I love it. And then the other thing he did is he called the
Pharisees and the sadducees. And this is in a shame. Honor
culture in public, a brood of vipers.
(29:04):
And if you know the reference back to the hebrew
scriptures, that means literally, they are the seed of Satan. That
is genesis three, where talks about the seed of the
serpent versus the seed of the woman. And he is saying, you guys are the
spawn of Satan. That would have been the most shame.
To the religious establishment. It could have ever been called in
(29:26):
a public shame and honor culture. He wasn't
nice, but he was good. Yeah, good
distinction. So once we've identified it, once we've
normalized, or I guess you don't even sometimes need to neutralize the anger,
because even around my kids, I've had to show
a degree of anger like you're saying that matches the level of
(29:48):
this is not okay. And it really helps them to see, oh,
mom, I don't want to do this again. Because they
genuinely didn't know. Yeah. Okay. So once
we've named it and we've sort of neutralized it
in ourselves, to the extent that we can healthily express it,
what then? Yeah. So I would feel it in our
(30:10):
bodies, and then I'd say, what am I feeling? Is it disgust?
If you're feeling nauseous, yeah. That's disgust. Or that's hatred.
And that's okay to then, you know, is it
anger in my chest? Okay. Our feelings tell us what we need. If I'm
disgusted, I can say something. Know, sheree, that
is very disturbing to hear you say that.
(30:32):
So let's say I'm at a, um, group.
I'm at a religious gathering, and you're saying something that is
like hate speech, but you think it's okay, so I can
say, because I'm feeling disgusted.
What do I need right now? I need to let everyone know,
or at least this one person, and say, that is really
(30:54):
disturbing to hear that right now.
Yeah. That's a way to stop the teacher in their tracks. Right.
Because sometimes they're just absolutely unaware. They're just
following tradition, and they're just repeating the same rhetoric that they've
been hearing in all of their circles, and they honestly don't
(31:14):
know. And I do believe that there is a groundswell
of people who are awakening to some of this hate speech that you're talking about,
that if we keep staying silent, we're
capitulating to the. Like, we're consenting to it.
Yeah. We're enabling it.
(31:34):
Okay. With the
establishment of boundaries. Like, you're talking about both within
ourselves and how we show up with others. And then also,
like, you're talking about assertive speech, just naming it for what it
is. What does that
do over time? I'm just picturing,
(31:57):
like, putting deposits in a little bank account over time.
Have you seen people transform through
this process? And what have you noticed that it's done for their
internal and external world? Yes,
that's a great question. So what it does, the end
objective, is that we are true to ourselves,
(32:20):
that we stop betraying ourselves. Because when I go to a religious
gathering and I'm hearing hate speech and I say nothing, I'm betraying
myself. I am not being true to myself. And when we continue
to do that, we do get depressed. We start feeling, like,
horribly. Right. So that's the outcome. To
be like. So, again, going back to the Hebrew, there's a word.
(32:44):
So when you hear the word perfect in the Old Testament, like a
perfect. Sacrifice, be therefore perfect, even. Perfect? Yes. That doesn't
mean perfect as we understand it in western culture, it means the
Hebrew "tamim." And Tamim means integrated. What you see
is what you get through and through. There's no compartmentalizing
of something over here. We're just whole.
(33:06):
We are integrated. And so the goal
of therapy as a therapist is to help my
clients become tame, integrated, whole.
So that is what we're doing. So when
I do not betray myself, I
am acting out in that whole integrated way, and I'm also modeling
(33:29):
for other people. I'm not attacking the hater. I'm just
saying that's really disturbing. So I'm holding them accountable without
attacking their character, without doing any kind of intentional
shaming. If they feel shame, that's their problem. I'm not
responsible for that. Right. Especially if you're presenting it with love and
power in that assertiveness. There's love behind it. Yeah.
(33:51):
So you could say that's really disturbing. That's not what I expected to hear
here. And it's really hard to hear that in this environment. It doesn't
feel like a safe thing to hear. So that would be an example of that.
Right? That's so powerful. Yeah. And it's not easy to do in
some spaces. In a lot of spaces, that is not easy to do. It's so
liberating. It's very
(34:11):
easy for me these days, I'll tell you. It is
so liberating. You feel whole, and then you
have some people hate you, and some people
are like, oh, my God, Cherie, thank you for saying that. That happened
to me towards, yeah, that started to happen to me when I was always the
one raising her hand in Sunday school, trying to bring it back to mercy, love,
(34:34):
and compassion. It was exhausting. But then I would have people stop me in
the hall and be like, thank you for sharing that. I was sick to my
stomach. They literally... This girl was like, I was sick to my stomach until you
said that. So I do think that we have to ascertain,
like, should I sit in this setting and always
be the one raising my hand, or can I use my voice in
(34:55):
other. Because I was shut down by the teacher.
Literally shut down by trying to do what you said, by trying to
advocate. Okay, well, in that situation, so if we're talking about,
like, for kids, I would say accountability or someone who's
an employee go up the chain of command. We have cell
phones, we can audiotape, we can videotape, we can bring about
(35:17):
accountability in these institutions. So if I'm working
with someone who's an employee, I'm like, I would audiotape that,
exchange with your supervisor and go up above her
and get some accountability. So that's another way we can channel our
anger. Yeah. And sometimes in the larger
institutions that have a lot of money and power, you can go all the way
(35:38):
up and still be silenced, unfortunately. But we do
have a free press here in our country, and we can. Spread
awareness that way. And that is what's happening, actually. That's actually
happening organically. Okay. So
I guess to kind of wrap this up,
I want you to hit on something else that you teach. And that's why anger
(36:02):
management doesn't usually work. The old anger
management models. Yeah. So along those lines, I mentioned earlier that
I was beyond disappointed with my own
experiences seeking out therapists. So many therapists and
the therapeutic community today teach anger management.
And I'm like, let's get it together, you
(36:23):
guys. It doesn't work so oftentimes. What this is, is
like these skills. Like, Cherie, just take some deep
breaths and just center yourself and feel your feet
on the floor. Or, Cherie, just feel the feeling in
your body. Or put up a
stop sign. Just imagine a stop sign, stop your thoughts. And
(36:46):
it's all these symptom management. It's symptoms that
we're managing. Just like the medical establishment only
manages symptoms, too. We don't get to the root. And so
that's how anger management is. And what it does
bypasses, right? Yes, it's bypassed. Have you
heard of spiritual bypassing, by the way? We talk about all the time on this
(37:08):
podcast? Absolutely. So it is. It's bypassing.
What it does is manage symptoms at best, but at worst,
and this is the case so often, is, it's gaslighting
that individual. So I will have someone who come to
me for disordered eating, helping with her disordered eating, who's been
to outpatient treatment for eight months, let's say.
(37:31):
And they do all these skills, like handle your.
Regulate your feelings, self regulation. This is basically what anger
management does, too. And at worst, this
is what usually happens, is she sees herself as
the problem, because if you do that to
individuals, and usually they already believe they're the
(37:53):
problem to begin with. So now you're just reinforcing. You're the
problem. If you could just manage your feelings, everything
would go smoothly. And so that's the most
toxic piece of this. And the problem is usually
another person. Right. But they're trying to twist
themselves more and more into a pretzel to make
(38:16):
this other person happy or for things to go smoothly with some
kind of false peace. Yeah, that really resonates, and it kind of
goes back to what I was illustrating about when I uncovered some disturbing
historical narratives, and I wasn't okay with
certain policies that I just sort of became complicit with
it for a number of years and didn't speak out, to not
(38:38):
make waves or to disturb the peace, when, in
actuality, what was happening inside of me was my
health was suffering. I did a podcast on
a patriarchy. Sorry. I did a
guest sort of presentation on the podcast
breaking down patriarchy with Amy McPhie Allebest on
(39:00):
SACRED RAGE. And it was this whole
thing. Know how my swallowing of my words
and the women that I've coached and work with were seeing things
like thyroid pervasive thyroid issues and some
of these autoimmunes because of trying to women,
we're very relatable. We
(39:21):
want everyone to be happy. We can see the whole
picture oftentimes. And that embodied wisdom is not always honored in
these old spaces. And when you were saying you get sick or
a gut ache in that area, because we feel that disgust, that's
actually the chakra that holds our womb wisdom. And so when
that gets triggered, it's like mama bear chemistry, because we're
(39:44):
not okay with that happening to our cubs, and we're not
okay with that happening to humanity. But women, we've had to stifle that energy, and
so it doesn't always reveal itself.
Super fascinating. Well, Bronwyn, is there
any parting words of advice or wisdom that you would give as we
kind of wrap this discussion up that we haven't maybe covered, or just any last
(40:06):
parting thoughts around this whole topic of the healthy expression of anger?
Yeah, I would say don't be afraid of all this.
I know it can sound so great in theory, and you think, oh,
if you only knew or whatever, it can sound intimidating,
but really being true to ourselves
(40:30):
makes us whole. And that is worth whatever the
fallout it really is. But also seek
community. So it's not just you being isolated. At the end of the day, if
you have a friend or two or
three or anyone you can be on this journey with, all
the better, because you might lose some people in your lives. I say good
(40:52):
riddance. Honestly, I sleep better now than I ever have in
my life. But it is worth at the end,
but definitely have a partner in crime. I
love that. I would totally echo and support
in that sentiment of finding your true
tribe who also may be experiencing
(41:13):
similar conflicts, but who are also on the path to
being true to themselves. And like you were saying, like not betraying yourself anymore.
And there's a lot of us that are arising in that space, and it is
very healthy, and it is very affirming and validating. So where can people
find your podcast? You want to say a little bit about that? Yes. My podcast
is Angry
At The Right Things, and it is wherever you subscribe to your
(41:34):
podcast. The reason I started doing it is, one, is
for people who want to bypass
therapy altogether and just skip to the wisdom, because, again,
so many therapists are so, so disappointing. That's
been my experience. It still is, because I have so many clients
come to me telling me their horror stories of previous therapists. So if you
(41:57):
want to bypass therapy or if you want to
find a really good therapist, but you want to hit the ground running, knowing what
you need and what you want and being informed first just to advocate for
that. Going into that therapeutic
right, because you're. Going to need to shop around, most likely. So to
know, have a bar, have a high bar for what you're looking
(42:19):
for, the level of wisdom and intelligence you want from your
therapist. And then third would be for someone who
is wanting to become a therapist or is a therapist. When I started out, I
had no idea what I was doing. So this is also for
budding therapists or even more seasoned therapists who want a
new approach to things. Well,
(42:42):
yeah, I would definitely say that sometimes you do
educate people in the field.
We do educate our experts sometimes. And
sometimes they're very grateful for it, and that's great. But if they're
not, then find another.
Well, thank you so much for your time today. This has been really
(43:04):
enlightening. You're welcome, Cherie. Thank you for having me. It was fun.
Bronwyn, welcome to the Soul Rose
Show. Thank you, Cherie. I am happy to be
here.
(01:01):
A lot of the illnesses that we're seeing, these chronic illnesses,
and, I mean, you could say autoimmune. You could say there's just a
myriad of things showing up in bodies right now that are
mystery illnesses. And I think you and I would both agree that they can
be linked to unexpressed emotion.
(01:21):
But we're going to focus on anger today and
why there is a stigma, maybe especially with women.
I know there's things you see in your practice, but just as a woman yourself,
what have you noticed with that
stigmatization of anger itself and the expressing of it in the
feminine? Yeah. Well,
(01:44):
I don't know as far as women versus men, because I've
never been a man, but I can reflect on my own
journey and how I discovered this for myself firsthand.
You say I have this expertise on the body and the mind, which
insinuates that those graduate programs actually taught me much,
and they really didn't some
(02:06):
basic principles, but I actually
learned the most through my own very severe
depression that I fell into about 15 years
ago. My family had just had to move
due to the Great Recession 2009 and
relocate about an hour and a half away. But it was like the
(02:29):
dark side of the moon to me. I might as well have been in outer
space because that's how it felt. And I just felt
so lonely. I just remember it was right when I put my daughter
in school. So she was now five entering kindergarten,
and I didn't have my job anymore. I didn't have my community.
My husband seemed a million miles away, and I just
(02:51):
felt so, so alone. And I sank
into the most profound depression
I've ever heard of, honestly, because what I was doing is my body was just
throwing up involuntarily and spontaneously, like, all the time.
I would be driving on the freeway, and I just couldn't pull over because
it just would happen. Or I'd be walking down the street,
(03:13):
which is really humiliating. A car is, like, a much safer place to
be vomiting involuntarily than walking down the street. It was
humiliating. And so my body was just reacting.
So that was the first extreme
depressive episode I had. Like that. I had a few more after that.
But the thing was, I went to
(03:36):
several different therapists at the time because I desperately needed it.
And even though I was hardly functioning, I remember sitting there. This is
when we did in person, thinking, you know,
I'm barely functioning, but I'm pretty sure I would be a better therapist than
this person. And I went to multiple people having the exact same
experience. So that kind of
(03:58):
exacerbated the depression. I wonder why. So, looking back, I
see how every one of my depressive episodes, in retrospect,
was all suppressed anger, and it's usually by a
betrayal. So the suppressed anger, as the
therapist, was a betrayal because you're supposed to be someone who
attunes to me. You're supposed to be someone who
(04:19):
really listens and believes me and trusts me and that
I can trust someone who really prioritizes my feelings, doesn't try
to talk me out of them. So that was a
betrayal. The big depression that I
had, though, was at my husband. In retrospect, I see that, that
I was so lonely with this move, and I felt like he
(04:42):
wasn't attuning to me, like he was kind of like, what's wrong? Get
over it. And so that was the ultimate betrayal in my
partner not really looking me in the eyes and just going,
wow, Bronwyn, I see how lonely you are. I see how hard
this is for you. If he had just done that, I would have
felt a lot better. But because he wasn't doing that and I
(05:04):
wasn't able to see this betrayal and to be
angry and to feel my anger and connect to it and say,
you know, Steve, I'm feeling betrayed by you. And it's okay for me
to feel angry because I didn't allow myself to do that and to
validate that. That's when the depression hit.
So interesting, because as I feel into how that
(05:27):
expresses itself in the collective that we feel this generalized
betrayal of the feminine,
that we haven't known how to even advocate
for our own emotionality, especially when it's an
uncomfortable emotion like anger. And men
oftentimes don't know what to do with that.
(05:49):
Well, okay, if they had a mother who was expressing healthy
anger or women around them that they grew up
with who had some kind of skill, I guess you could say, around the
healthy expression of that. But most women, we've been
conditioned to be nice.
As if that's the right. Like, I'm not saying be mean,
(06:12):
but let's be honest. We've been conditioned
to be nice and sweet. Well, beyond that is just like,
what do I do with that? But I love that you just use those terms,
because all my clients say, well, I want to be nice, not mean. And I'm
like, wait, what's nice? Do you really want
to be nice, or do you want to be good? Yeah.
(06:35):
Is enabling people being good,
or is it being nice and then mean? Like,
if you bring someone some kind of
accountability, is that mean or is that good? And if
it doesn't sound nice to everyone's ears, whose problem
is that? Yeah, you're just being a
(06:58):
mirror. You're just reflecting the truth. And if that's an ugly truth,
that's not your fault, and that certainly doesn't make you mean.
Yeah, it's almost like
you were saying, holding up that mirror and reflecting back to them. But it's not
up to us to manage their response to our own self
advocacy. Right, so that's. You brought me
(07:21):
right into. It's like I plan, I do here. Cherie, I love it.
The number one principle. We talk about boundaries a lot, and I love how
boundaries have entered into the vernacular of our society
now. But the most important boundary is the one that we will
never see. It's invisible. It's that we are only
responsible for our own feelings. And there's this big,
(07:44):
invisible boundary that. Cherie, if you're disappointed with this interview right
now, your feelings of disappointment are your
responsibility, not mine. And so when we see that,
like, your feelings belong to you, my feelings belong to
me. I am responsible for my feelings. And if
I'm disappointed, I need to do something about that. That's not your
(08:06):
job. And if I'm disappointed with you, then my
job is to use my words and be a grown up and say, you know,
I'm feeling disappointed. Is there something we can do? And if I'm not willing to
do that, then I'm playing a game with you. I'm being manipulative. I
am wanting you to see that I'm disappointed without being willing to
articulate it like a grown up. And now I'm expecting
(08:28):
you to feel responsible for my feelings.
And I think as parents, we make that misstep often.
We make our children responsible for the way that we're showing up or feeling.
I know it takes a lot of
centeredness and awareness
to not throw that out to other people and project
(08:51):
that. I'm curious, though, if we could
just backtrack with your story a little bit. When you were feeling that betrayal
and it was really up for you and you named it, and you're like, this
is betrayal. And I have a right to feel this anger
because I have been betrayed. I think we get gaslit a
lot when we try to name the betrayal.
(09:12):
And I'll give you an example, and you can tell me if this
resonates with. Because I know that you work with women. In religion. You work
with women. Most of them are secular, but
some are. Yeah, for sure. But you are aware of
some of the issues surrounding women who are now kind of waking up into these
old patriarchal spaces. Evangelicals. In my
(09:34):
religion of origin was Mormonism. And
when I started to
explore my feelings of
unease, let's just say. And I really started to do kind of
a historical databased
looking at documents, public records. And I
(09:56):
was really coming into a very
disturbing pattern that I wasn't told
about. There were some historical facts that were
left out of the narrative of my religion of origin that I felt
were so incredibly important that people know. So
in my naivety with these new discoveries, I started to
(10:18):
talk about it, and people were very uncomfortable
with that. And rightly so, I was uncomfortable discovering
it. The reason I bring this up is I felt acute
betrayal trauma that I was not shown this. I
was so, like, had served a mission. I had
spent my life around a certain kind of narrative and a certain kind
(10:40):
of, let's just say, trajectory that I
was on. And when I found out that there were a lot of discrepancies
with that, what I was told versus what the reality was,
it was really jolting. And
so because other people were
uncomfortable with what I was discovering, I had to go, like you were saying,
(11:01):
like that. It was almost like a depressive, like, oh, my
goodness, this is my quote
unquote "cross to bear." This is something I have to internalize and fix
inside of myself and come to terms with. And
so, yeah, acute betrayal trauma.
So you're saying you felt betrayal from the
(11:24):
historical piece, facts being left out, but then
additional betrayal when you shared it with people you thought
would feel with you and resonate with, you
weren't willing to. Is that what I'm hearing? Yes, but it's not so much
the people that I try to be transparent with.
It was the institution itself that didn't offer transparency,
(11:45):
but had all the list of expectations without
providing the transparency. And so I felt the
betrayal from that institution, from the religion itself, from the people who
were withholding the information. So the
allegiance to the institution then became in question
for me. And that's what kind of started me on my path of deconstruction.
(12:07):
So I had
a lot of people saying, oh, you shouldn't be upset by that, or what's
the big deal? Tons of people. It
was just absolutely staggering to me that I was being sort of gaslit
around. "Nothing to see here, folks." It's
okay. Or they would take
(12:30):
some concept that I had explored and deconstructed and then change
it after the fact.
Okay, let me backtrack. So certain
policies were in place, certain doctrines were in place when I was
growing up, and as I was having children and as I was kind of moving
along my religious path of devotion,
(12:52):
I was on a certain path and
with certain policies in place. And then during my deconstruction
process, they changed those policies, not due to me,
but other people who were disturbed by those policies, but
they never offered why they changed it. What, the
accountability? Right. No transparency, no accountability. It's like,
(13:15):
we're just going to go ahead and change that. And so for those of you
who have walked through it before, we're not going to offer why we changed it.
Just God's changing it. So there was just a lot of gaslighting and
pain around. Well, this was not the narrative
I was told, and these were not the policies. These policies were in place when
I was making certain decisions in my life that shaped those decisions. Had I
(13:35):
known that you were going to change it later, I would have made a different
[choice] And, yeah, so what you're describing, though,
I mean, it's so interesting because we see that on an individual
level, too. So to me, it's synonymous or analogous
to someone like, let's say you're like, well, Bronwyn, I need
to talk to you about something you said at the party the other day. It
(13:56):
was really hurtful. And if I'm like, oh, yeah, well, I was just
having a really hard day, Cherie, and I'm not going to say that again. So
that's the betrayal. Because maybe I'm saying
I won't do that moving forward, but I'm actually not holding myself
accountable. I'm showing no ownership, no insight, no self
awareness, no apology. So it's the same thing.
(14:18):
And when we feel betrayed, our feelings tell us what we need.
No matter what our feelings are, when we feel betrayed,
it's giving our brains information.
Like, well, if this person is consistently betraying you, and now they're
not even admitting that they betrayed you, then what do I need?
I need to not trust this person, this institution
(14:40):
again. I guess that the violation of trust was the most
disturbing piece of it. Yeah, I
was providing my full trust and my full devotion, but
that was not being fully reciprocated. And, yeah,
it's interesting. So I know that you have worked
with different groups, and you're saying, I were talking before how there's kind
(15:03):
of this upswell of women within religions. You could say
evangelicals. And I was not raised in the
evangelical religion, but it was pretty intensely patriarchal.
Very intensely patriarchal. What are you seeing?
What are women's voices? What are they needing now within religious spaces
that you're noticing? I'm just seeing a whole lot of
(15:24):
women, which I am so impressed by,
who are, like, holding on to their faith
still, but holding everyone else
accountable for a bunch of. And how are they
doing that? How are they navigating that? Well, I am on one Facebook group
called the Bear Marriage Facebook group. And Bear Marriage is
(15:46):
a podcast I subscribe to at a friend's inspiration. And
it is
a group of evangelical women led by some leaders who,
like the leader, Sheila Gregoir, wrote a
book called The Great Sex Rescue. So
basically, she did
(16:07):
very comprehensive research on
all these evangelical women across the spectrum. So from
fundamentalist to the more progressive, the whole thing. And
what they found, among other things, one thing they found is that
the most fundamentalist women who subscribe to
this notion that evangelicals promote, which is basically
(16:30):
sex on demand.
Like, basically, you need to have sex as much
as possible to make your husband happy. That's your job.
Mandatory sex, kind of. So those women had about
twice the rate of vaginismus as women in the
(16:52):
general population. Interesting. Yeah. And they
go through why this is, but their bodies are
reacting to this kind of systematic false teaching.
And so what Sheila Rae Gregoir and
her research team showed is like, okay, this isn't even
in the Bible, so it's bullshit. And look,
(17:14):
it's harming women. And the whole
idea that women's job is just to put out to make their husbands feel emotionally
connected somehow and that
men and women are inherently different. This is nowhere in our
sacred text. So where's it coming
from? Where did it start? Yeah, let's get some
(17:36):
accountability. So it's super refreshing. I don't consider
myself an evangelical, but I am Judeo Christian. And I
just love to see this movement because in the Jewish tradition,
women are known for having "hutzpah." And I relate more
to jewish women, and I am racially jewish, but I love
the hutzpah, and I want to see that pervade all women, just
(17:58):
like, you know what? Why do we have to apologize
for being women? We get the same voice as anyone else, and
we get to hold accountability just like everyone else and show us
the money. Where is this in the Bible anyway?
Trace this back. Where did it start? As you
were sharing that, it reminded me of when I took my daughter, who was then
(18:21):
19, she's 25 now, to Africa six years ago this month.
And we visited a very remote village, which was
very. It was quite disturbing. They actually circumcised females at age
four. And the women just
look very despondent to me, very detached. But also they have a measure of joy
in what they're doing, what they're creating. But there was a village elder,
(18:43):
and he would spend his time between, I
think, about five different wives or women that he claimed were giving
him children. And so I was the person in her group who was,
like, raising her hand because I was disturbed not
only by the female circumcision, but the
polygamy, the aspect of, like, we can talk to the tribal
(19:05):
elder, but we can't talk to the women. And so
I asked, and I will never forget what his answer was. He
said, it's sacred. It's a sacred tradition that
we do this, that we circumcise the girls in the isla, and then it's exactly
what we're talking about. I'm like, where did this start? In my
estimation, in the group that I was processing with after, it was like there was
(19:27):
probably some village elder x amount of years and years and years
ago who maybe he was betrayed and maybe
his wife stepped out on. I don't know. But it's just like
somewhere, somehow, this tradition started
in this remote village in Africa that women are not
to have pleasure, that women are the vehicle, like, you're kind of describing with this
(19:49):
fundamentalism that women are somehow at the
whim or control of their partner, and that he presides and that
he's the one that. And it's like, I think now we're just kind
of waking up to all of these old ideologies kind of going,
yeah, where did this start? And why is it still being
perpetuated in the 21st century here? I don't
(20:11):
know. Yeah, I agree. There is a waking up
going on, and I am very grateful to be alive right now
because even I'm 53. And, yeah, there are words
entering the vernacular that
didn't enter it until very recently. Not only boundaries, but, like,
accountability. You hear all these people talking about these
(20:33):
mental health people seeking therapy. Even ten years ago, it
wasn't like this. There's just a huge shift forward
into, like, I don't know. I want to say
spirituality, but also, like, mental health. I don't even know.
It's almost like we're reclaiming ourselves.
Yeah. So what have you seen with the link between someone not expressing, like, externalizing
(20:55):
their anger and depression, let's just say. Yes,
so Freud actually is the
one who came up with depression as anger turned
inward, and he couldn't have
been more right on the money. I have found not only depression is anger turned
inward. Anxiety, panic attacks, mania, psychosis. And
(21:16):
I've worked with all
of that. It's all anger turned inward. So our bodies feel
anger at some level. Even when we're
little children. We just know instinctually
when something's wrong, when our parent is betraying us in some way,
even if we don't know it cognitively, even if we don't have words for it,
(21:39):
we just know, like, it's wrong. And we feel the anger,
but we hold it within our bodies, usually. And so then
we tend, as a society, unfortunately, to
associate anger with the people who have the outbursts.
Okay, that's one type of anger we see,
but that's actually people who are chronically angry at other
(22:02):
things and or people who are suppressing anger
at the very thing they're most angry at. And then it
comes up, bubbling up, volcanoing out
at everyone and everything else. My
goal, because that's my expertise, is anger, is to help
people connect with their anger, to develop a healthy
(22:25):
relationship with their anger. We all have anger. What we all need
is a healthy relationship with it. So
suppressing it's not healthy. Externalizing it all the time is not
healthy. And it starts with just saying, you know what?
I'm okay to feel angry right now, because this is not okay
doesn't mean I'm going to explode. It's just okay to feel it. So it
(22:47):
starts, number one, with just that self validation that awareness.
It's okay. Even if I don't say anything to this person right
now, I'm going to feel the anger. Even if no one else knows
that's there. I do. I know it. I'm not going to suppress it. I'm not
going to ignore it. I'm going to feel it. And then the second is,
okay, so our feelings tell us what we need. I feel angry. What do I
(23:10):
need right now? Okay, so the basic two things are assertive
speech and boundaries. So, Cherie, if you just said something really out
of left field, that's not okay. Me channeling my anger out
of my body in a healthy way looks like this. Cherie, that's not
okay to say that. I'm not okay with it. That's it.
That's my anger. I don't have to explode. I don't have to
(23:33):
attack your character. I don't have to attack anyone.
I'm just like, hey. Or with my husband sometimes, of
course, hey, Steve. I'm not liking that tone of
voice. That's not working for me. That's my
anger. That's the expression of.
To just put a little bookmark here with a mask in. I've been married almost
(23:54):
30 years, and I have three sons and three brothers and a
husband. And it's like, it's so interesting, because
I think as women, we are really terrified of male
rage. And a lot of us had fathers
who were explosive. I mean, my dad was amazing
in a lot of respects, but his father was this irish
(24:17):
temper guy, and it kind of just went generationally.
And I read somewhere else, too, that women, we do internalize anger more than
men because it's more socially acceptable for a man to express
anger, almost like it makes him a man to kind of be
in that energy. And so there's twice as
(24:37):
much depression in women than there is in men.
I believe that. I also think, unfortunately, boys are taught not
to cry. That makes them a sissy or a baby or whatever. And
so I think a lot of men, by their angry
outbursts, are actually. That's their version of crying, too. Yeah, good
point. That's true. Because they haven't had healthy
(25:00):
emotion expression either. It's not been safe for them to show the
tender emotion that women are validated for.
Okay, cool. So we start with. Just starting
to interrupt your process. So the first step was,
just know. It'S okay to feel it. Feel it in your
body. Like some people feel it in their chest. This is usually
(25:23):
where it is. If you feel it in your head, what I would do
is tell yourself, you know what, Bronwyn? You
don't need to shut it down, because this is usually our head is fighting our
body's expression of anger. So if you get a headache or
tension your head, I would say, it's okay, Bronwyn, it's so
okay to feel the anger. You don't have to fight it. You don't have to
(25:44):
resist it. You don't have to talk yourself out of it. Just let it
be felt in your body. And usually people's tension in their head will go
away then, and they'll feel it more in their chest. Sometimes we feel it in
our shoulders. Like, our shoulders want to rise up and fight,
and then a lot of people will feel it in their gut. And what I
think they're really feeling their gut is disgust. So that's
(26:05):
just another variety of anger. It's a response to
something objectively disgusting. So when we're really
being gaslit or if we see
a parent neglecting a child, it feels, like, in
our gut, and it's like, that's hatred. That's disgust and
hatred. Talk about. We're not allowed to feel that. That's something I talk
(26:28):
about on my own podcast. Like, you know what? Hatred is just a
normal human reaction or response to
something that is objectively evil
or detestable. There's no shame with feeling
disgust or hatred. If you have a little child and you're walking down
the street and the child sees roadkill and they feel
(26:50):
disgust, you don't say, hey, Johnny, don't feel disgust. That's a
bad feeling to have. So then they run and scoop
it up. No, feel the disgust. It's telling you something. It's
there to inform you, right? Yeah.
So allowing yourself to feel it, locating where it is
in your body, talking to yourself,
(27:13):
or having that aware conversation with yourself, that it's okay to feel this
way. This is part of being human, that kind of thing. I'm also reminded of,
and I did a podcast episode on this a few years ago, of when Jesus
flipped over the tables in front of the temple.
In our religion of origin. We called it righteous indignation,
which is like a very healthy expression of anger.
(27:35):
And people don't want to see Jesus that way. They don't want to see Jesus
flipping over tables. But that was
epic because he was using
his platform to the platform
of being like the Im. Like, you're
saying with the disgust that he felt with the money changers in front of the
(27:57):
temple as a means to say, no,
not on my watch, this is just not okay.
So I think sometimes we can be
even too nice with our anger, if that makes
sense. Jesus wasn't nice. He was good. He wasn't.
So that's what he. In
(28:19):
his goodness, in his I am. There was still an
expression, an outward expression, that was honestly quite
shocking to a lot of people. Well, but then, if you think about it,
if you think, do we want a God or
a Jesus that is detached and apathetic,
I'm sorry, but I don't want that. No, we want passion. We want
(28:42):
a God who's like, that makes me disgusted because it's corrupt,
it's wrong, blah, blah, blah. He was not violent.
He overthrew the temples. He did not hurt a person.
I love it. And then the other thing he did is he called the
Pharisees and the sadducees. And this is in a shame. Honor
culture in public, a brood of vipers.
(29:04):
And if you know the reference back to the hebrew
scriptures, that means literally, they are the seed of Satan. That
is genesis three, where talks about the seed of the
serpent versus the seed of the woman. And he is saying, you guys are the
spawn of Satan. That would have been the most shame.
To the religious establishment. It could have ever been called in
(29:26):
a public shame and honor culture. He wasn't
nice, but he was good. Yeah, good
distinction. So once we've identified it, once we've
normalized, or I guess you don't even sometimes need to neutralize the anger,
because even around my kids, I've had to show
a degree of anger like you're saying that matches the level of
(29:48):
this is not okay. And it really helps them to see, oh,
mom, I don't want to do this again. Because they
genuinely didn't know. Yeah. Okay. So once
we've named it and we've sort of neutralized it
in ourselves, to the extent that we can healthily express it,
what then? Yeah. So I would feel it in our
(30:10):
bodies, and then I'd say, what am I feeling? Is it disgust?
If you're feeling nauseous, yeah. That's disgust. Or that's hatred.
And that's okay to then, you know, is it
anger in my chest? Okay. Our feelings tell us what we need. If I'm
disgusted, I can say something. Know, sheree, that
is very disturbing to hear you say that.
(30:32):
So let's say I'm at a, um, group.
I'm at a religious gathering, and you're saying something that is
like hate speech, but you think it's okay, so I can
say, because I'm feeling disgusted.
What do I need right now? I need to let everyone know,
or at least this one person, and say, that is really
(30:54):
disturbing to hear that right now.
Yeah. That's a way to stop the teacher in their tracks. Right.
Because sometimes they're just absolutely unaware. They're just
following tradition, and they're just repeating the same rhetoric that they've
been hearing in all of their circles, and they honestly don't
(31:14):
know. And I do believe that there is a groundswell
of people who are awakening to some of this hate speech that you're talking about,
that if we keep staying silent, we're
capitulating to the. Like, we're consenting to it.
Yeah. We're enabling it.
(31:34):
Okay. With the
establishment of boundaries. Like, you're talking about both within
ourselves and how we show up with others. And then also,
like, you're talking about assertive speech, just naming it for what it
is. What does that
do over time? I'm just picturing,
(31:57):
like, putting deposits in a little bank account over time.
Have you seen people transform through
this process? And what have you noticed that it's done for their
internal and external world? Yes,
that's a great question. So what it does, the end
objective, is that we are true to ourselves,
(32:20):
that we stop betraying ourselves. Because when I go to a religious
gathering and I'm hearing hate speech and I say nothing, I'm betraying
myself. I am not being true to myself. And when we continue
to do that, we do get depressed. We start feeling, like,
horribly. Right. So that's the outcome. To
be like. So, again, going back to the Hebrew, there's a word.
(32:44):
So when you hear the word perfect in the Old Testament, like a
perfect. Sacrifice, be therefore perfect, even. Perfect? Yes. That doesn't
mean perfect as we understand it in western culture, it means the
Hebrew "tamim." And Tamim means integrated. What you see
is what you get through and through. There's no compartmentalizing
of something over here. We're just whole.
(33:06):
We are integrated. And so the goal
of therapy as a therapist is to help my
clients become tame, integrated, whole.
So that is what we're doing. So when
I do not betray myself, I
am acting out in that whole integrated way, and I'm also modeling
(33:29):
for other people. I'm not attacking the hater. I'm just
saying that's really disturbing. So I'm holding them accountable without
attacking their character, without doing any kind of intentional
shaming. If they feel shame, that's their problem. I'm not
responsible for that. Right. Especially if you're presenting it with love and
power in that assertiveness. There's love behind it. Yeah.
(33:51):
So you could say that's really disturbing. That's not what I expected to hear
here. And it's really hard to hear that in this environment. It doesn't
feel like a safe thing to hear. So that would be an example of that.
Right? That's so powerful. Yeah. And it's not easy to do in
some spaces. In a lot of spaces, that is not easy to do. It's so
liberating. It's very
(34:11):
easy for me these days, I'll tell you. It is
so liberating. You feel whole, and then you
have some people hate you, and some people
are like, oh, my God, Cherie, thank you for saying that. That happened
to me towards, yeah, that started to happen to me when I was always the
one raising her hand in Sunday school, trying to bring it back to mercy, love,
(34:34):
and compassion. It was exhausting. But then I would have people stop me in
the hall and be like, thank you for sharing that. I was sick to my
stomach. They literally... This girl was like, I was sick to my stomach until you
said that. So I do think that we have to ascertain,
like, should I sit in this setting and always
be the one raising my hand, or can I use my voice in
(34:55):
other. Because I was shut down by the teacher.
Literally shut down by trying to do what you said, by trying to
advocate. Okay, well, in that situation, so if we're talking about,
like, for kids, I would say accountability or someone who's
an employee go up the chain of command. We have cell
phones, we can audiotape, we can videotape, we can bring about
(35:17):
accountability in these institutions. So if I'm working
with someone who's an employee, I'm like, I would audiotape that,
exchange with your supervisor and go up above her
and get some accountability. So that's another way we can channel our
anger. Yeah. And sometimes in the larger
institutions that have a lot of money and power, you can go all the way
(35:38):
up and still be silenced, unfortunately. But we do
have a free press here in our country, and we can. Spread
awareness that way. And that is what's happening, actually. That's actually
happening organically. Okay. So
I guess to kind of wrap this up,
I want you to hit on something else that you teach. And that's why anger
(36:02):
management doesn't usually work. The old anger
management models. Yeah. So along those lines, I mentioned earlier that
I was beyond disappointed with my own
experiences seeking out therapists. So many therapists and
the therapeutic community today teach anger management.
And I'm like, let's get it together, you
(36:23):
guys. It doesn't work so oftentimes. What this is, is
like these skills. Like, Cherie, just take some deep
breaths and just center yourself and feel your feet
on the floor. Or, Cherie, just feel the feeling in
your body. Or put up a
stop sign. Just imagine a stop sign, stop your thoughts. And
(36:46):
it's all these symptom management. It's symptoms that
we're managing. Just like the medical establishment only
manages symptoms, too. We don't get to the root. And so
that's how anger management is. And what it does
bypasses, right? Yes, it's bypassed. Have you
heard of spiritual bypassing, by the way? We talk about all the time on this
(37:08):
podcast? Absolutely. So it is. It's bypassing.
What it does is manage symptoms at best, but at worst,
and this is the case so often, is, it's gaslighting
that individual. So I will have someone who come to
me for disordered eating, helping with her disordered eating, who's been
to outpatient treatment for eight months, let's say.
(37:31):
And they do all these skills, like handle your.
Regulate your feelings, self regulation. This is basically what anger
management does, too. And at worst, this
is what usually happens, is she sees herself as
the problem, because if you do that to
individuals, and usually they already believe they're the
(37:53):
problem to begin with. So now you're just reinforcing. You're the
problem. If you could just manage your feelings, everything
would go smoothly. And so that's the most
toxic piece of this. And the problem is usually
another person. Right. But they're trying to twist
themselves more and more into a pretzel to make
(38:16):
this other person happy or for things to go smoothly with some
kind of false peace. Yeah, that really resonates, and it kind of
goes back to what I was illustrating about when I uncovered some disturbing
historical narratives, and I wasn't okay with
certain policies that I just sort of became complicit with
it for a number of years and didn't speak out, to not
(38:38):
make waves or to disturb the peace, when, in
actuality, what was happening inside of me was my
health was suffering. I did a podcast on
a patriarchy. Sorry. I did a
guest sort of presentation on the podcast
breaking down patriarchy with Amy McPhie Allebest on
(39:00):
SACRED RAGE. And it was this whole
thing. Know how my swallowing of my words
and the women that I've coached and work with were seeing things
like thyroid pervasive thyroid issues and some
of these autoimmunes because of trying to women,
we're very relatable. We
(39:21):
want everyone to be happy. We can see the whole
picture oftentimes. And that embodied wisdom is not always honored in
these old spaces. And when you were saying you get sick or
a gut ache in that area, because we feel that disgust, that's
actually the chakra that holds our womb wisdom. And so when
that gets triggered, it's like mama bear chemistry, because we're
(39:44):
not okay with that happening to our cubs, and we're not
okay with that happening to humanity. But women, we've had to stifle that energy, and
so it doesn't always reveal itself.
Super fascinating. Well, Bronwyn, is there
any parting words of advice or wisdom that you would give as we
kind of wrap this discussion up that we haven't maybe covered, or just any last
(40:06):
parting thoughts around this whole topic of the healthy expression of anger?
Yeah, I would say don't be afraid of all this.
I know it can sound so great in theory, and you think, oh,
if you only knew or whatever, it can sound intimidating,
but really being true to ourselves
(40:30):
makes us whole. And that is worth whatever the
fallout it really is. But also seek
community. So it's not just you being isolated. At the end of the day, if
you have a friend or two or
three or anyone you can be on this journey with, all
the better, because you might lose some people in your lives. I say good
(40:52):
riddance. Honestly, I sleep better now than I ever have in
my life. But it is worth at the end,
but definitely have a partner in crime. I
love that. I would totally echo and support
in that sentiment of finding your true
tribe who also may be experiencing
(41:13):
similar conflicts, but who are also on the path to
being true to themselves. And like you were saying, like not betraying yourself anymore.
And there's a lot of us that are arising in that space, and it is
very healthy, and it is very affirming and validating. So where can people
find your podcast? You want to say a little bit about that? Yes. My podcast
is Angry
At The Right Things, and it is wherever you subscribe to your
(41:34):
podcast. The reason I started doing it is, one, is
for people who want to bypass
therapy altogether and just skip to the wisdom, because, again,
so many therapists are so, so disappointing. That's
been my experience. It still is, because I have so many clients
come to me telling me their horror stories of previous therapists. So if you
(41:57):
want to bypass therapy or if you want to
find a really good therapist, but you want to hit the ground running, knowing what
you need and what you want and being informed first just to advocate for
that. Going into that therapeutic
right, because you're. Going to need to shop around, most likely. So to
know, have a bar, have a high bar for what you're looking
(42:19):
for, the level of wisdom and intelligence you want from your
therapist. And then third would be for someone who
is wanting to become a therapist or is a therapist. When I started out, I
had no idea what I was doing. So this is also for
budding therapists or even more seasoned therapists who want a
new approach to things. Well,
(42:42):
yeah, I would definitely say that sometimes you do
educate people in the field.
We do educate our experts sometimes. And
sometimes they're very grateful for it, and that's great. But if they're
not, then find another.
Well, thank you so much for your time today. This has been really
(43:04):
enlightening. You're welcome, Cherie. Thank you for having me. It was fun.
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