The Luxury of Anger

Growing up, my mom described me, even as early as three years old, as being prodigiously well-behaved.

“I could correct you across the room with only a glance,” she’d say with a smile.

That always felt like praise until my oldest turned three, and I discovered the incessant use of the word no during the “terrible twos” was no match for the task of emotionally regulating a three year-old who had her own opinion about every. little. thing.

This past month, Christine Lawson’s book, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable and Volatile Relationship, has called me to reframe my impeccable self-control as fear of my mom’s erratic mood swings.

Anger was a luxury.

Whether it’s Emmanuel Sanders celebrating a touchdown catch or a Nuggets guard staring down an opponent after dunking over him, league rules around “taunting” confine athletes to a razor thin bandwidth of emotional and cultural expression while simultaneously paying them to perform at levels of superhuman intensity.

Anger is a luxury.

In The Week’s article “It’s 2020 and Women are Exhausted”, Zoe Fenson writes:

Warren and her fellow female candidates are being distilled to the most basic and dehumanizing of stereotypes. Because in our American patriarchy, when accomplished, outspoken women pursue positions of power, they are routinely painted as unreliable and unlikable — snakes in human form.

Anger is a luxury.

And yet anger is often the only fuel explosive enough to initially thrust the vehicle of justice out of the gravitational pull of Cape Canaveral’s oppressively humid atmosphere.

Last week, Illinois Representative Bobby Rush, introduced the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. Though named after a 14 year-old boy murdered in 1955 for supposedly looking at a white woman in a sexual manner in a grocery store, legislation criminalizing lynching was first introduced in 1900. After 120 years, passage could finally add lyching to the United States Criminal Code making it a federal crime.

At her son’s funeral, Mrs. Till Mobley propelled the Civil Rights Movement to a new stratosphere when she, against sheriff’s orders, opened her son’s casket, publicly revealing his mangled body.

She permitted several photographers to take pictures of her son’s disfigured corpse and urged the publication of the gruesome images. “[People] would not be able to visualize what had happened, unless they were allowed to see the results of what had happened,” she later said. “They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this.”

Anger was necessary.

What rules did your family have around expressing anger? What do you remember being furious about as a child? How did it show? What injustice was it seeking to counter? What story, if told, would free you to see your anger as an ally in birthing change in your life and story?

UPCOMING OPPORTUNITIES

Denver Story Group: Monday, March 16th 6-9pm in Littleton

(2 spots left)

Between Touches Zoom Call: Tuesday March 24th, 6-7:30pm MST

(1 FREE guest spot left)

Relief in Powerlessness

In the summer of 2012, I began realizing our family’s time on the mission field was coming to an end. I’ll spare you all the gory details but suffice to say that I wanted a deeper level of emotional wholeness as a sexual abuse survivor and the resources I needed for such an intense process simply weren’t available.

It was a tortuous decision for someone who had “made life work” in confining emotional spaces for fifteen years.

Was this phase of life truly different? Was I at my tipping point? Couldn’t I figure this out, without having to leave?

I remember thinking one day, “This would be so much easier if my team leaders would just send me home.” And a split second later I knew I’d hate that too.

For eight, eternally long months I battled my inner demons as I chose to care for my own soul over other people and things. Slowly I realized it was a choice only I could make—unless of course I were in full-blown crisis. And that is the convenience of a crisis—others are forced to choose for you.

Suicidal depression, extramarital affairs or substance addiction would have compelled others, whether it was morally or legally, to push my own eject button.

Choice is a risk.

Which means…

Choice may cost us something of immeasurable value.

Therefore…

Choice feels like a burden.

So…

Powerlessness becomes a relief.

Those tortuous months of choosing for myself gave me two wonderful gifts:

1) A visceral reaction of disgust to stories (like in the musical number below) where the path of abdicating choice is portrayed as an easy escape route.

2) Opportunities to walk alongside clients at the same crossroads—will they choose to care for themselves as faithfully as they care for the world around them?

The battle to hold a sense of agency over our lives is so important to win because abdicating to powerlessness can be retraumatizing, creating even more fear in holding power in our own lives.

What important choices did you make growing up? What were the risk factors in those moments? Did these experiences encourage you to exercise choice or abdicate your power in order to avoid blame, isolation or rejection? In your life today, what’s a situation in which you would rather not choose? What collision are you hoping to avoid? What story, if told, would massage some of the scar tissue constraining your authority in caring for yourself?

From the song “On the Steps of the Palance” from Into the Woods:

Better run along home
And avoid the collision
Though at home they don't care
I'll be better of there
Where there's nothing to choose
So there's nothing to lose
So I'll pry up my shoes
Wait no thinking it through
Things don't have to collide
I know what my decision is
Which is not to decide
I'll just leave him a clue
For example, a shoe
And then see what he'll do

Now it's he and not you
Who is stuck with a shoe
In a stew, in the goo.

NEW MEMBERSHIP OPTIONS

New offerings tailored to your needs!

Beginning March 1st: Membership packages designed for….

individual growth, service providers & professional therapists.

TRADITIONAL COMMUNITY MEMBERSHIP:

Four-person online communities designed to offer personal care and support as you engage your past in finding greater freedom in the present.

One spot left in my newest group! Visit for FREE to see if it’s right for you! Next group call takes place on Wednesday February 26th 7:00-8:30 AM MST.

Cost: $75 per month (3-month minimum enrollment)

Last month to join at a 20% discount—price increases to $95 on March 1st.

NEW FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS:

Want to deepen your therapeutic leadership & presence?

Like me, many of you desire to see wholeness in the lives of others! Beginning in March, I’m offering a unique learning opportunity for social workers, chaplains, nonprofit employees, ministers, small group leaders, and missionary care specialists.

Subscribe as a service provider and receive:

• monthly content (including a 30-minute audio file expounding on important therapeutic categories)

• monthly article engaging three key questions from community members

• Access to an optional members-only 60-minute learning call designed to equip you in leading from your own story work in your vocational ministry

12 Memberships Available

Cost: $55 per month (3-month minimum enrollment)

NEW FOR INDIVIDUAL GROWTH:

Want fresh ways to connect with your story?

My most basic membership subscription includes:

• monthly content to engage with on your own or share with a community you are already a part of.

• 25% discount ($30 off) on 75-minute coaching calls for months when you need additional personal processing support

Enroll now to begin in March and receive access to your choice of two past months of content for FREE.

Unlimited Memberships Available

Cost: $25 per month (3-month minimum enrollment)

NEW FOR THERAPISTS:

Want a supportive community in which to share about your own story while honoring professional boundaries?

Beginning in March, I’m offering a therapist-only space that provides the privacy you to need to engage your story and discuss work challenges without navigating dual relationships.

Membership includes…

• monthly content (includes a 30-minute audio file lecture on key therapeutic categories)

• Access to an optional therapist-only 75-minute processing call: a place to share your personal connections with the material and discuss therapeutic categories & implications with your clients.

• access to an optional online discussion platform for professional resource sharing and referrals

8 Memberships Available

Cost $65 per month (3-month minimum enrollment)

Parasite and Privilege

Last Friday, my new favorite NPR podcast, Pop Culture Happy Hour, tipped me off that Parasite was a fabulous film and true contender for Best Picture. Seeing it only the night before the Oscars aired, my awe at its creative brilliance was still fresh allowing me to celebrate as it won award after award.

There are so many praiseworthy aspect of Bong Joon-Ho’s stunning film but I most valuabled its expansion of my view of privilege. Much like Roald Dahl uses the ridiculous in his book Matilda to expose subtle, abusive parenting, Joon-Ho’s far-fetched thriller expands our window of tolerance for engaging the uncomfortable reality of the disparity between affluence and poverty.

At one point in the film, the Kim family has their almost subterranean apartment flooded by a overnight torrential downpour. Images of floating possessions, a backed up sewage system and a night in a makeshift shelter at a school are a gut-punching contrast to the Park family’s naive relief over the rain’s benefit to their lawn the next morning. Parasite helped me concretely understand the privilege of welcoming rather than fearing the weather.

And that has stayed with me as I’ve shoveled snow almost daily this past week to keep my inclined driveway safe for my teenage driver. Privilege is the luxury to roll my eyes at the forecast or enjoy watching the snowfall from beneath a quilt, rather than fearing its effect. The means to insure my teenage driver, owning a family car (much less two!), and being able to afford a shovel are all privileges of wealth.

Snow has concretely anchored me this week to the flood scene in Parasite, but other threads in my life are also woven into the reality of my privilege.

Last week I began a new role as a case manager for the nonprofit Bridge of Hope. Tonight I’ll visit my first client, a single mom enrolled in our housing subsidy program designed to prevent her recidivism back into homelessness. I am anticipating this new role will force me to straddle both my present privilege of being a two income family as well as my past childhood of living not far above the poverty line as the child of a single mother.

Last week I also spent hours on the phone seeking to secure a medication that has helped me successfully manage a chronic illness. My copay for the first two years of my diagnosis was $0 but insurance companies and their specialty pharmacies altering the “tiers” of the drug I rely on have now made it unaffordable. I’m straddling both the privilege of having health insurance and not qualifying for medicaid as well as the handicap those are, ironically, in seeking financial assistance.

Parasite. Privilege. Snow. Homelessness. Medication. Any movie that helps me more deeply engage my own personal experience of privilege, as well as feel seen in ways it is absent in my life, is indeed Oscar worthy!

What did privilege look like for you growing up? In what ways did you experience affluence and poverty—either physically or metaphorically? What story of straddling privilege and the absence of it do you need to tell in order to be more compassionate to yourself and others in the present?