Anger and Women
When no thoughtful question can be offered, when no rational challenge can be brought, when truth has rendered readers speechless, the likely response to my blog content will be “she’s so angry.” And it’s said or written as if I should be ashamed of myself. I am not.
I know much of what my ex-husband did to me. I know how his mother abused him as a child and then me as his wife. I now know some of how they disparaged me behind my back over three decades. I know many “way past appalling” practices that many women endured at the hands of the “treatment” industry. I know how the treatment industry seemed to change course without taking responsibility for past practices and any harm they caused. I know how the religion industry participated in abandoning women like us or did worse than that. I’ve listened to women punished by their adult children for telling the truth about their father’s secret life and all the kinds of risks he took with all their lives. I’ve heard way too many stories of financial ruin, businesses lost, college funds emptied, multiple mortgages secretly take out on homes, assets hidden in divorces and kept from wives, child support never paid, and children set adrift by fathers who never pick them up for joint custody time but who go for joint custody so they pay less support. I’ve held shattered spirits and minds in my heart for safekeeping over months and months and months while others told them to “get over it, everyone cheats.” I’ve accompanied women like us in the last year of their lives as they died from the health damage directly related to their husbands’ secret lives. They were magnificent women and I still cry for them. All this and more. Yes, I’m angry about those things.
Why isn’t everyone?
The answer is long and complicated and unpleasant. But here’s someone who breaks it down for us. Soraya Chemaly wrote a book called Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. Here’s a link to an introductory TED talk that might help remove the “shame” and the “shaming” that seeks to keep women’s legitimate and reasonable anger invisible. Women who get angry at injustice and express themselves are dangerous, I guess—dangerous to those who thrive on injustice done to others.
https://youtu.be/nUcSV-9mEmM?si=k8rskYaF0z8OnVqF
When anger is a reasonable response to injustice that continues to be perpetrated on women who did nothing more than love a con artist who lies as a way of life and cares not who is hurt, I say no shame on those with courage to own anger and refuse to let it eat them alive. Don’t kid yourself, if you don’t own your reasonable and appropriate anger, it will own you. Your health will be affected. Your personal agency constricted. Your trust diminished. Your joy sapped.
Learning about women’s anger is a big learning curve. Learning about our own anger is empowering. And that’s what Soraya Chemaly is talking about. Don’t be ashamed of being angry. The chances are it makes perfect sense. When we get that, it doesn’t own us. But it can empower us.
From the very beginning I have said the work I am doing is justice ministry. My anger got me there.
Shame, not so much.
With you,
Diane.