Ugly emotions
I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon during coaching, and personal development conversations over the years. It’s one that relates almost universally to women, and I’ve certainly include myself in this assessment.
The issue is this: we’re not very good at getting angry. We’re not highly skilled at the vein-throbbing, fist-shaking, furious feather-spitting kind of behaviour.
It’s not that we don’t feel it. We certainly do, along with frustration, bitterness, jealousy, and all those other emotions that I call ‘ugly’. The problem is that we’ve not been taught to express these in any kind of safe way. And that’s because we rarely get to see it. Girls are taught, through politeness norms that suppress disruptive behaviour, to use indirect methods of dealing with rage. Society seems to distrust female anger. It’s not OK to lose our temper, even though we all know we want to sometimes.
And the lack of role models in popular culture doesn’t help. Fictional women can be catty, psychopathic, whiny, manipulative, or even—occasionally—outraged at a deep injustice, but everyday female anger is depicted with shocking rarity.
So we’re a bit unpracticed. In real life anger usually comes out as tears, upset, overwhelm. All much more manageable in the workplace. Much more ‘female’ emotions, easier to deal with in the ladies with tissues and sympathy.
Getting to an acknowledgement of real anger can take a while. we have to get over our need to avoid ‘getting ugly’. But it’s universally liberating when we do, and coaching is a very safe space to do it.
Managed properly, it becomes a powerful force for change. I’ve seen transformations in coaching clients after a recognition that what’s really going on isn’t a lack of confidence, or feeling ‘stuck’, or an inability to communicate with a boss. It’s pure anger, and it’s a highly useful source of data in answering the difficult question ‘what are you not OK with?’.
So let’s celebrate genuine female anger on the rare occasions when we see it. From Jo Marsh in Little Women, to Joyce Byers in Stranger Things, it’s entirely possible for ugly anger to exist alongside kindness, love, growth. And I’d argue that the latter are more beautiful when anger is acknowledged, and dealt with.
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Incidentally, as I was searching for an image to go with this blog, it became clear that in image libraries, women are only shown to be angry in a ‘I’ve asked you three times to tidy your room’ cross-mum kind of way, freakish hair-pulling witchiness, or something closer to real anger but she still has to be model-beautiful and/or half naked. Or the image is tagged as ‘mental disorder’. Kind of proves my point, sadly.
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash