K: I want you to know I’m really working with anger a lot right now and I need a lot of room for it. I tried to bring it to my NVC Practice Group last night and it did not go well, which amplified it.
This part of me needs a lot of space and I need to give it to her—she has been waiting a long time for me to be ready to do that. Part of that looks like really attending to her needs and not so much focusing on other people right now. I am needing to talk and be with some of my support people who can really be with the intensity of my anger and not personalize it, and not become activated by it. I am talking to Amanda in a minute and that will be helpful. I have a few others I might reach out to.
I know that is hard for anyone to be around, and I also know that anger is a particularly difficult emotion for you based on your childhood, and it brings up a lot. I want you to have full permission to choose not to be around it when it’s so up for me. If it was just something between us, that’s a bit different and we would need to work it out together. At this moment, it’s not exactly that. It’s BIG and tied to many, many things, interpersonal, systemic, and power-related. I’m willing to be patient as you work on yourself and learn how to be with anger, and I don’t need you to have it figured out right now since I have other support. So, if it doesn’t feel like something you can be with without becoming activated right now, and you want to choose to have space this weekend, that is actually a much more supportive choice for both of us. I want you to do what you need to.
I would like to know how this lands. And also I would like you to take a little time to be with what I have shared and connect with yourself before responding about the weekend.
R: I love you, care about your experience, and want to be supportive. I am also putting together a longer text. But want to say that right off the bat.
K: Thank you.
R: As far as how it lands, I’m feeling concern and care for you, a desire to support you in whatever way you’re needing. I’m also thinking that I’ve done things and acted in ways that have been hurtful to you in tender places related to your anger.
I want to be with you, if that’s what you want. If you’re needing to express anger at me I can be there for that.
If what you want is time and space away from me I don’t want to push. All I ask for is clarity around what you’re needing and how you’re feeling.
Because I care deeply about how this is impacting you, along with our connection and with my own needs.
I appreciate the expression of your care, and your desire to support me. I’m struggling with knowing what I want right now. And I mean in the immediate sense of this weekend. In your response, when you say “I’m also thinking that I’ve done things and acted in ways that have been hurtful to you in tender places related to your anger,” I see an example of the subtle communications that I sometimes get from you that lead me to wonder how much you take responsibility for my challenging emotions when they arise in our relationship. It is easier to draw out and get clear together with some challenging emotions than it is with others. I’m finding anger to be the most difficult, because doing emotional labor to help you (or anyone) see what is missing is the last thing my anger is interested in doing. It wants to be met, and it also doesn’t want to do the work to lead someone who isn’t yet able to meet it where they need to go. Quite a conundrum. So naturally, I’m not sure how to work with it in our relationship at this moment. In this text exchange, as in some of the conversations we have, I hear you taking responsibility for my experience. I also hear you doing that when I didn’t say it was about anything you did. I appreciate your willingness to take responsibility when it’s appropriate to do that, and at the same time, don’t want you to take on things that aren’t yours. I know from personal experience that this is a difficult thing to figure out when there is codependent family conditioning.
Having space to express anger fully and unfiltered, without anyone trying to fix it or make themselves responsible for it–rather, having someone who can really allow space for it, acknowledge it, and express empathy for the unmet needs beneath is really what I want when anger arises. In cases where someone has acted in a way that contributes to harm and results in anger, I do want seeing of that, owning their part, and asking what is needed for repair. But there’s a really important difference between taking responsibility for the actions one took that contributed to a difficult experience for another person and taking responsibility for the difficult emotions themselves. I don’t want anyone taking responsibility for my emotions. It’s disempowering, and I have come to a place in my own healing where I don’t want to give my power away anymore. My anger is MINE.
I’m discovering that actually finding space where I can be heard and given empathy for my anger, while not being bypassed/minimized/misunderstood OR overtaken/co-opted by someone else’s sense of responsibility for my anger is really hard to come by, except in very specific relationships and spaces. It’s turning out to be the case that the places I can get empathy and empowerment when I’m experiencing anger are with people who have worked a lot with their own internalized oppression, know their own anger well, and therefore understand the wisdom and empowerment of anger; they don’t just fear it. How that would have changed the previous text exchange we had would have made a very different impact.
Original Message: As far as how it lands, I’m feeling concern and care for you, a desire to support you in whatever way you’re needing. I’m also thinking that I’ve done things and acted in ways that have been hurtful to you in tender places related to your anger.
I want to be with you, if that’s what you want. If you’re needing to express anger at me I can be there for that.
If what you want is time and space away from me I don’t want to push. All I ask for is clarity around what you’re needing and how you’re feeling.
Because I care deeply about how this is impacting you, along with our connection and with my own needs.
Here’s an example of what a response to my message might have looked if my anger could be met in the ways that I’m longing for: As far as how it lands, I’m so glad that you’re sharing what is going on for you. I feeling concern and care for you, and a desire to support you in whatever way you’re needing. I am hearing you say that this is BIG anger. With what you named, I’m guessing it’s HUGE. Generations of suppressed feminine rage! I want to honor the magnitude of it; I don’t want to co-opt your experience or make it personal or specific to our relationship if that’s not what is going on for you. At the same time, I fully acknowledge the culturally conditioned power differential inherent in our relationship. I own that I’ve been conditioned as a white cis man and that that impacts you. I own that it’s likely that there are things that I do unconsciously and unintentionally that recreate patriarchy and misogyny within our relationship, and that this may sometimes have the impact of harm for you. I’m wondering if that is contributing in any way to the anger you are experiencing.
If it is, I want you to know that I’m 100% here for it if you need to talk about it, and I can hold space for you if you want to share it with me. Your anger is welcome here. I can be with it. I am not afraid of it or threatened by it, and I value and honor the importance of it, particularly in your experience as a woman who has been trained by the patriarchy that you’re not allowed to have anger. I care about your experience. If there’s any part of what you are experiencing that you would like to share with me, whether it’s about how I’m showing up in our relationship, or anything else, I would experience it as a gift from your heart of your emotional labor on my behalf, and on behalf of the health of our connection. You also don’t owe me that, and I can give you all the space you need. It is my work as a male-bodied person to educate myself and learn more about the ways patriarchy harms the women I care about in my life.
Whatever you are needing, I support you. I am also totally okay if you don’t respond right away–I heard you say your anger needs space, and I want to offer as much as it needs.
I know that building awareness around where the boundary and difference lies between responsibility for one’s self/one’s actions/one’s intentions and impacts (useful, appropriate and supportive), and responsibility for others’ emotions (disempowering, harmful for everyone involved, not supportive) is challenging to understand at first. I know you have to come to it on your own. This is why I sometimes need space when my anger comes on strong. I don’t know that you are completely clear with this yet, and part of how I have bypassed my anger in the past is to go straight to compassion for the way other people aren’t at a developmental place of understanding around how to be supportive, and so I “should” myself into accepting the help they can offer me as “good enough” when it isn’t. I often end up caregiving instead of attending to what is needed for me in that experience. I am needing something different.
To be clear, this does not mean that those people unable to support me in the ways I need are not good enough, it means that the support is not enough. I need to go to the places where I can get the kind of support I am needing in order to heal, by fully allowing my anger–suppressed and co-opted by patriarchy for generations and centuries and now manifesting in this particular queer female body–the space it needs. To be free. To be full. To be unapologetic. To be messy. To be firey and fierce and loved into fullness and healing by others by being met and seen exactly as it is. Because this is what I am needing, and because I don’t feel certain that you are able to provide it for me at this time, and because I don’t know how to express to you what is happening for me without you being activated into self-aggression, I don’t yet know how to navigate this with you. My anger wants you to work with your own relationship to anger, particularly how it is for you when your female partners are having a lot of it, without pulling me into emotional labor for you while I’m having my own experience of anger. Maybe you can do that. I just don’t know and I don’t fully know what to do with the not knowing when I DO know that I just can’t keep doing this kind of work for male partners. Not right now anyway.
I got some good support today from Amanda and Alex, and I’m talking with Kathy in the morning to share with her about how her facilitation had a harmful impact for me and to seek understanding about what was going on for her and how much she was aware of. I don’t know at all how that’s going to go. I don’t know what I will need after, I might not know what to ask for.
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