Rage.
An email entitled Rage may seem a bit full on for a Friday pep talk. I get it but since becoming a parent, I have learned a lot about rage and what I’ve learned has really helped my mental state, my compassion and my ability to deal with stressful situations. I still fuck it all up occasionally but it’s rare and for that I am grateful.
I was full of rage. I didn’t know it and would never have said I was an angry person, but it was always there just below the surface. It would fly out of me and shock everyone around me. I’d even shock myself. I felt out of control when it came to my rage and it worried me.
One day I was driving and I had the girls in the back of the car. A guy pulled out in front of me and by the grace of whatever higher power you choose to acknowledge, we didn’t crash. There was literally a couple of centimetres between us - the smallest of spaces fighting off the biggest of potential disasters.
I raged.
I got out of the car and I screamed and shouted. I behaved badly. I was mad but I was also scared. Road rage is a thing and here’s my theory about why. Every time we get in the car, we are putting ourselves and our passengers at a greatly increased risk of danger. Even if we are the best drivers, in the safest car, with our seatbelt on, there’s a vulnerability that we never really acknowledge. But, the potential for disaster is there, so close, every single time. You may trust yourself, but to avoid disaster you are also placing blind faith in everyone else driving around near you. You don’t know them, you don’t know what they’ve been doing, whether they’ve been drinking, or looking at the phone. You just have to trust that they will keep you safe just like you have to keep them safe.
When someone does something stupid on the road then, we are triggered. That subconscious vulnerability we feel comes racing to the surface and in a flight or fight way, we lose our cool. The threat of danger was so close, the adrenaline rush was so powerful and now…you’re dealing with the aftermath. You’re confronted with the fact that if those couple of centimetres hadn’t been there, you’d be on your way to hospital in an ambulance.
That’s scary. And that’s what rage actually is: fear.
Whatever your rage is about and whenever it happens, it’s always about you feeling unsafe, afraid, vulnerable. Whether that’s physically or emotionally, rage and its little sister, anger, all stem from a sense of not feeling safe. So when you’re next in the car and douchebag pulls out in front of you, acknowledge the fear and vulnerability your feeling. Put a face to the rage and call it what it really is: fear. The next time you lose your shit with the kids or your husband or the lady at the checkout, take a breath and ask yourself what’s the real feeling because the rage and the anger is just the symptom.
For now though, it’s Friday. It’s the weekend and this is a lot to digest before you embark on another working day so I’ll leave you with this. We all feel the rage - you’re not a bad person - but you can’t just be ok with it and write it off as ‘part of who you are’. It really doesn’t have to be but to beat it means getting all honest and vulnerable and that can feel deeply, deeply uncomfortable.
So, try this: go somewhere quiet and write a list of things you are afraid of. The big things, the little things, all the things. And then divide them into categories:
The things you have no control over
The things you can manage right away.
The things you can manage at some point in the future (try and put a date on it).
I want you to burn the first list.
I want you to put the third list in a drawer.
And I want you to deal with the second list and then chuck it away.
Have a great weekend.