Women and Anger - by Darylynn Starr Rank
August, 2005

“A giant floating iceberg filling up the living room with this cold feeling of dread and greyness. That’s the best description I can give you. It’s awful. Really awful.”

Those were the loving words I got to hear from my husband many years ago when he was trying to tell me that I did get angry – a lot! While I was busily trying to tell him that I didn’t. 

Or at least I really didn’t think I did. Upset, yes. Hurt, oh my. Anxious, edgy, and extremely self-protective, you bet. But hardly ever angry. 

This time, however, he did in fact know more about me than I did. (It’s very rare, of course!) I would never have called the feeling he was describing ‘anger’. Never. Although I knew what he was talking about. But my explanation of that glacial greyness was profoundly different. 

“I’m not angry. I’m hurt. You really hurt me.” (And I’ve gone away to where you just can’t hurt me anymore, I’d think.  Where I’m safe. And protected.) 

And utterly and completely shut down! Not on him. On my anger! 

But I didn’t discover that until later. Much later.

It took me a really long time to understand about me and anger. About a lot of women and anger, I think. (Men, too, I believe. They have trouble finding acceptable ways to express their anger just like women do. But they often have more permission to be angry than women. And way less permission to feel hurt and cry. It’s just the way our world has trained us.)

My version of ‘not feeling angry’ was my endless attempts to be a nice, kind, good little girl. Sweet, polite, taking care of people, and always worried about their feelings. 

Well, anger’s not nice, or sweet, or any of those things. Or so I believed. And being angry always hurts someone’s feelings, doesn’t it? So I learned to shut it down. It’s simply not what good little girls do. Or nice women.

Voila, the iceberg. Which I saw strictly as me being hurt. Never hurtful. 

Well, if you were to have a quick chat with my husband, he’d tell you that grey silent icebergs don’t actually make him feel really good. Or safe. Or happy. Or even human. In fact these days he’s kind of relieved when I just tell him straight out that he’s acting like a bit of a dork. (Well, ‘tell’ might not quite capture the volume level.)

And you know what. It ends up feeling much warmer and cozier inside me, too…

Now that I’ve learned it’s okay for even very nice, kind women to get angry sometimes. And learned how to do it in ways that don’t freak me out. 

Anger can be really, really useful, helpful, and effective. And utterly necessary a lot of the time. It’s just another part of who we are.

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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