Scream It To Heal It!!!
“Anger is actually trying to tell us something. Anger is confessing that it’s not the main event. There’s tension arising from my unwillingness to be with this deep sense of being hurt… And never in my life had I ever been told and ever been supported in touching deeply into this woundedness. I call it heartbrokenness. To sink beneath the anger or to move through the anger for what it was: an indicator that my heart was broken.”
–Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger
My expression of anger is in its toddler stage. I know this because I am a constant witness to the temper tantrums of a 3.5-year-old, and when I say “I feel you” to validate his emotions, what I really mean is “I want to be you.” I want to throw things against the wall, I want to hit and bite and scream “you’re stupid!” when I’m mad. But I don’t because, just like I tell Luca, it’s not okay.
So what is okay? Drawn to learn from my own intuition on what feels good and sounds right, I’ve taken workshops, listened to podcasts, and read a thousand instagram self-help slides with scripts on how to calm myself while I validate my child’s feelings and give him tools to express them in less harmful ways – to himself, to others, to stuff. I even took a meditation class. None of it sticks.
It wasn’t until I could no longer control my own rage in the midst of another week of Luca’s school being closed – the tip of the iceberg, truly – that I figured out why: I can’t teach what I don’t practice, my child’s the world’s most sensitive bullshit detector, and he currently learns best from mimicking behavior.
So here’s what happened a couple weeks ago to wake me up to the truth. One layer of it, anyway…
In the midst of emotional turmoil unrelated to Luca’s behavior, along with 6 months of relative sobriety (a social drink here and there), I became more sensitive than usual, and thus, more easily triggered into big feelings. It had been power struggle after power struggle for days because I could not tap into my creativity and patience. I finally snapped. First, when he refused to get in the bath after a particularly messy poop. I angrily grabbed him and forced him in as he cried and screamed “that’s not okay!” And then again, when he threw a cup full of orange juice at my head while I was driving. I stopped the car and turned around to scream “don’t you ever do that again!” while he cried, begging for me to hold him. Believe it or not, I had never screamed at my kid before that moment. I felt… shame. Which made me even more angry. I had crossed boundaries I’d set for myself, and I was afraid that I’d broken something that couldn’t be repaired – even though my kid knew what was “not okay” exactly because I was practiced in apologizing and repairing in other moments, and because I’ve affirmed that his body belongs to him and there’s a difference between care and control.
I was struggling to forgive myself because I hadn’t felt anger like this for a long time – I hadn’t allowed myself to – and it felt scary. After some reflection, I set the boundary again, burning it into my conscience: I will not touch my child when I feel angry; I will not scream at my child. Of course, I was immediately tested. We got home to an empty house, my partner still at work, and entered yet another power struggle as I sat at the dinner table begging him to sit down and eat with me to no avail. I wanted to throw my plate across the room at him. Instead, I stood up, walked to my bedroom, shut the door, and screamed as loud as I could into my mattress over and over again. Once I felt the anger drain, I walked back to the dinner table and started eating alone. Luca watched me for a moment, walked into my bedroom, closed the door, screamed into the mattress, then walked back into the dining room and sat down at the table with me to eat his dinner without saying a word.
I’ve spent a lifetime being told my “genio” (rage or temper in Spanish) was something to suppress. It’s been my journey as a community cultural organizer and a parent the past 3 years through a pandemic, economic, and climate crisis, experiencing what I now realize has been bone-deep depression, that’s turned me inward and compelled me to be in relationship with my anger and the wounds its drawing my attention to. I’m really grateful that despite my isolationist tendencies when I’m in the depths of despair, I’ve reached out for help in my own way, by creating a community of people around me who are down to feel our feelings together, and support each other on our healing journeys because we see it as the pathway to liberation for us and our communities.
That’s where the courage stemmed to create this event for myself, and invite others into it.
And the idea itself came from this group of moms, and my friend Cesia Dominguez, who has shared so much of their own journey with me in getting into right relationship with their rage, and how to do it in a way that also creates a pathway to healing for others. An event they organized with a screaming workshop to “channel rage against whiteness” was part of inspiring this one.
Here’s the meditation, which I remixed from a meditation on grief in the CHANI app, and a conversation between bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh on “Building a Community of Love.” It also contains some vocal exercises provided by the radically talented Kat Kellermeyer through my friend Hillary McDaniel, who helped hold me accountable to myself and others after I said I was going to do this and started losing momentum, and who also showed up with logistical support.
And here’s the playlist I made that we danced to – I tested it out by jumping on the bed with a pretend microphone, works great.