Raised evangelical Christian, feminist writer Lyz Lenz grew up believing her anger made her bad. In the fifth episode of Thread the Needle, find out what happens when Lyz starts listening to her feelings. Along the way, discover the dark underbelly of repressed rage.
Episode Guests:
Lyz Lenz, feminist writer and editor living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (Twitter: @lyzl)
Dr. Jeanette Raymond, licensed psychologist and anger management specialist
Relevant Links:
Belabored, by Lyz Lenz, August 2020
God Land, by Lyz Lenz, July 2019
“All the Angry Women,” an essay in Not That Bad, an anthology edited by Roxane Gay, May 2018
Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly
Good and Mad, Rebecca Traister
Thanks for listening to Thread the Needle, a monthly podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women’s lives. If you have a story you’d like to see featured in a future episode, please email podcast@theneedle.co.
Follow Thread the Needle on Instagram @theneedlepod.
Thanks to Molly Bloom of American Public Radio for mentoring this project!
Host and Executive Producer: Donna Cleveland
Theme song by: Meara Oberdieck
Original music by: Taylor Ross
Episode artwork by: Chosie Titus
Audio mastering by: Nicholas Naioti
Episode 5 transcript:
DONNA CLEVELAND (HOST): Feelings are for feeling. This might sound like something out of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood to you, but at age 25 this was the message Lyz Lenz had desperately needed to hear her whole life, but never had until now. Now, she sat in an old Victorian house in Iowa with a group of women in a Bible study class she'd joined on a whim. As instructed, Lyz held a baby doll that was supposed to represent her inner child. She recited affirmations and wrote letters to her younger self.
She would later write about this class and how the activities felt a little ridiculous to her at first, but how she felt something opening up inside, and so she kept going every Tuesday night. In that classroom, she was encouraged to let herself experience all of her emotions fully for the first time. Most importantly, she could finally admit how angry she was.
You're listening to Thread the Needle, a monthly podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women's lives. I'm Donna Cleveland, host and producer of Thread the Needle, and a woman with a lot of feelings.
Today we're going to explore an emotion that many people have trouble with. You can be happy and that attracts people to you. You can be sad and you'll get sympathy from people, but when you're angry, you tend to repel people. If you're a woman, especially, you might be told you're too sensitive, irrational, unhinged even. As a woman, anger often discredits you. But surely if we all experience anger, there's value in this emotion, right? History points to yes. In the feminist movement, anger has long been a motivating force, bringing women together to fight for a common cause, for women's suffrage to abortion rights to equal pay. In recent years, anger has come center stage again, thanks to the me too movement and the election of Donald Trump as president. Books like Good and Mad by journalist Rebecca Traister and Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly make strong cases for all the reasons women have to be angry and all the ways our culture tries to suppress that anger. Today we'll be exploring the inner workings of anger, the reasons we experience it, and the transformative role it can play in our lives. For better or for worse depending on how we express it.
This story begins back in Bible study class with Lyz Lenz. Lyz wrote about this formative experience in Not That Bad, an anthology edited by Roxane Gay. Today Lyz is a well-regarded author and editor living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And anger is a central theme in her writing. She has a book coming out in August called belabored, which is about reproductive justice and her writing has appeared in places like the Washington post, the Columbia journalism review, and the New York times. But before any of this, Lyz was a young girl coming of age in an evangelical Christian family in the nineties
LYZ LENZ: I was raised evangelical, and I mean evangelical with the capital E, conservative, in Texas. I have seven siblings, so I have four sisters and three brothers. So we were homeschooled. We wore the jumpers, for a little while, and the head coverings. So I grew up in a very, very religious, very kind of separatist life for a little while. It wasn't always like that, but the messaging was that if you were angry, you were bad. And there were the Bible verses that talk about like, you know, it's better to sleep on the roof than in the house with an angry woman.
CLEVELAND: Lyz said her mom recited this line to her and her siblings often.
LENZ: As a young girl, you know, if I threw a temper tantrum or got upset, the message was always, ‘You need to calm down and not be so emotional.’ You know? And I think that this is not just messaging that I heard in my little religious sphere either. It was reinforced in so many other ways. You know, people talk about like, ‘Oh girls are so emotional, they have all the emotions.’ And so there's like a lot of, and there still is a lot of negative talk about young women, girls, and even grown women and their emotions.
CLEVELAND: As a little girl. It didn't take long for Lyz to figure out that she was rewarded for being the good girl.
LENZ: I learned from an early age that if you wanted people to take you seriously, if you wanted people to listen to you, you're supposed to not have any emotions, right? You're supposed to be like, you can't cry, you can't get mad, you can't shout. If you're going to be a good girl, you can't feel almost. But I think for me, I just was like, I’'m such a people pleaser. I was like, ‘Whatever you want, I just want to be good.’ So I probably drank the Koolaid a little more deeply than any of my other siblings. But I think we all feel it. Whether you're rebelling against it or trying to shove yourself inside of that tight box.
CLEVELAND: Even though good girl conditioning deeply affected Lyz, she couldn't help but push against it. And when she did, she saw how differently she was treated than her brother.
LENZ: I have a brother who is 16 months younger than me. In many ways we were raised like twins. We look alike, we act alike, and he and I always talk about the different ways we were treated. He was allowed to be angry. I remember one time we were at church, we were always at church, and I must've been seven and he was six and this little boy came up and hit me on the back of the head with a wooden swing. And it was terrible. And this boy and I, he was the pastor’s son. He and I had tussled in the past, right. He and I did not get along, and we had fought and I would get in trouble for it, but when he hit me in the back of the head with that swing, my brother finally got involved and went and just like had this big fight with John John.
That was the kid's name. God bless you, John, John, wherever you are, I still hate you. These two six-year-old boys were just like going at it in the dust on this playground, at this Texas church. And I remember going up to the dads who were just standing there like, ‘Oh yeah, let them have it out,’ and thinking, and even at seven, holding the back of my head and crying and thinking, ‘Wow. So they get to fight. Like I can't push John John. I can't yell at John John. Oh, but my brother can?’ It's almost honored in boys, you know, we say, ‘Oh boys, they just punch each other and then their fight is over, you know? Whereas girls they just simmer and then take it out on each other in these passive aggressive ways.’ As if violence is something that we should be encouraging. But I remember really taking that to heart and thinking like, ‘Oh well it's better to be like a boy, but also I cannot be like a boy. Like there's limits.’
CLEVELAND: As this reality was settling in for Ly,z across the Atlantic ocean in Wales, a child psychologist was beginning to make her own connections about anger. Dr Jeannette Raymond saw kids and parents walk through her doors regularly and soon a picture began to form
Dr. JEANETTE RAYMOND: A lot of the issues that were coming up with parents angry with their kids because they didn't do their homework. They wouldn't go to school or they behave badly and caused them problems. And then the children's anger at not being able to express themselves or having to turn themselves into whatever their parents wanted. And my curiosity about it was, how do people show it and at whose expense is the anger shown or not shown.
CLEVELAND: Eventually Dr. Raymond moved to the US and began a private practice for adults. She became convinced that anger was playing a larger role in people's lives than many of us would like to believe.
RAYMOND: I noticed that a lot of people came to me with issues that were to do with stress or you know, something in their body or sleep problems. And it really turned out to be about the emotion of anger and all the stress that goes with trying to manage your anger. And if it's done in ways that are not healthy or that protect somebody else instead of you, then it can lead to all sorts of problems in the body and eating disorders and all sorts of other things. So anger and stress became areas of great interest to me in relationships and how it was managed in order to keep relationships going.
CLEVELAND: From the day we're born, Dr. Raymond said, anger is a part of our lives.
RAYMOND: We are born helpless and dependent. And that's what anger is about, it’s saying, ‘I need you to do something with me, and you're not doing it.’ When you're born and you're cold, or you’re hot, or you’re uncomfortable or you're hungry, or you're just not in a good position, the only way you have of showing your anger and your frustration is by crying. Anger is a ton of adrenaline that wants to make you be assertive ,take care of yourself, not allow yourself to be abused or used as a doormat or just give in and appease people. So that's what anger is, it’s a self survival tool.
CLEVELAND: Anger is so universal. She said that all mammals experience it.
RAYMOND: Anger is one of the primary emotions. All mammals have them, whether you're a monkey or a dolphin. Now, all the other things that we talk about are our feelings, but your feelings are different. So rejection, betrayal, guilt, those are all feelings of conscious awareness. They are not emotions. So anger is a primary emotion. We need it to express our needs. If we didn't have it, you would not survive because your mother, if she doesn't know you're angry when you're a baby and you're crying and you're angry and you're pushing her away because she's trying to give you something that doesn't match your need, it wouldn't survive.
CLEVELAND: This brings us to the next point. We all experience anger, including all mammals. It's an active emotion that encourages us to engage with the world and change our circumstances. But the way we express anger depends on what our parents modeled for us.
RAYMOND: If something is not tolerated, in other words, it's not tolerated that you speak up for yourself. If you're told to shut up, then you're not ever going to be comfortable expressing your anger that way. So if your dad says, ‘I don't want to hear you, I don’t want to hear your complaints.’ And if he talks like that to his wife, then the girls will learn that it's not OK for girls to speak their mind and to be a little bit angry to express the concerns about things not being an equal playing field or whatever. So it's really what's tolerated. If it's tolerated that people throw things around and hit things and mock people and be cruel and use that anger in a powerful way to make people feel small and insignificant, and if that's tolerated, then that's what goes on. Boys will do. If it's tolerated that you drink to manage your anger, then that's what a girl or boy will do.
CLEVELAND: Over the years, Dr. Raymond has found that there are three main ways patients express their anger, and some of the behaviors we use aren't immediately recognizable as anger.
RAYMOND: Well, you can either express it in a negative way and abuse people, you can turn it inwards and destroy yourself, or you can become passive aggressive and control things, but you do it at the expense of nurturing intimate connective relationships.
CLEVELAND: She said anger doesn't have to be destructive.
RAYMOND: Anger shown in an assertive, self-empowered, productive way is the healthy way, and everybody should be attempting to express anger in that way.
CLEVELAND: We'll take a closer look at the different ways we express anger later in the episode. Right now, we'll get back to Lyz's story right after a quick break. Thread the Needle will be back in a minute.
CLEVELAND: I like to stay up to date with the freshest voices in the feminist world and that's why I've been listening to the podcast Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller. Inflection point is a playbook for how we can all make big changes in the world with lessons from the world's most powerful women. Two of my latest favorite episodes featured interviews with Amber Tamblyn, the actor turned activist who just wrote Era of Ignition, which is an inspiring book about her involvement in the me too movement. I also loved Lauren's interview with Isha Clark. She's a high school student who helped organize the youth climate strike in San Francisco, which had a turn out of more than 30,000 students. Each show was so eloquent and passionate and even though it made me feel like I was a slacker in high school, I didn't mind because I loved her so much. Lauren Schiller does an amazing job of pulling out the best insights from her guests. I highly recommend you check out Inflection Point. You can listen on Apple podcasts or on the podcast app you're listening to right now and just make sure to subscribe and now back to Thread the Needle.
CLEVELAND: We've established that anger is a primary emotion that propels us to get our needs met and we learned that the way we express our anger depends on how we were raised. Dr. Raymond also made sure to let me know that moment to moment how a person expresses their anger can change. You can be passive aggressive one moment and you can turn around and yell. People are complicated, but we all have our tendencies. Lyz received the message loud and clear as a child that her anger was unacceptable. This made her feel shut down and pressured to be a people pleaser, but she was able to use her anger to pursue the life she wanted in her essay in the Roxane Gay anthology. Lyz wrote about how her parents didn't want her to go to college and refuse to emotionally or financially support her when she's decided to go. Anyway, she used her anger as motivation to apply for school, to find grants and scholarships to pay for it, to sew pajamas for herself, and to scrounge together belongings that she needed to live on her own, and finally to leave home. She knew her anger had helped her, but it came at a big cost—losing the approval of her family. Even once she was in college, the proverb from the Bible that her mom recited so often stuck with her.
LENZ: It's better to sleep on the roof than in the house with an angry woman.
CLEVELAND: She was still worried on some level that her anger made her a bad person.
LENZ: When I was a senior in college, I learned that one of my younger sisters had been abused for several years by someone who was a family member at the time. And so there was that. Then I got married and then two years after that, that same sister was in a very bad car accident and lived with me while she had to learn how to walk again. And then around that same time I had gone into therapy and was volunteering at this woman's shelter in town where I was working with a lot of women who were coming out of some really horrific, abusive backgrounds or still in them, not even coming out, but still in them and trying to deal with them and trying to cope. I remember there was a moment where I just kind of was like laying on the floor screaming and crying because it was just too much.
And I remember going into the woman who ran that woman's shelter at the time and saying to her, like, I see all of this around me. I see all the ways women are being treated poorly. I had another sister who was in a physically abusive relationship at the time too, and it was just, it was so much, and I remember telling her like, ‘I can't do this. I can't.’ I don't know if it was like existing as a woman. I just was like, ‘I can't be in this body anymore.’ And I remember her saying, ‘Well, you're mad, and it's OK to be mad.’ And because I was religious, more religious than I am now,, she had said, ‘Well, just look at the Bible. Look who is angry in the Bible and how were they talked about?’ And it was this kind of eye opening experience of going back to this religious text that had been formative to me as a child and seeing, ‘Oh yeah, there's a lot of people who are angry and they're OK. Oh, but they're men.’ But I think I interpreted that as well, then I can be OK.
CLEVELAND: As a regular churchgoer, Lyz tried for years to change her religion from the inside. Her religion still felt like a foundational part of who she was. She had married a Christian and they went to church together regularly. In 2019, Lyz published God Land. In her book, she shares the very personal journey of her relationship to faith and the end of her marriage and how deeply these two are intertwined. In much of God Land, you see Lyz repeatedly trying and failing to make the church into a place that welcomed the LGBTQ community and championed women's rights. She even started up a church with her husband and some friends, which she helped run even while working full time and having two kids at home. She discovered later that they didn't share her ideals and their differences led them to eventually shutter the church. After that, she found an inclusive Lutheran church with a female pastor. Her husband wouldn't join, saying he was morally opposed to attending a church that allowed gay people to have leadership positions. Soon, she also discovered her husband had voted for Donald Trump. Lyz and her husband had both begun to speak up about their beliefs, and their differences were becoming irreparable.
In her book, Lyz shares her moment of clarity when she knew she needed a divorce. She came home and found that her husband had taken down her Halloween decorations because he found them offensive. They were witches and a sign that read, ‘Drink up, witches.” A divide had been growing between them, she wrote, but in that moment, something broke.
LENZ: In the breaking apart of my relationship, I kind of rediscovered again that I am angry, but what is that telling me about the world around me and how can I use this to motivate me? I mean, I got a divorce because I was upset and angry with a relationship where I was being told to not have a career, to give up everything, and to make it work, and I don't think I would've been able to leave that had I not used my anger a little bit as a cocoon.
CLEVELAND: Finding herself in this situation was especially upsetting because as a girl she'd been clear on one thing.
LENZ: I didn't want to be like my mom. I didn't want a domestic life. I think my anger and dissatisfaction with the role that I had been handed from birth, which was to be a wife and a mother, led me to have a career. It's a different kind of career, but I don't think I would have had it if I didn't have that kind of drive that what I'd been given, what I'd been told to be, is not what I want, so I'm going to find something else.
CLEVELAND: For Lyz, anger has been a powerful motivating force.
LENZ: I looked through everything that I've written for the past 13 years, and it's always there at the nexus of faith, family, and feminism and pushing back at what I see we've been given as women and what I think we deserve to have. That's how anger has benefited me. It's also been a motivating force in my ability to fight for other people. Anger gave me the strength to stand up to family members and to say things that I would not have otherwise said or take stances that I would not have otherwise have taken, because I'm afraid and I'm a people pleaser and I just want us to all get along.
CLEVELAND: So far, we've seen the many ways anger helped Lyz to break through in her life. I asked her though, how'd she ever used her anger in ways she wasn't proud of.
LENZ: I remember having this conversation with my dad, and I love him, but he has not always been a positive force in my life. And he was saying some things that were very hurtful. And in 32 years, I never yelled at my dad, never, because I knew what my parents thought about anger and women. And so I'd always tried to be good. And I remember just unleashing on him. It was a verbal volley of insults and past hurts. And I had the presence of mind to say, I need to stop. And I walked away. But then I turned back around and came back for round two, and it was not, it was not great, but it was so many years of repressing. And that's when I think anger is destructive. Anger is not destructive when it's expressed in a healthy way or allowed to have space.
Anger is destructive when it's used as a weapon to hurt people. And I think we get to that by repressing it, right? By repressing it, and repressing it until we are at the point where we don't have anywhere else to put it, so it just explodes out of us. And I saw that happening, and it was one of those moments that was a real game changer for me, because I was like outside of myself a little bit watching myself just scream and be so angry in a way that I never had before and really haven't ever since that. I was just like, okay, this is not good. This is not who I want to be in the world and this is not how I want to act. I think of anger now as this kind of neutral force, just like you know, sadness or happiness. It’s not always bad. It's not always good. It's just about how you use it, and how you let it exist in the world.
CLEVELAND: Even in instances where Lyz felt good about the way she'd expressed her anger, that didn't mean it came without a cost. In Not That Bad. Lyz writes about how difficult it was for her to speak up when her sister's sexual abuser showed up at the hospital after she got in that horrible car accident. Her other sister who was also in the car crash had screamed at her and told her, ‘You never know when to shut up.’
LENZ: When it's other women outside of you, OK, sure. Maybe you're not on board, but these other people are and you know, when you're ready, I'll be here. But seeing my sister be so angry at me, and she was also in a hospital bed in a back brace yelling at me, and I, that was so hard for me to see that she was in pain and that I had caused her more pain. I didn't regret it, but it was really, it was really, really hard. And it's still something that sits with me. Um, I will say that one thing I have learned is that life is long and it's full of grace. And, um, that sister recently sent me a beautiful letter that talked about, you know, that experience and I don't want to violate her privacy, but her, her letter was, was full of understanding and compassion.
And she said that me doing the things that I believed I needed to do, even when she disagreed with them, has given her the ability to do those things too. So that was, that was really wonderful to hear. And that is almost 11 years after the fact. So I will say that there is a lot of momentary braking when you stand up for yourself and you do what's right, but I deeply believe that life is full of grace and that if you're doing the right thing, it won't always be so hard and painful.
CLEVELAND: Lyz admits that she's used anger in destructive ways at times. Overall, her life is a shining example of how women can use anger as a tool for self-empowerment, from creating the career she wanted, to fighting against sexist and homophobic behavior from her religion, to leaving a marriage where the divide had grown too vast.
On the flip side of the positive transformations that came out of Lyz's anger, I wanted to understand better what happens when we can't express our anger constructively. Dr. Raymond said she didn't see a gender difference in people expressing anger outwardly and turning it inward. She did say, however, that she saw more women acting in passive aggressive ways. I had her walk me through how these different expressions play out.
RAYMOND: One way is to turn the anger outward to whatever it is you're angry about and you try and rail at it, try and change it in some way, shape it to your needs, and that could be destructive if you're in a job where you can't do that. So that's one way and that that applies to both genders.
CLEVELAND: Next, she explained what it looks like to turn anger inward.
RAYMOND: Freud said that depression is anger turned inward. So it's another way of showing anger. But by taking the fangs out of it, by taking the power out of it so that it becomes not destructive to the outside world because you need them. You need your friends, your family, your parents, whoever. But if you take it out on yourself, it's OK to destroy yourself because then they might come rescue you. Most people who are depressed are furious and enraged. Underneath all the mood disorders is rage. So it's not that we're not expressing it, it's the manner of expression that society may dictate is okay or not okay in different situations and in different generations and peer groups.
CLEVELAND: Dr. Raymond says she's seen a lot of evidence from working with patients and from researching on how turning anger inward can result in health problems. She's a big believer in the connection between anger and a host of different disorders.
RAYMOND: There's a ton, a ton of evidence to show that irritable bowel syndrome, IBD, gastric ulcers, indigestion or gastric issues are because of rage. Eating disorders are based on rage. Obsessive compulsive disorders are based on rage. I've written articles about this because it's camouflaged because it's not safe. It's not about society saying yes or no. If it's not safe in your family to show that you're angry because your dad might clip you around the ear or throw you out of the house, then you're not going to show it outwardly. You will do it by being sick because dad's okay with you being sick.
CLEVELAND: Dr. Raymond sees this suppression of anger play out in all different kinds of ways in her practice.
RAYMOND: I’ll just give you another example of a current female patient who is an only child who grew up, uh, with her parents in constant discord, fighting, yelling, saying horrible things about each other, and she had to protect her mother from her father when he got angry and her mother would never show her anger because she didn't want to make her dad even worse. Her husband, even worse, she didn't want to provoke him. So the message she gave her daughter was, when your dad comes home from work, we have to be quiet. We just go and play, don't show it. And so she, over time developed panic attacks because she was getting angry. She felt threatened that if she wasn't quiet as a mouse and being a good girl and just doing whatever daddy says and pleasing dad, that he would leave mom. So then it would be her fault and she wouldn't have a daddy though and then she had to do everything. Dad said chose not to make him angry where she grew up a very, very angry, angry, furious person.
CLEVELAND: Lastly, Dr. Raymond explained a more covert way to express anger by being passive aggressive.
RAYMOND: If one partner is very openly, outwardly speaking about their anger, their frustration, their dissatisfaction, then the other partner doesn't feel safe to do the same thing because then all they end up doing is trying to stuff their anger in each other and it doesn't work. So what the other partner does is become the quiet one. They express their anger by scaring the other partner by saying, okay, ‘You can yell and scream at me, you can make me feel bad. You can tell me I'm the worst thing you've ever met, but I'm not going to be there for you. I'm going to withdraw. I'm not going to answer your question. I'm not going to have a conversation with you. I'm not going to enjoy watching a movie with you and join in and laugh and joke. I'm not going to be part of a question about our grocery shopping or our weekend activities or whatever.
I'll just say ‘yes’ to everything or ‘no’ to everything and be quiet. Now, that is a much, much more powerful way of expressing anger because it gives you power, because then the other person feels so anxious and panicked that they have lost you, that they come and beg your forgiveness. They confess their sins, they prostrate themselves in front of you and say, what can I do to make up? And oh boy, that victory’s good. That's what a lot of women do because they're afraid of being assertive. They're afraid of challenging the men and women in their lives, whether it’s authority figures or parental figures or friends that they don't want to lose. The bottom line is they don't want to damage and lose relationships. So any expression of outward anger that threatens the relationship is what stops them from showing it. And what I encourage my female and male patients to do is to give it a try. So instead of acting out by saying, ‘Why can't you,’ say, ‘Hey, I'm angry about this,’ and then explain the anger.
CLEVELAND: Lyz has also noticed women resort to passive aggression, but she reminds us to look at why women make that
LENZ: There is a lot of research about how women, because other avenues of self-expression aren't deemed socially acceptable that women have reached out to other avenues. I wouldn't ever say it is inherently a woman trait to be passive aggressive. I think it's a facet of culture. It's a facet of misogyny. It's a facet of, you know, the sexist way we structure our society, but sure does it happen? Absolutely.
CLEVELAND: Taken as a whole, I was beginning to see a disturbing picture of the consequences that mismanaged anger has to our physical and mental wellbeing. And because we have powerful cultural messaging directed at women to be agreeable, that puts us at greater risk of the negative effects of repressed anger. Lyz has come a long way from being a people pleaser who felt ashamed of her anger. Now in her writing career, she seeks out stories that make her angry.
LENZ: Those are the stories I love to tell, the stories about things that make me angry or the stories about situations that upset me. I get to have those moments where I say, ‘OK, what is wrong here? What's at the core of my response?’ And then use that passion as motivation to fix it.
CLEVELAND: Lyz not only writes about anger, but also uses it out in the field as a journalist, she interviewed Neo Nazi, Richard Spencer. He's the guy who organized the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 where an activist was hit by a car and killed.
LENZ: I went to Montana to talk to his soon-to-be ex-wife about the abuse she's experienced at his hands. And then I got to go interview him. And I would say if I hadn't kept that anger wrapped around me like a little shield while I interviewed him, I wouldn't have been able to get through it because, one, it was really scary and terrifying. Some of the things that she had shown me were just deeply, deeply troubling. She had all these audio recordings of the abuse, and it was so upsetting. And then to go from that and immediately walk into a room with him, all alone was . . I don't think I could have gotten through it without that kind of like cocoon of frustration and anger.
CLEVELAND: In her personal life. Lyz has learned to slow down when she's feeling angry and to try to learn from the feelings that arise.
LENZ: In our society, we prioritize intellect over emotion. But the two work together, and you can't separate out your body. Your body is your body. Your mind is your mind, and it's connected to your emotions and your feelings. These all have to work together. The best thing is to be a whole person and to stop warring with yourself. Stop trying to feel things that you are clearly feeling and to just sit with those feelings and to say, OK, what is this teaching me? Or what is this telling me about myself?
CLEVELAND: Anger is often an uncomfortable emotion to feel, but Dr. Raymond says it's an opportunity for self inquiry
RAYMOND: When our hot buttons are being pushed. If we drill down: What's the hot button? What's missing? What are you longing for that isn't coming? Whether it's someone smiling at you or recognizing you did something well, it could be the tiniest of things, but there could be a deep, deep, deep longing. Once you know what it is, you can figure out a way of addressing it, but if you don't know what it is, then you remain constantly helpless and dependent on someone else and then when they don't do it or they push one of your buttons, you know you're off.
CLEVELAND: Dr. Raymond has watched anger management therapy transform the patients who are able to learn to talk about their anger in healthy ways.
RAYMOND: That heavy weight of the anger inside them is gone. There's a release of tension. They cannot, they have room inside them to think about other things and feel other things. So it kind of opens them up and they feel good about themselves. They get some energy. So when they get a response from whoever it is they're expressing themselves to, even if it's silence, there's a tremendous sense of, ‘Wow, I actually matter. I got heard.’ And I talk to my patients about, yes, because your message was powerful. It was about you expressing yourself, your place of hurt and pain, and the reason you got heard is because you weren't accusing the other person of being bad. If you start expressing your anger by saying ‘You, you, you, you, you,’ what's the other person going to do? They're going to put their guard up and tune you out. But when I help the patient to say, ‘I felt really bad,’ the other person's hearing their pain and hearing their anger because they're not being accused.
CLEVELAND: Talking to Dr. Raymond and Lyz Lenz, the thing that I was struck by is the bravery it requires to express anger in a direct way, especially if you're a woman because women are taught that voicing their anger makes them look crazy and undermines where they get their value as being pleasant and sweet.
RAYMOND: If it's not safe because you feel like you're threatened that the man can just walk away. If you show your anger or if you try to be equal or if you try to be just regularly assertive if they're going to take everything away from you, that means you are dependent. Dependency is the one thing that stops you from showing your anger. So the more women can feel less dependent, and I don't just mean financially, I mean emotionally, that you don't need this guy to make you feel 10 feet tall, that you have other ways of feeling validated, and good at your job, and a decent human being, and a positive influence with your kids, and so on and so forth. If everything relies on one person, then you will never show your anger other than by turning it inward and making yourself sick.
CLEVELAND: Dr. Raymond had brought us full circle. It was like that proverb Lyz's mom drilled into her as a child: anger will make a woman alone. Lyz has been able to fight through that fear in her life and she's better for it.
LENZ: I definitely think that the lesson is about listening to yourself and trusting yourself, and I don't think we tell women that enough, that their emotions are not a problem, that their emotions are good, that feelings are for feeling, and that as long as you're not using them to wound other people, they're just as an important part of you as anything else.
CLEVELAND: Thank you for listening to Thread the Needle, a monthly podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women's lives. I'm Donna Cleveland, the host and producer of this show. The theme song is by Meara Oberdieck. Original music is by Taylor Ross, and episode artwork is by Chosie Titus. Thank you to Molly Bloom of American Public Media for being my mentor. If you have feedback or a story you'd like to see featured in a future episode, please email mepodcast@theneedle.co and lastly, please leave a review of thread the needle on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends. This is an independent podcast and a passion project, so I'm relying primarily on word of mouth to spread the word, so any help makes a huge difference. Thank you. And I'll be back next month with another episode.