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It’s menopause month at Healing Womanhood so now seems a great time to reflect on anger! It’s an emotion we’re often socialised out of as women, it can feel a bit scary and unfamiliar and it can come up for us in a huge way during menopause. If we’ve become very adept at hiding our anger throughout our lives, we might not even know we’ve been doing it so it can be really frightening if it pops back up when our hormones begin to shift. But menopause can be a time that forces us to drop the bullshit and find our way back to ourselves so what if, rather than being bad and destructive, something to be feared, our anger could be just another part that makes up the whole of us? A part that when loved and integrated can actually be really helpful? A bringer of positive change?
My own relationship with anger never turned to one of suppression, mainly because I never really had that capacity, I’m far more likely to be flooded by my emotions than cut off from them (this is to do with the way my own nervous system responds to trauma, perhaps you can relate or perhaps you developed different strategies). For me anger had always been connected with fear, when I was angry, my anger was masking a feeling of being threatened in some way. This anger could get me involved in protests and did have the capacity to create change but it wasn’t contained, it wasn’t integrated and I could easily feel overwhelmed by it.
My darling partner Jo had become incredibly adept at hiding her anger, even from herself. That is until menopause hit. Menopause often lights us on fire both physically and emotionally and for Jo, feeling that sudden anger where it didn’t exist before came as a shock. But what if there’s actually a purpose to it?
As menopausal women we’re often stereotyped, ridiculed, overlooked completely or expected to work as we did when we were 20, managing childcare, parent care, jobs and houses. In those circumstances being angry is an appropriate response. That’s an anger that can shift the culture of a workplace, if it’s integrated.
So how do we integrate our anger? How do we turn it from something that either overwhelms us or is suppressed into a part of us that can help us to feel whole and empowered? Well as with any other part of ourselves, we love it. We take time to go inwards, invite our anger forwards to tell its story, see if it brings along or is defending anyone else (like fear in my case) and we hold it. Letting it know that it’s seen and heard and letting it know how it can help us, what changes we are working to create and how it can bring its energy into those efforts. Although this sounds really simple, it involves undoing a lot of conditioning and going against the culture, it can be hard and we aren't looking for perfection. Integrating our parts is a practice, not a goal or destination to be achieved, as long as we can proceeed with the intention of kindness, we're doing ok.
Our tapping this week is a good one for connecting to those angry feelings that might be coming up and if you’re ready to really integrate that anger, bringing it on to your side, our Wholeness meditations on the patreon membership are a great place to go.
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