Ep. #10: Mean Girls, Different Kinds of Anger, and Neural Pathways

In this episode, I talk about the different kinds of anger and when it's productive and when it holds us back.

This episode covers the following:
1) Unproductive  anger - what that looks like.
2) What productive anger looks like and how anger in general affects the nervous system
3) What questions to ask when we are angry and how to process it
4) What the thoughts around anger do to our neural pathways in our brain
5) How to mindful with intention and without judgment

Transcript

Welcome to Unleash your Inner Power with Dr. Janny Chang, the podcast that helps women from all walks of life through throughtwork, research and storytelling to help rewire your brain and kick ass in your personal and professional life. Hello, lovelies. Hello dear friends, I am so glad to be back, I have been preoccupied with some things at my, my full time job. 

So this has been on the back burner, but I've been writing and thinking about things and doing some reading. And I've been wanting to actually record the podcast and finally got this chance. I'm just super happy to be here. And so grateful for anyone that's tuning in. And as always, please reach out to me, I would love to hear from you. Even if it's, you know, just giving me feedback or suggesting a topic for the next podcast. I'd love to hear from you. jannychang1@gmail.com. Also, please follow me on Facebook and Instagram. I'm Dr. Janny. Coach on Instagram. And on Facebook, you can find Dr. Janny Chang, my Facebook page. 

So I've missed you all. I am just so glad to be here. I have been thinking about this topic. For weeks, I've been wanting to talk about anger, anger, and when it can be productive, and when it can hold you back. So I think for many women, we've been socialized not to express anger. And this creates some patterns of behavior that may hold us back. I was rewatching some scenes of Mean Girls, and some movie that was written by Tina Fey. Based on the 2002 book by Rosalind Wiseman titled Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping our daughters survive cliques, gossip, boyfriends, and the new realities of girl world. 

Wiseman said, anger is an emotion that tells us something is wrong. That's a good thing when we know how to process it effectively. And then communicated appropriately. Paying attention to the feeling when we habit and asking ourselves a few simple but powerful questions is essential to our well being. Whether we're the ones getting quiet, or the ones being mean. So much of the destructive behaviors and Mean Girls, belittling others being passive aggressive, talking behind people's backs, trying to control other people's behaviors. These are byproducts of not being able to express one's anger directly. 

Men or women, or folks in the non binary world. As humans, we, I believe I've not been taught how to process anger or other types of what we consider to be negative emotions. That's why I think people talk about the fear of anger or rage just consuming them. Whereas we don't really talk about that kind of, you know, fear of consuming being consumed by a certain emotion. When it comes to delight or joy. We don't seem to be concerned about being consumed. When it comes to these particular emotions, for instance, now in young in therapy, the concept that we all have shadow or dark sides in which certain thoughts and feelings go to hide in the unconscious, because we don't think they go with our image of ourselves. that captures it so well. 

When you suppress your anger and you don't accept your shadow self that contains rage and other emotions, that suppression can actually manifest itself in other ways. I know for some people, it's it comes out as depression. For others, it's actually even more anger. And even the littlest things right, this is what happens when we suppress anger, and we don't accept the part of who we are. Now, it's so key to be tuned into our bodies, my friends, because some emotions don't show up as anger right away. I've noticed that for myself, it's these little annoyances that show up in my mind and body that I ignore over time, which then accumulate and then become anger.

Let me give you an example of a client I had. She was non confrontational at work, but she simply didn't like some of the things that her boss was doing. Rather than address them directly with her boss. She kept all of this to herself until fester, and she blew up at her boss one day, thus seeking my help as a coach. Now how did it start? Well, it started off for her as subtle thoughts and feelings like she did that again. Write that thought and then feeling mildly peeved. Now her boss did meet with her and asked her many times if things were going okay, she shrugged it off, didn't want to talk about it over and over again. 

And instead, she complained about it to her co workers and to everyone else who was actually not in a position to change the situation. Right, those people don't really have power, or the ability to change a situation for her. Now, this kind of cumulated anger can arise from what's perceived to be a boundary violation. I'll talk about this later on in the podcast. In this case, it would have been really productive, to address the issue with her boss during a meeting, establish a boundary and then move on with it, right. So that's so important to note, my lovelies, because I want to talk a little bit about what anger looks like and how it can be productive in cases of boundary violations. 

Now with the case with my client, you know, it was more about allowing anger to fester, and it's starting off with being annoyed, and then letting it fester over time, right? When she could have just addressed it talked about it, established a boundary and then moved on. And that's actually what mature anger or productive anger can look like. Now, let's talk a little bit about anger. When it comes to boundary violations. It's actually productive in many cases, right? Like, say mama bear is looking out for her cubs a predators nearby. This activates her sympathetic response. And she activates her fierce anger. This is in response to perceived danger and to what's factual in the situation right for her. 

That's it, something is threatening her cubs. And so this anger propels a mama bear to act and protect her cubs. And the stress cycle is completed, the anger dissipates, that's productive. That's also what I consider healthy. Now some of us have generational trauma that we've inherited. And we may be part of a collective where this anger is justified due to a history of boundary violation, such as exploitation and abuse and genocide. And it is so important to feel a knowledge that anger is there, not only for ourselves, those of us who are part of this collective or part of generational trauma, but also for others to recognize and to validate that, right that that anger is there. And that it's because of this history.

Let me explain a bit right. I call this anger on behalf of others. And it can be a beautiful thing to be honored. Okay, it shows that you recognize yourself as part of a group, a collective, that you're not an island unto yourself. It shows that you care about others and you empathize with others. When you're angry, that your people or others have been exploited or mistreated, or have experienced boundary violations. You are standing, you're essentially standing for what's right. And you're in integrity, with your values. Now, you can sit with this anger, and let it fuel you to create change. And this is where I would ask these questions is this anger serving me right now? Is this anger helping me create the kind of community I want to see where people are loved and valued as human beings? Is anger helping me to get closer to the kind of person I aspire to be? That could include leaders, activists, people within my community, within my family, that I deeply respect who are out there creating change. 

For me, I always look to Grace Lee Boggs, who was an Asian American activist who fought for change at the very grassroots level with her African American husband, James Boggs in Detroit. And she just has so much wisdom about how activism has changed over the years. You know, for her. She she talked about how protests don't work as well anymore, because the nation state is not as strong due to globalization. So we have to look for different ways to find solutions to problems within our communities. And for Boggs, anger, she said may fuel small rebellions. But that's just short term thinking. And it doesn't solve problems in the long run. For her long lasting change, is founded on love. She wrote in her book on sustainable activism. Love isn't about what we did yesterday. It's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after, notice how that love translates to action to create change in this world. So while anger will help fuel you, true lasting change that we want from society and from within ourselves can only come from love. 

And just to bring in some science, my loves being more mindful and letting that anger pass through us. Whether it's an intimate, immature and unproductive anger, or anger that's based on caring about others. Just remember that the more we focus on thoughts that lead to anger, it's literally carving out and strengthening this neural pathway in our brain. So we want to ask ourselves, you know, let's go ahead and do a thought download or reflect or ask ourselves these questions. Is this how we want our brain to be structured towards anger? Is this how I want to show up in my life, on a daily basis, because that neural pathway towards anger means it'll become easier and easier over time for me to get angry, because that neural pathway just gets stronger. 

And so I'd want to ask myself, whether whatever source, that anger comes from whether like I talked about an immature kind of anger, right, we talked about, you know, one of the clients I had, who, you know, didn't agree with a lot of things and didn't communicate this to her boss, right? That could be considered a kind of immature anger and unproductive or an anger that is productive, you know, based on protecting other people or based on boundary violations on behalf of a collective. Right. So whatever type of anger that this is coming from, we have to ask ourselves, is this what we want, knowing that this kind of thoughts and feelings towards anger does create and strengthen neural pathways in our brain that makes anger even more accessible over time, okay. 

Now, if this is not what we want, then I would suggest to practice mindfulness with intention and purpose, because that will help so much my loves Daniel Siegel, who's an MD, who's in a lot of research on this, and I believe he is the director of the mindful awareness Research Center at UCLA says that the mind uses the brain to create itself, and the mind and the brain reinforce each other.

Research on the brain shows that programming starts really early in life. It also shows how mindful awareness is effective, and remodelling your brain, and achieving the kind of structural changes that are necessary for change. This is from the book you mind, your mind is what your brain does for living. So what I'm trying to say is paying attention, being mindful, being aware actually changes your brain's physiology by the kind of energy and information along new neural pathways. So that you can actually change what you know you've experienced in the past, either as a child, or anything in the past in which you have been, perhaps strongly geared towards anger. It's paying attention to the present moment. 

So being mindful means paying attention, in the present moment without judgment, and with intention and purpose. And it's not simply just being just ordinarily aware, when we're ordinarily aware, we might have, you know, negative beliefs. And I think it comes down in the same book, your mind is what your brain does for a living, they talked about four negative beliefs that tend to circulate in our mind, you know, and they or something is wrong. I am not good enough. I don't belong here. And I'm always going to be on my own. Right? Well, being mindful, can actually combat that, right being mindfully aware, is to say is to be aware and sit still without judgment, being aware of what is accepting it as just what it is, as opposed to resisting it when you resist it, you, you know, ruminate and complain about how things should be different and people should act differently or, you know, you complain about it to your to your friends, you know, and it doesn't really, actually get you anywhere, right? 

And it ends up being that it just escalates your anger even more, right? So when you're being mindful and you sit still without judgment, you don't judge you or interpret. Right? You just sit with it. And you watch those thoughts in your brain. But of course, old thoughts or thoughts, like the negative ones, I told you the four ones that tend to predominate. They will pop in your head But the difference is that you let them pass through and you don't let them linger. And you just let the anger sit there, and you feel it in your body, and you breathe into it. And there's actually a way when you hire a coach, which was so, so useful when you have a coach, because coaches can help you see blind spots in your thoughts that might be leading towards anger, to kind of unproductive anger, or, or a coach like myself can also help you process that anger. 

So it's so important to process that, okay. But you can also, as you're letting the anger sit there, you can associate the anger in your mind with something in nature, that shows volatility, and rage like lightning or fire, you can visualize it, because that's one way to kind of process is to allow yourself to connect images. With that feeling, you make images of it, and if you're an artist, create art from it, if you dance, let yourself move with anger, it can be a powerful energy that you can express. Okay, so one of the ways to express that and to also process it because actually creating art forms can help you process that anger is you know, to dance and to create art or to write I love to write, or to journal, or I know that now even there are some rooms that you can rent out to break things, you know, just for that sole purpose. Alright, you can meditate, you can listen to music, whatever helps you process, feel, and then eventually release that emotion. 

And this is what can be a very cleansing process. It's very cathartic, I find for myself also crying, crying and connecting to my spiritual center. That always brings me back to myself. And it helps me process that helps me just feel it, feel it and feel the heat within my body, and then actually process it, and connect me back to my center self where I'm able to actually breathe through it and release it.

Okay, so this is that cleansing, cathartic process. And I highly, highly recommend, of course, you know, hiring a coach, because like I said, you know, if you have this history, whether it's history of generational trauma, or the history also have a certain thoughts and feelings that you find to be affecting your current way of life. Okay, it's inhibiting you from moving forward, or being or you're feeling stuck in certain thoughts and feelings. A coach can really help you, okay, like coach like myself can help you see your blind spots, okay, and analyze what's going on in your mind currently, and also help you process, identify and process those emotions, and not even necessarily to release it right away, we can just sit with that discomfort together. So helpful. 

All right, my friends, this is it for this week, the podcast on anger and the different kinds of angers and how anger can actually be productive and cleansing. but to also be mindful that, you know, as I alluded to, in this podcast is that over time, you know, even when anger is productive, that the longer we allow it to fester in our bodies, the candy, stabilize our nervous systems, it can also create these neural pathways and strengthen them, that makes it easier for us to be angry. So we really have to ask is this what we want in life always comes down to what will serve us, and not only what will serve us now? But what will serve us in the future? what's going to help our future selves? When we envision who we want to be in the future? And what kind of life we want? Where does this fit in? That's what I always go back and ask myself. All right, my love's so good to be back. I will see you next time. I really hope to hear from you. Please do email me and contact me or DM me. I'd love to hear about your stories and your feedback. Anything you want me to talk about for future episodes. All right. Take care.