Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we're changing the dialogue around divorce so that no woman ever stays in her marriage out of fear. Get ready to dispel myths, learn life-changing tools, and build a solid foundation in yourself from which to make your decision. And now your host, me, Britta Joe. Welcome, welcome, y'all. So today, if you are listening, you might be listening through my podcast or you might be listening through Quinn's. But regardless, as you are quickly realizing, we are doing another combo episode today. I love these. I love these.
SPEAKER_00I know. I know. I was just about to say, like, I just fucking love that I have, you know, this amazing bestie in you, Quinn.
SPEAKER_01Quinn is always during the week the week. She's like, I've got this idea. What about this episode? Or what about this episode? And usually I'm like, I am going, as Quinn knows, the last two and a half months, I am like doing a lot of deep, crazy work at the moment. And so I'm like, I am like overwhelmed and losing my shit. Um so to have a bestie who's like, well, what about this topic? And I could just be like, yeah, actually, I really have been thinking about this. Let's do it. So we're getting to sit down today and dive into something that I know both of us are very, I would say pretty passionate about this topic. Yes. Um and I think we've the beautiful thing, just to bro, I just do want to kind of give you guys a little bit of context, that we have had quite a few run throughs on this episode. We did a a whole like hour-long outline brainstorming, and then we recorded an entire episode yesterday that unfortunately with some technical difficulties did not get uploaded. And so it's but it's beautiful because it's allowed all this like percolating and um I guess like seasoning to kind of set in on it. So I'm really excited to get to do it again with you and see what new magic arises on this kind of third and hopefully final go-around.
SPEAKER_00Who knows?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, hopefully this one sticks.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So why don't you introduce what we're gonna be discussing, Quinn?
SPEAKER_04We are going to be talking about anger, and this can look like rage, it can look like annoyance, it can be that whole range of emotions when we talk about being angry. And Britta, I want to ask you about how you see anger presenting in women who are trying to decide whether to stay or go in their marriages.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so um, I would say anger is probably one of the most repressed emotions that I see my clients experiencing when we first start working together. We're usually more comfortable with confusion or um distress or feeling trapped. But acknowledging anger tends to be a little bit of uh an intense experience. So I actually had, and it's intense, but it's also super vital. And I see it come up in almost every client that I work with. At some point, there is a reckoning that arises. Um, and for one of my clients, this happened a couple weeks ago, where um, you know, we've worked together for probably three to five sessions. And her normal approach to life is a very glass half full. Everything's gonna be great. I've got, you know, um, I'm gonna take care of everybody, I'm the people pleaser. I'm, you know, if things are tough, I'm just gonna take it up a notch and I'm just gonna go harder. Really indomitable spirit. So when we met for our session, she showed up and was like, this week has been brutal. I have just had so much anger just flooding through me. Yeah. And and it was obvious that there was a lot of like distress and fear for her, that this emotion was coming up, and she didn't really, um, as we'll talk about later, have a framework for how she could be herself and feel this much like hatred and rage. Um, which, of course, me as a coach, having seen this repeatedly over and over, it didn't catch me off guard at all because I knew in the previous sessions we'd been working on, she had been unearthing and really facing severe trauma from both her childhood and events in her marriage that to cope with, she had, you know, hidden away basically from her conscious brain. And then us working together gave her the safe space to bring it to the surface and really look it in the eye. And when you do that, a natural response, when you start to fully realize what has happened to you, what you've been through, is to rage, to feel incredibly um angry. At some point, right? It it hits and it's well documented, um, especially in the CPTSD book, that angering is a an important part of that. What I noticed was she made it mean there's something wrong with me, and I'm always gonna feel this way, and I'm starting like it felt like I'm out of control now.
SPEAKER_04Or perhaps, oh, if I'm this angry and feel this much rage at this partner, I obviously should get divorced. But is that always the case?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I it's not always the case. I think that's the important thing, and we'll talk about this later in the episode. This idea that it's just it's just a feeling that's alerting you to something. And we don't know yet what it is. And sometimes that anger, um, I've had clients, so in this case, definitely her anger does stem from actual experiences of trauma with her husband. I've had clients though, where their rage, once we've kind of dived into it, is coming more, you know, it can be very complex, right? Coming maybe more from childhood feelings of not being able to express what they want, not knowing what they want, never expressing that in their marriage, hoping their husband will intuit it. Once we allow the rage, they start speaking up more, actually advocating and saying what they want. And in the client I'm thinking of, her husband was like, Oh, I just didn't know. Yeah, I'm here for this. That doesn't happen often. I don't want all of you to think like, oh, well, that's like the normal, that's a pretty, I would say that's one of the smaller percentages of what my clients experience. Um, but in that instance, that was the case. And it was through allowing her rage, like acknowledging it, being with it, acknowledging that, like, yeah, I get to feel this way. And then not necessarily raging at him, but using that rage to get her to say the things she wanted to say to advocate for herself that the changes in their marriage were started. So, um, with this client, the client I mentioned at the very beginning, it was a combination of both having rage about past trauma, having rage about current trauma. And I think the main thing to realize with women considering divorce is it can feel very scary to admit how angry you are.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. For me, with my clients who are already divorced, I see rage intermittently. I mean, there are some women who are still in this burning of being very angry about how their divorce happened or how the marriage ended. But for a lot of the women that I work with, it is more intermittent. And it's not, I think it just shows up a little bit differently when it's post-divorce because you're able to not just unpack the marriage, you're kind of taking stock of your whole life. And so it's maybe it's anger that is at your family of origin or society, patriarchy. Sometimes it just kind of generalizes. But I think that some women will get divorced, being very angry in their marriage and get divorced and think the marriage was causing me to be angry, and then they come into post-divorce life and the anger is still there. It is still here. Yes, which tells us it's here for us. This is not anger is not the enemy. Anger is just part of human expression. But Britta, I think both of us have been afraid of our own anger, and we see this fear in women who feel angry in their journeys in life. Why do you think women are so afraid of anger, expressing anger, feeling anger, being angry or being labeled as angry? What do you think it is?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we I mean, at least in you know, US culture and in a patriarchal US culture, it is there is no real framework in a positive way for women having anger. You often get labeled as bitchy. It it just and I I grew up in experiencing a lot of my mom being angry, and so just feeling the fear around anger. There was a lot of fear for me as a child of what was going to happen, and then also um really never having space to feel my own anger. That was never okay.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So it truly is a relationship, uh, sorry, a feeling that I don't really have a clear relationship with of like, what is it? What is it here to tell me? What do I do with it when I'm feeling it? And we also have the cultural idea that like the good girl, right, is always polite and kind and she's never raging. Yes, she lowers her, you know, she's calm and collected. And I think that, you know, this ties in deeply with like the ethos of being that the mother, right? For those of us that have children wanting to be able to be calm-headed and cool and collected in this warm bastion rather than um hot-tempered, you know, losing my shit, screaming at everybody. So and the other really tough thing, too, is you know, when you when for me, my mother was the one that was always angry. I think in a lot of our clients, if you look back at your parents, typically one of them was the one who got, you know, especially if you come from like codependent narcissistic relationship dynamics, one of them got to be the angry one, and the other got to be the one always caretaking those emotions. Um if the parent that was always angry was someone you kind of felt afraid of and that you needed to caretake, you're probably not gonna know what relationship you should have with that emotion because it's so tangled in your identity of that caretaker as well.
SPEAKER_04Yes.
SPEAKER_01What about with you?
SPEAKER_04Well, I second the idea that our culture so many negative um connotations with a woman who expresses anger. It's oh, she's PMSing, she's out of control, she's crazy, um, she's too much. Good girls aren't like that. She's such a bitch, nobody likes her. And there isn't a place for a strong voice of I am hurting, I am angry, this is not okay, at least in the culture that I grew up in within within Mormonism.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, definitely. I resonate with this idea of it being afraid that it's gonna hurt people we love. Um, for sure. I think there's a lot of fear around anger, especially when you're considering divorce, of is it going to hurt my children making this choice? But I I want to make this point of when we are afraid of hurting others with our anger, we often end up hurting ourselves by just not acknowledging it. And that was really where my client kind of landed at the end of that week was acknowledging and realizing I have spent so much of my life being afraid of my anger and hiding it and managing it and burying it to make everybody else not be hurt. And yet look at how much I've hurt myself by not being by not by not being with what is, right? Which is actually I'm really angry, and maybe there's a reason for it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04So that begs the question that we all need to answer about anger and why it's worth it to face it. Because we may not always do it in the most productive ways, but why is it still worth it in order to have full expression? I think you hit the nail on the head in one way that avoiding it makes it worse. And I think that in the book Body Keeps The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vanderkoelk, he talks about what happens when rage is not expressed. And so this is a quote from that book. He says, rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self in the form of depression, self-hatred, and self-destructive actions. What do you think about that?
SPEAKER_01So important for all of you listening. This is like one of the biggest takeaways that you have to understand. We think we can just avoid it, like oh, this emotion, we can just cut it out. It doesn't need, you know, it doesn't need to be a part of the experience, but it has to go somewhere. And where it goes, at least for me, because I definitely growing up suppressed massive, massive amounts of anger. And as many of you know from my podcast, it eventually manifested as very, very severe depression, not wanting to live, suicidal ideation. Um, because when you don't allow your anger to lead you to like, okay, something's not working. So maybe we like change things up. All you're left with is, well, the problem is me. I must be the problem. And that is the most, that is the darkest, most painful place, at least for myself, that I can get to. Because the one thing I can never get away from is myself. Yes. And I I do see that, and I think that's something you see as well with your clients. If we were to talk about like what is the biggest side effect that we see in the women we're working with who don't embrace and learn about what anger is and how to work with it instead of just suppress and shove it down, is your brain taking that energy and it like starts to cannibalize yourself and it cannibalizes that love that you have for yourself. And it it takes all that energy that could be spent changing your life and making it into what you want, into attacking yourself, tearing down your self-image, and making you the problem. Because if we got to keep everybody else happy and we can't express our anger, you must be the problem.
SPEAKER_04Yes. And I want to point out some of the recent research, and it was made, uh, the case was made for this in a book called The Myth of Normal, where Gabor Mate, he the book was so much about trauma and autoimmune disease. And he made the case that women especially are socialized to suppress emotions like anger or frustration. And it has a profound impact on our physical health. And he argued that this emotional repression is a significant factor in the development of autoimmune diseases, where the body turns against itself, where we attack ourselves. And I have seen that in my own family. I have there's a lot of autoimmune disease in the women in my family and um within the religious culture we come from as ex-Mormons, lots of autoimmune. Where, and what do they say about what do most people think of the Mormons, besides hating that they come and knock on their doors and things like that? But Mormons have this reputation for being so nice. Yes, and they are, yes, they are nice to your face, they really are.
SPEAKER_01Well, at as both you and I know from and that's why I always like I it is like without a doubt when people say that, right? Oh, you used to be Mormon. I knew a Mormon family, they were so nice. It's like textbook that people say this to me.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I always have this like, and I I always tell them, I'm like, yeah, that's because you can't see under the hood.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Like the car looks nice on the outside, but there are severe consequences to taking, to cutting off entire parts of the human experience, labeling them as bad, and saying these should never be experienced or felt, or you're sinning, or you're somehow evil. And that is a hundred percent the issue that most of my women are experiencing, just even considering divorce, because for a lot of them, divorce is bad and it's not supposed to be an option.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So it really does tie in to these ideas of like things you're supposed to do, things you're supposed to feel, the elements of a lot of shoulding. This is who you should be, this is what your life should look like, versus the reality that is in front of you, how you are actually feeling, what you are actually experiencing in your marriage, in your body, in your relationship, that nobody else gets to see or experience but you, and hopefully, in this episode, giving you the knowledge and the tools to start being with what is, especially if it's anger in your body without doing what culture or perhaps religion has taught you, which is ooh, bad, run away. I cannot, if I feel this, it must mean I'm a bad person. Nope. It's just a feeling, it's just data that we want to actually take and bring in and examine and look at if you want to have a life that's actually driven by you rather than you being driven by the programming of your parents, your culture, your religion.
SPEAKER_04I think for my clients, there's this sense that if I'm feeling all of this anger and it's taking so much energy to try to ignore it or to suppress it, if I allow it to be expressed, it's just gonna be more damage or more energy I have to expand or um to use to manage it. Whereas if you if you think of your anger or any emotion that you want to suppress as a beach ball, like a big fucking beach ball that you are out in the ocean and you're pushing it down and you're thinking it takes so much energy to keep this ball underneath the water. And it does, it takes so much energy. And you've got the waves of being the single parent or getting a job or new education. And you're like, if I let go of this beach ball, it's gonna be terrible. But what happens if we can just allow that beach ball to come up to the shore, we can allow it to just float on top of the waves. It can be there. But if we are pushing it down, you know that one of those waves is gonna knock you off balance just a little bit. And that beach ball full of anger is gonna pop up really high and maybe in some destructive ways, it's it's just the nature of suppressing emotions. There is no way to get around it, and it takes less energy to deal with it than to repress it. And I know on this side of it, if you if you're not used to looking at your emotions and ex and experiencing them, it can seem impossible to think that you could actually feel and process something like rage or anger, and it could be better for your life. But I promise you, that is the truth. That is the truth.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and if you're if you're doubting this, you can you can pause for a second and think of how I I just love this analogy of when that beach ball comes up, once it's out of you, once, once it's on its way up and you're not getting to like gently release or take your time with it because you've lost control of it, this is where we get the symptoms that so many of us associate with anger that actually aren't truly feeling and processing anger. This is where we get the lashing out at our children, um, you know, losing our shit, um the long, like, you know, hour-long rage session, screaming, anger cleaning, throwing stuff, you know, whatever it is for you. We all know anger cleaning. I love that. Anger cleaning, yeah, or the like huffy, passive aggressive, you know, and maybe it's it's not always like these explosions, but it could be the low grade, like passive aggressive, sarcastic, snide, just like in your head, constantly like, I fucking hate the world and these people in it. Yeah, you know, like so I would offer that when we are in that state, we're not actually like processing and feeling the anger as much as we are, once again, we're not actually suppressing as much as I would say, like these, this is by acting it out when we're attacking others or we're attacking our children. We are still in resistance to that emotion. Because as you and I learned when we went through coach training school in the life coach school, when you are actually processing and being with a sensation in your body, which emotions are what create those sensations, you don't have to be doing anything. It is a very internal, uh inwardly focused, just noticing and breathing through what's coming up. And it's amazing, as I know you do with your clients as well, when I first start teaching them how to do this, how much they realize it's so much less worse than you think it was going to be. Like, yes, it's intense to feel in your body, but once you do, it's like the steam is let off of the kettle. Like versus when we get that like high-pitched screaming whistle of all of that pressure building up. So really try to in this episode wrap your head around you think you know how to like what anger is and what it looks like being processed, but it's the same thing as like sadness. A lot of people think like crying means you're processing sadness. It doesn't always mean that. Sometimes I know in the past when I'd have these like day-long, sometimes like multi-day just like crying fess, it wasn't so much processing at times as much as just getting lost in the like not actually feeling the sensation as much as getting just kind of wiped out by all of the expression and explosion of it outside my body. So hopefully we're giving you kind of some fine tuning around when you're actually experiencing anger down in your body with the sensation. And this is how when you said we're afraid to kind of burn, we're afraid to to rage and to allow it, you can be burning and raging inside, and that does not mean you are flinging stuff and yelling at people.
SPEAKER_04Exactly. You don't have to be emoting, we're not pushing it outside of our bodies, we're sitting with our bodies and the magical alchemy that can happen when we sit with the sensation of rage in our body. This doesn't mean that there aren't times where it needs to be expressed, and we're gonna go into some of the tools on that. So maybe this is a good time to do that. Yeah, would love it. I I really love to have clarity around what exactly we're talking about. And one of the tools that I use um to help myself and my clients understand the language around emotions is a fantastic book that Brene Brown wrote called The Atlas of the Heart, where she breaks down like huge.
SPEAKER_01I'm like snapping Brene Brown. Like, we love her. We love her. Her work has been life-changing for me. Quinn called it the Bible earlier when we were talking about this. She was like, Yeah, I've got my my handy Bible, and she held up Brene Brown's book, and I was like, I am here for this Bible, right?
SPEAKER_04Because I I really, if there's an someone that I want to hear what they have to say about emotions, it's Brene. So in this book on page 226, in case you have it, she says, here's what we know about anger. And Britt and I are going to break these down. So I'm gonna give you the numbers and then in the next few minutes, we're gonna just go through them one by one to show how it will look like in your life. So, number one, anger often masks emotions that are more difficult to name and or more difficult to own. Number two, just as an indicator light in our car tells us to pull over and check things out, anger is a very effective emotional indicator light that tells us to pull over and check things out. And number three, anger in response to experiencing or witnessing injustice, pain, and struggle can be a powerful catalyst for change. But by definition, a catalyst sparks change. It is not the change. So we're going to talk about anger as a mask for other emotions, an indicator light, and as a catalyst. So let's start with that first one anger as a mask for other emotions. Britta, when you feel anger, what do you think is actually underneath? I know my emotions, I'm I'm curious if when you feel anger that you recognize that there's something else underneath it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so um I find that anger often will mask feelings of um like typically it's emotions that are a little bit difficult for me to go feel. And I would say there are things like betrayal, um anything kind of around my abandonment, um having trust broken, right? That's that betrayal piece. Um any type of deep sadness. Um, if it's an emotion that when I kind of try to go feel it in my body, it starts to feel really, really big. And, you know, as you know, being my coach, sometimes I need someone else to hold space for me in those emotions when I'm experiencing, especially if it's related to like a specific childhood trauma or a uh belief created around that, then yeah, my kind of exit cord pull is to go to more of an angry um feeling. And then I would offer, I I definitely tend towards more of like acting out my anger, kind of speaking it out, getting angry with my kids. You know, my kids definitely get it the most because they're the ones that are around. Yeah, yeah, they're the the ones that are around me um the most. So it's it definitely helps when I don't understand that it's here to show me more, I can use it as kind of a mask to hide what's going on underneath for me from myself.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. For me, it's usually grief underneath anger and a lot of shame about my personal self-betrayal, thinking, well, I should have made a different choice, or it's my fault. And I've seen this recently over, you know, some silly things. Well, not really silly. I went and had some dental work done, and I was sharing with you earlier this week. I have a lot of dental trauma in my past. And because of the economic situation with my husband um not getting the medical and dental care that I needed throughout our marriage. And now I'm taking care of myself, but I found myself being very, very angry at him this week. And when I settled into it, what I was really feeling was this deep grief and shame about having stayed in that marriage where I was not cared for, where I was not safe for almost 23 years. But it was easier to just be angry at him rather than feel the shame and the grief for my past self. So that's that's the place that my brain goes to. So it's a good indicator for me as far as the masking, is to just ask myself, is it just easier to feel angry than what I actually am feeling? And I have found that that gives me deeper insight into my anger.
SPEAKER_01I love too thinking of it when you say, you know, is it easier? And I would offer like, is it easier to act out this anger? Because we're not even feeling when we're using anger as a mask, we're not actually feeling the anger in the way we were talking about earlier. We're once again just kind of using it as this little, and you know what it feels like when you're doing this. You feel kind of like powerful and edgy and just like, let's burn this shit down. Yes. And um, and I kind of know when I'm doing it because I feel very like right before we got on this call, in fact, I was very much in a this energy of this like, I want to burn shit down. Um and I want to go do things and kind of take like aggressive, instantaneous action without a lot of like foresight. Um, and it was beautiful because you in that moment, as I was like, I am just really like feeling this. You were like, well, let's just be with it. Let's just go into your body and notice. And I was like, Yeah, I feel all this energy just churning in my chest, right around my heart. And it was so awesome how just you saying go in your body and me noticing where it was at, we didn't even have to do anything. Like, it's not that we changed anything or that I thought anything different. I just went into the body and was able to feel it just kind of release and settle down a little bit more without.
SPEAKER_04You may take the same actions that you were thinking about before, but it won't be from an energy of let's burn this shit down. It's gonna be more from a more sustainable, this is what we're doing, a more determined place, I think.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and that is the key. And you you'll I know you're gonna talk about this a little bit later. Um, with the whole, especially when you're wanting to make decisions that you want to stick with long term, right? The sustainability piece of being able to use anger um in a way that's going to ultimately get you the result you most want, rather than just kind of going in and blowing all the shit up, which I just have to say, this reminds me so much. Quinn watched me like, what was it? It's been it was like at the beginning of last year, where I launched this huge neighbor neighborhood-wide like fight against this developer, and there was so much anger. Like looking back, Quinn, right? I was very like, I was walking into those city council meetings, just burning that shit down. Like walked in, lit a match, exploded the whole thing. No, and it was just a naivety of not understanding that, yeah, that may feel really good, but it doesn't often when people are met with that, they tend to get really defensive and like all opportunity for constructive, like across the table work is gone. And as the thing continued, I got to experience and see the kind of unsustainable detrimental effects of just going at something with pure anger. And it was, it was I don't regret it at all because it was a beautiful experience of learning for me, of like, oh, in the future, I tend to get these very intense, fiery feelings, and I want to process and fill those in my body and find sustainable, workable solutions when I'm meeting other people across the table. Um so yeah, it real world examples, y'all, of how burning that shit down. I mean, the developer is still developing the development. It's yeah.
SPEAKER_04But that's a segue into anger as an indicator light. Yeah, for you in the past, it was I'm feeling this anger. This is an indication that I need to burn shit down. I need to come in, throw a grenade at the city council meeting. And now you're saying, oh, it's an indicator that I need to process this and turn get reconnected to my frontal, get curious, then decide rather than letting the anger or the rage be the determining factor of what you do.
SPEAKER_01Which am I getting that right? Absolutely. And what I would say is like it definitely is a process. So please don't like be where you're at in your process. Yeah. That was an important, like, really vital piece of my journey that I needed to go through. And Quinn knows she watched me go into some of the like fucking firest and energy I've ever done. Like getting up and just reaming people out on about something that I was super passionate about, you know, something that really did matter to me. And that actually was, in my view, a huge growth and evolvement from where I had been previously, right? Yeah. Raised as a Mormon, no, first off, no real like acknowledgement of my opinions and what I cared about. Secondly, too much fear to even speak up about them if I did feel that way.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So you're gonna be on kind of like this spectrum of learning and figuring out how does anger work for me? How do I want to use it? And it's gonna be messy, and that's okay. That'll be okay. Yeah. I even though looking back, I'm like, bummer, I didn't really get the result that I most wanted that I maybe could have gotten by taking a more processed and intentional, like, you know, oh, this is an indicator. I'm gonna step back, I'm maybe gonna figure out some more rather than a grenade, maybe we're going in with, you know, strategy, it it taught me some really important lessons for the future of how do I wanna approach people, what works best. And I just I had to also find my voice though, in yeah, I I can speak speak up and I can ignite people and I can start things, which also I would say was a piece of you know, getting divorced, because and we'll talk about that later, but I definitely used anger to get divorced.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Yeah. For me, when anger comes up, especially as a parent, I have trained myself to see it as an indicator that I need to slow down, I need to quiet myself, I need to get more curious. But I've got to say, this is a skill. This I am 52. I learned, I began to intentionally learn this skill in my early 40s after I had probably six children, maybe more, but just being so overwhelmed and a lot of yelling, me yelling at my children, my husband yelling at me and the children, my children yelling at each other, and I just reached this breaking point where this type of anger and raging at each other, it wasn't the home that I wanted to create. And so I made a concerted effort to teach myself that when tempers flare, I need to go to a deep calm. And it has taken me years, but I never yell at my kids now. I can't remember the last time I raised my voice to them or disciplined them out of anger. It's a very, very chill kind of home that I have now. Sometimes when we get tense, I use that as an indicator like, oh, mom needs to go for a walk. I have a park in my neighborhood. And so mom will just say, I'm leaving, I'll see you guys in half an hour, and I'll go take some laps around the park. Um, but that's where I am now. But I love how you talked about your experience with the grenade at City Hall. That was part of your path. And I had plenty of those in my path. Your children are quite a bit younger than me. You are younger than me by about 15, 16 years, and are at a different place. And so I don't want anyone, just because I I really am a badass at this now, and I have a chance.
SPEAKER_01She'd be so she so is, and I love being in her home.
SPEAKER_04But it's it hasn't always been this way. But it is something it is available to you as a learned skill for you and your children. That when tempers flare, we chill out. We slow down, we get curious.
SPEAKER_01Well, and that's I think what you're showing too that it's so important to understand about anger is like that's why using it as an indicator light to slow down first is so powerful because what you see is actually people who are caught up in reacting to their anger are the least powerful. Yes, they actually it ends up being a lot of expended energy, just like a grenade, right? Like this big explosion with like a lot of shrapnel left behind that then gets to be dealt with post the explosion. And I do right now, although I would say, you know, my anger in my home has gotten the explosions have gotten so much better from when I was married. I was exploding on the regular every single day. In fact, I have a client right now who is in this exact space of like, I am losing my shit with my kids on the regular. And I have so much compassion because I know what that's like, especially knowing now that I know about my CPTSD, it seems very likely she has it as well. That environment, all the triggers, all the right, I've done a lot of beautiful work of changing my environment, right? Realizing this marriage is not a good fit for me. I and leaving it and now having a home that is mine where half the time I am not around my children, which allows me to resource a lot for myself. Then when I am with my kids, for the most part, I am able to be, like you said, much more grounded, able to hold it until something big goes off.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01Which Quinn is laughing because that has happened recently. I have a son who just turned 14, and we had a big incident of teenage breaking of the rules and testing the boundaries that has really triggered my betrayal, lack of trust, um, trauma. And Quinn has watched how because you know, because of that, I am much quicker to anger right now. There's a lot of processing that has been brought up by this, that it's easier to go do anger to avoid those deeper, painful feelings and kind of just acknowledging at times, right, like our overwhelm with life, our overwhelm at the task we are trying to complete in doing it differently. So I think it's really important this piece I was saying earlier of like power comes from when we use anger for us in those constructive ways of like, okay, what's here? How do I want to use this? And it really is the most powerful place, is when you're acknowledging seeing it and then kind of dropping down into that grounded part, which is not, you know, in the moment, maybe where you're gonna be, but it is something that if you're noticing a lot of anger, you can be going, okay, there's something here, what's underneath, and doing that work when you're not in that moment.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. I think it's one of the most helpful times to have a coach is when you're processing these big emotions that you're not even sure how to stay with it. And we've been doing this work of processing our emotions, working on this skill for a few years now, at least four years. And at least four. It is still like when I'm facing down a big pile of shame or anger, rage, betrayal, and I know in my head on the other side I will feel better. It is still, it still takes my breath away to drop into my body, and I still need a coach or a friend to sit there with me to help bring me back to myself, to stay with it, because it's not something we're very good at. It's something we're taught to avoid.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yes. And, you know, this takes us back to, I know we were gonna talk a little bit about like that. I was telling my client this week, you have to be resourcing yourself in addition to this. Yes, and and so you know, pieces that have helped over the years are doing meditation, learning to do meditation, learning to I I think some of the biggest pieces for me would be exercising, having an outlet for my energy, just a place to go, push hard. Um, and then breath work. Um, I remember when I found the biodynamic breathwork where he specifically takes you down into those emotions, and instead of you having to like the breath work and the movement of your body just activates, activates and releases the emotion without you even having to like talk it through.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you don't have to tell a story about it, it's just feeling the sensation your body knows what to do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. What are some of the practices that you found that support you in moving and being with anger?
SPEAKER_04For me, especially using anger as an indicator in the beginning, it was practicing and making a game plan when no one was triggered, so that I could think through when are the triggering moments, like kids not accepting a no answer when I've told them no 10 times, or when people aren't going to bed and I am super tired. Um, those are times where there would be a lot of anger, or mealtimes, dishes, you know, those kinds of things. And so I made plans before the situation came up. And I would choose a mantra that I am calm, I can be calm, just breathe, slow down, nothing has gone wrong. Just making those choices ahead of time and practicing it in my head. When this happens, I'll do this. When this happens, I'll do this, or I will say this. So that when it happened, I already knew. I didn't have to make it up in the moment because I was not resourced in the moment. I had to have a tool ahead of time. I agree with the breath work. I believe that meditation is super helpful, even if you can only sit with yourself for a minute and just notice the thoughts coming through your head. Don't try to stop your thoughts, but just notice that thoughts are going to be offered by your mind without you doing anything. The mind will just continue to spit out thoughts and it has nothing to do with you. You also don't have to hold on to any of them. So if the mind presents a thought like, my son hates me, my son is terrible, he never obeys me, or whatever it is. He's so disrespectful. I don't have to believe that. It's just a story. I can believe that he is not well resourced in the moment either. He may need more love. I bet it would help if I slowed down. Like I can choose to think on purpose, or I can let my mind drive the thought process. And just the way the human mind is, it's generally pretty negative and chooses the worst possible story to tell us. And so choosing ahead of time, choosing when you're well resourced, what you will do in those times when you are not feeling well resourced, that has been key for me. And I agree about moving your body, really becoming familiar with your body, touching your body, being so, so loving to this body and all that it can do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So listening to you, I was realizing because I was thinking, I know a lot of the work because you're working with clients post-divorce. So I am wondering, and maybe this is just like a difference in our stories, right? The ways we approached divorce. Um, because I would say my what actually kept me in my marriage for so long was talking and calming myself down out of the rage. Right. And and I'm seeing a little bit how, yes, post-divorce, especially if you are now raising kids as a single mom, if you are those, it is absolutely key. Key. Like this is what we're talking about like the rage does not go away. Managing your mind and choosing your stories intentionally, yeah, is a skill, whether you're married or not. So that ain't going away. But I would love to pause for a second and just hear your thoughts on you know how we watch out for talking ourselves down and out of rage when we are in the space of considering divorce.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01When there are the potentially things that maybe we do want to be upset about.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And I think that is this third way that Brene talks about rage or anger as a catalyst, because I think it definitely is a catalyst for change and it has been in my life. But I think that I I love how she parsed it, where it can be a mask, it can be an indicator light, it can also be a catalyst. But the catalyst is not the change, it is the match, it's not the fire, it's not the rocket. You still need the rocket, but you need that ignition to get the rocket to break free of the gravitational pull. So that's what I feel like you're talking about is when you use rage for that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And can we just pause? I love that visual when you just said, you know, the the anger being the match, the ignition, the rocket fuel, that piece that launches, that is big enough, strong enough, aggressive enough to get you to break away from the gravitational pull. And what I'd say that gravitational pull is, is it's your old habits, it's your old beliefs, it's those parts of you telling you this should be enough, you should be fine, it's not that bad. Um, is he beating you? No. Um Then you should be happy. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay that you don't want to have sex with him, just suck it up.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01All of the especially, you know, thinking of one of my clients who just so many parts of her life, her mother, her religion, her culture, all telling her it's fine, and yet deep inside herself, her some inner soul part is raging around like it is not fine. I am super upset and like losing it. Something is wrong, right? Something is wrong. And I'm realizing too how important it is for us as women to hold space for each other's anger. Yes. Because, right, because I'm seeing how this client I'm thinking of, she was in a world where whenever she brought that anger to her mother or to other women, it was like they couldn't handle her anger. And they were like, ooh, no, no, no, no, make that pretty again. Can you put that back? Like it, and what you're seeing in that moment is like when you haven't addressed your own anger, you need other people to put their anger away too.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And how important it is to be validated and seen. Because one of the biggest things I hear from women who work with me is how much it means to them when they come to me and they're like, I am deeply upset about this. And in that moment, especially when I'm hearing about traumas they have experienced, abuse in their marriages, instead of minimizing it or being like, it's not that bad, I'm like, yeah, that sounds that sounds really rough. That does not sound, you know, just having somebody say, You're not crazy, that actually sounds really awful. I, I would, would you pick that for your daughter? And they're like, no, never. And you're like, okay, then let's examine why you're picking it for you. So right? Whenever we say that, there's always like a very clear, like, yeah, oh, not okay.
SPEAKER_04This is not okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Or if your best friend came to you and told you what you're telling me, what would you say to her? And they're like, I'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? Like, yeah, no, he does not, yeah, he does not get to talk to you that way. He does not so just noticing for ourselves too, when we have women in our lives who want to share their anger with us, right? Or maybe there's something that they're struggling with, not just wanting to put a pretty bow on that and tell them to, you know, please put that back in a package, but being here for, yeah, maybe maybe you're not happy, maybe this isn't a fit.
SPEAKER_04So if you were not a coach, or if we were just talking girlfriend, girlfriend, and you know, most of the people listening to us are not coaches, most of the people have not experienced coaching. How would you tell someone this is what you do specifically to show up for another woman who is really angry?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I would offer that you do not provide solutions or advice. That's that is a like, I'm trying to get you out of this. Let's go fix it, let's go change it. She already has the answers in herself. I mean, this is the work we do, right, Quinn. It's not my job to tell if you're my client, it's not my job to tell you. I never know when you come to me what you're gonna decide. I know the work is bringing you into a feeling of self-trust and reminding you that you can trust yourself and you do have all the answers. So if I was just somebody's friend, it would be just reflecting back their own thoughts to them. So when they're saying, he said this to me, and I just got really mad, one of the simplest tools that you can use is really intense reflexive listening, where instead of thinking about what you're gonna say next to them, you really drop into the present moment, you hear what they are saying, and as much as possible, you try to reflect it right back to them by saying, So if I hear you correctly, it sounds like, you know, he said this to you. And then when he did that, you, you know, went into the other room and you started crying. And literally that's all you have to do. You pause, and what you will notice is your friend will be like, Yes, exactly. And they will come, they will share another piece of the story, and then you kind of reflect that back to them. And what you're doing is this really beautiful, it's almost like mirror work of helping them hear the wisdom that they already know, but from a non-judgmental, let's try and fix it, change it space. Um, and and you do that by being kind of a compassionate just witness. And I think the most compassionate thing we can do is to truly listen. Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_04I love that. So let's kind of switch gears to anger as a catalyst. In my mind, I didn't have I didn't divorce because I was angry at him or that he had done anything worse than he had been doing our entire life. But it was after the divorce when things were happening with my children. I mean, within the first year, I'd gone back in front of a judge twice over parenting violations. I'd called Child Protective Services, I had a protective order. My children only had supervised visits where I was there with him. Um there have been so many things that where I've had to say, you don't get to treat me like this, you don't get to treat our children like this. I don't care if it's legal, you don't get to do this to our children. And that's where the anger has really propelled me to a much stronger relationship with myself. Whereas in the past, letting a lot of things slide and instead being like, no, this is not okay, and I won't stand for it. And that's why, you know, I still have an attorney on retainer, and he gets to communicate through my attorney because he has such a hard time communicating to me directly. Yes, yes, yes, and it has been so good for me. Um, if you recall, a couple of years ago, he assaulted me in in front of my house, and it was it it paralyzed my nervous system.
SPEAKER_01I I had the wherewithal to call the police and file the police report, but which can we just take a second to also like acknowledge that the that is a beautiful example of using anger to set boundaries to protect the things that need to be protected in that moment. So I know that's that's a big deal to make those steps, to make those calls. I also love, I just want to highlight you saying like you have an attorney that is on retainer that handles all communication with your husband because that was not how it was at the beginning. In the beginning, you were handling a lot. It wasn't until you got to a point of like, okay, this is a shit show. Every time I talk to him, he just wants to take all of his trash out on me and just verbally ventilate and emotionally dump. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and it was through you getting angry enough, it was a catalyst to go, okay, I'm actually gonna spend money on paying for someone else to do this because it's worth it to me not to have my mental health bludgeoned by him every time we have to talk.
SPEAKER_04Yes, to not give him access to my piece. Because he can he can say whatever he wants to my attorney, and then my attorney just gives me the facts, and then I, you know, say back to them whatever I need to say. But I think it's interesting in looking back at myself at that time, because it was about it was a little over a year later, where there was an incident where we were both at my daughter's gymnastics class. He blocked my exit. He leaned into me, started puffing out his chest and making these huffing noises like a gorilla. And I had to just say very loudly, you're being very aggressive. You need to step back and draw people's attention to me. Get my daughter, get out. He chases us to the car, yelling at me, drives very aggressively, right behind me, and then speeds up to get to my house to talk to my other children before I get home. And in the first instance, where he assaulted me and I had to call the police, it paralyzed my nervous system because, on the one hand, I had enough anger to say, I'm gonna see if that was actually assault. And it was. And the police came and took the, you know, my statement or whatnot. But I made it mean I'm not safe. Like I'm still very angry, but I'm also angry because I'm not safe. And if you remember the um mask, the anger mask, for me, a lot of time there's that self-betrayal and that shame. And so the second time, where we had the confrontation at my daughter's gymnastics class, I was able to recognize that sensation in my body. And I knew I wanted to believe something different because it threw me off for months that first time. And so that second time, I chose, I consciously chose and practiced another story, which was we are safe. I'm doing it. Yeah. I'm protecting us. This is okay. And I had to go and I mean, I talked to you. I went to a drum circle where I could jump and scream and beat the floor and just move this anger, this rage of how dare you threaten me through my body. And that was really important. But it was using anger as a catalyst for self-reflection, self-knowledge, stronger boundaries, um, the stronger boundaries with lovers, stronger boundaries with family. It has anger has been hugely useful to me as a catalyst for change and giving myself the space to heal. What about you? How has anger been a catalyst in your life? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I think anger, we are I love how much we have very different stories on you know our trajectory. Um I think a lot of my anger was experienced more pre um, you know, you watched even before I filed for divorce, it was when I was going to therapy, learning about narcissistic personality disorder, starting to really look at mine, was like kind of an onion, you know, that first piece of whoa, my religion. It was the first piece was my mother, you know, having the safety through my therapist to really start to anger and disconnect and like set boundaries with her. Then it became angering at my religion and the things that they had taught me that had, you know, hurt me in so many ways. And then eventually in my in my marriage, and I noticed that for me, the relationship with anger has always been a little bit complex. And you'll I know Quinn will relate, like Quinn has watched this in me, that sometimes anger gets really for me, really activated and it burns really hot, and in the moment I'm really in it, but once I go to sleep and I wake up the next morning, yeah. It's like all the fuel has been rained on, and now we're just like in depression.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, I tend to move, you know, if I'm not really kind of on it and using it in the moment, my brain moves very quickly into using it against me and spiraling into depression instead. So um I would say I'm very much in, I probably like the thick of understanding how to use it more as a productive catalyst that doesn't just kind of fire me up and I rage and I talk a lot, and then nothing actually gets put into place. So a couple examples I wanted to use, um, just in contrast, right? Just showing like the all across the board would be that there were, you know, for a good year before I even filed for divorce, um, you know, my friend, my good friend Kelly at the time would be able to say that like there were multiple moments where there would be boundaries that were violated in my marriage, and I would get really upset, but then he would, you know, say the right things or apologize, and I would just kind of get talked back in to and give kind of back into the fear of what it would actually be like to leave. And looking back, that was just what I needed to do. It was just a process I had to go through of over and over and over again, kind of uh this is kind of a harsh word, but it's the only word that's really come of like betraying myself ultimately, like ultimately deciding it's too hard to leave, I'm just gonna stay, until this moment that came out of the blue, which I think I've talked about on the podcast before, of just like this straw that broke the camel's back. It was a regular, like average day in February. I thought in my head, the overarching thing was like, we are staying together, we're, you know, gonna make this work. And he just made a very flippant passing comment out of frustration about me, and it just snapped something in me. It was like my world rotated, you know, 180 degrees, and I all of a sudden saw everything from this other perspective, and this deep anger welled up in me that was like, Who the fuck do you think you are saying that about me? Like, there are people in my life, and I had really good friends at the time, right? I had, I had, I had Kelly who really loved me, and I had my therapist, people who were just like, you are amazing. And my thought was like, How can these people think I'm amazing? And you think so little of me? And for the first time, I didn't make it mean it's because I'm broken. You know, there's something wrong with me. I made it mean, I think there's something wrong with you.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And thankfully, I took all that rage. I called up my best friend at the time. I went and stayed at her house that night, and she let me rage. She was, she did not like, oh my God, Britta, what do you think this is gonna mean? Are you sure you're ready for this? She was just like, Yeah, that's fucked up. Yeah, you are amazing. And she supported me. And then over the next, you know, nine months of going through that divorce, it was a lot of um really gathering the support around me of people who could like help me kind of white knuckle my way through that divorce, which was having like a kick-ass attorney who every time I kept like saying stupid shit or agreeing to stuff, and his attorney would call and be like, Well, Britta said this. My attorney would be like, No, she didn't. She doesn't say anything except through me. And then she'd call me and be like, Stop it, stop talking to him. I'd be like, I'm sorry, Betsy. I'm sorry. So just know if anger isn't, you know, if anger really is difficult for you, learning how like it's it's a journey, it's a process, it's something that I'm still in active um experiencing and you know, learning how to be with. Um, but I I would say I'm I'm coming through learning how to not just, as you've seen recently, because the other example I was going to use was with Cal, you know, my oldest, and just these normal teenage things. And instead of internalizing it and like, I'm a bad mom, um, it's taken like three or four weeks now of a lot of fucking emotional processing and up and down and seeing myself be really angry to land in this space, like I said to you today, of you know what, I think this is the best thing that's ever happened because it's showing me what's not working in uh my parenting right now, in the dynamic that I have around devices in our home. Yeah. And instead of feeling, you know, you really helped me, instead of feeling grief about that, like, oh, I should have known ahead of time, just being like, yeah, this is welcome to parenting your first.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, your oldest. Yeah. Your oldest game age is my sixth or seventh. And so things that I've learned, I get to sit back and watch you learn. Because not everything can be learned by watching someone else or having someone else tell you. Sometimes you just get a get in there and fuck up and learn for yourself.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And I think knowing it's okay to let it be the messy that it's been. My my experience, my journey with anger has been a lot, and it's still very much in process of learning how to use it as a catalyst. It definitely helped me massively to get out. I needed that explosion to pull me out of that gravitational, you know. I was very locked in, very thought. And I will say this too: the other gift that the universe gave me was after that one little thing, there were multiple things he did once I filed that were like explosions that that helped because when they went off, I was just like, oh my god, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Um at that We're not kidding, Brita. We're not, it's for real. It's for real. Which is literally where I've been the last four weeks, right? Quinn, I've been like, are you kidding me? What is going on?
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um but I guess, you know, that's the gift in these moments. It's an opportunity to check in and recalibrate. Like, okay, something, where's my soul at? Where is my life at? Where are we wanting to go from here? Yeah. And anger can be the thing that kind of propels you into that powerful no more. I loved, you know, you sharing about just that transformation for you. Cause I know just four years previous when we started coaching together, there's no way you would have spoken to Dale like that in a public space.
SPEAKER_04No.
SPEAKER_01Telling him, you know, yeah, driving being aggressive. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Yeah. I've grown a lot. I think. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm really proud of both of us and the way we are learning to be fully expressive of all of the emotions, letting it be messy, messing up, showing up again for ourselves, continuing to grow, leaning in. I am just so proud of us and all of the women who are grappling with the big questions of life, staying or going in their marriages, or those who have chosen out how they want to create the life that they most want. I'm just so proud of us. We are doing it. We're doing it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I love that thought for all of us. Yeah. Like we are doing it.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01We are so often afraid that it's supposed to look differently. It's not. If you're feeling lots of anger, you're doing it right. On the right track.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for this conversation and Quinn. This was magical.
SPEAKER_01As always, um, I just, you know, wanted to mention like Quinn, it both Quinn and I are we are taking individual clients at this time. So definitely, if you are like, okay, I'm ready for this deeper work. I want someone to show me where anger's at in my body, how to feel it, how to use it as a catalyst, reach out to us. Yeah. Um, yeah. And as Quinn knows, I'm gonna be starting a community soon where I'm really excited. We were just, I just have to share like a quick tidbit from this week.
SPEAKER_00Speaking of anger, I had gotten a uh voicemail from an ex partner of mine.
SPEAKER_01And there is this trend on what TikTok, Instagram, TikTok, that I think you had sent it to me.
SPEAKER_04I may have that clip from JD Vance saying, I'm a never Trump guy, I never liked him, I'm a never Trump guy, I never liked him.
SPEAKER_01And so Britta was saying, we should put together, you know, these messages from our exes and do some dances and dance to them because I'd seen I'd seen clips on Instagram of women with like pretty abusive voicemails from their ex-husbands or their ex-boyfriends, and just dancing that to them to kind of show this like, dude, you don't you don't own me anymore with your thoughts and your words about me.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um so you know, we have not fully decided yet, but that may be content that we end up sharing within the community.
SPEAKER_04I think we both have some really good ones.
SPEAKER_01I I know. I was like, we could kind of maybe start, you know, a community trend where we're um just because I I I love taking things that are meant to scare you and make you small and using them to be really fucking big. Right.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_04Yes. So let's do it. Let's do it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Be be on the lookout for that in the future when the community launches. I'm hoping to bring Quinn in quite a bit, get to do stuff with her in there, get to play. Um, know that we love you all. And yeah, till next time. See y'all later.