Ep. 16 The Anger Passed Down From Grandma (Generational Anger and What Your Body Inherited)

What if the anger you're carrying isn't even yours? This episode pulls on a thread I've been sitting with for a while - one that goes deeper than coping skills and breathing techniques.

 The Anger Tree is a framework for understanding where anger actually lives in the body, where it comes from, and what it's trying to tell you. We're not unpacking the whole thing today. We're planting a seed.

Book 1:1 here

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, I'm Leslie Turner. I'm a mom, a somatic practitioner, and an intuitive coach. This is the Intuitive Drop. Short conversations about emotional truth, the nervous system, and living from your intuition in real life without losing your mind along the way. Let's drop in. Nobody taught us what to do with anger. They just taught us that it was wrong to have it. So it went somewhere else. And maybe right now you're calling it stress, maybe exhaustion, maybe it's just the way things are. Could be your anxiety at 2 a.m. or the reason that you snapped at your kid this morning, or the tightness that lives in your chest and never seems to leave. It's there. It's been there. And today we're going to call it exactly what it is. I want to take you back to the year of 2020. I mean, not the finest year for many of us, but I ended up having a baby at the beginning of that year. And then we know what happened two months later. We had a pandemic. I was in a house in a town I had just moved to, and I was alone for 14 hours a day because my husband worked shift. And I was not okay. Not that soft, oh, I'm okay, but not really. It's in the kind that lives in your chest like a trapped animal, the kind that made me rage at nothing and everything and feel immediately ashamed of both. I was a naturopathic doctor, still. I knew about hormones and nervous systems and postpartum depletion. I had a language for all of that. And still, I could not find a safe place to put what I was feeling. Anger, real anger, didn't have a home. Not in the culture I was raised in, not in the profession I was trained in, not even in my body, which had spent decades learning to convert anger into something more acceptable. Sadness, exhaustion, overwhelm, which were all true, and also all anger wearing a mask. I didn't know that yet. I just knew that something was locked inside me that I didn't have the answers or the key for. And I think that's where a lot of women are living right now. And so that's what today is about. Because something that nobody really says is that for hundreds of years, literally hundreds of years, women's anger was not allowed. It was dangerous. It was unfeminine. It was hysterical. It was something to be managed, medicated, prayed away, or punished. And so we as women learn to swallow it, to smooth it over and call it something more acceptable, like sadness or disappointment. I'm just tired. Oh, I'll be fine. And what happens when you swallow something that was never meant to be swallowed? It doesn't just disappear, it goes somewhere into the body, into the tissue, into the jaw that is always a little tight, into the shoulders that never fully drop, or the stomach that knows before your brain does that something is wrong. It also goes into your lineage, your mother's unspoken fury, your grandmother's silence that wasn't peace, it was survival. Generations of women ahead of you who felt exactly what you feel and had nowhere to put it. It gets passed down. And no, this is not a story they're telling you. This is a pattern in your nervous system, in your DNA. As a nervous system that learned that anger is dangerous before you ever had a chance or a reason to be angry yourself. It was already there. And I want to go even further than that because some of what you're carrying, it's not even this lifetime. Think about what would have happened to a woman who expressed her anger openly 200 years ago, 500 years ago. She'd be accused of what, hysteria, locked away, burned. Her body learned to suppress it to survive. And that survival pattern, that do not show your anger or you will be destroyed. It didn't die with her. It's in your cells too. It's in the way your throat closes when you try to say the thing you actually mean. It's in the freeze that happens when someone challenges you and you go silent instead of speaking. This is not a weakness. This is not your body doing something wrong. You're carrying a very old instruction. And it's time to question whether it still applies. One thing I want you to note is that anger and grief are not separate. They wear each other's clothes. Sometimes that looks like what looks like grief, so the crying, the withdrawing, the heavy sadness that sits on your chest, it's actually anger that doesn't feel safe enough to be anger. And sometimes what looks like anger, like the snapping, the irritability, the wall that goes up, is actually grief that never got to be held. They mask each other, they protect each other. They are, in so many women, completely tangled together. Anger doesn't travel alone. It's always in relationship with grief, resentment, disappointment, fear, shame. And until you're willing to look at all of it, you're only ever working with half the picture. I've been doing this work for a long time in my own body and with women I work with. And something has been forming for me lately, a way of understanding anger that goes deeper than coping strategies and breathing exercises. I'm calling it the anger tree. I haven't copyrighted this, so don't steal it. I'm not going to unpack the whole thing today because it's still a work in progress. It's still growing. But the image is this: anger has roots. It has an origin, a lineage, the soil that it actually grew in. Is this anger even yours? Or did you inherit it? It has a trunk, which is your body, where the anger lives right now in the tissue, the nervous system, the held breath or the braced jaw. And then it has branches. How it moves and reaches and weaves into every corner of your life, your relationships, your patterns, the way you're you mother, the way you lead, the way you shrink or erupt when someone crosses a line. It's the same tree, depending on whether you're willing to tend it, whether you can see the roots, feel the trunk, trace the branches. Either that anger either burns everything down, or it becomes one of the most powerful sources of information and energy you have access to. Because anger's not a character flaw. It's not a sign that something is wrong with you. It's simply data. It's information. It's pointing at something. Maybe it's pointing at a boundary that's been crossed, a truth that's been suppressed, a need that has been denied for too long. The women I see doing the most powerful work in their lives, they're not the ones who got rid of their anger. They're the ones who learned to read it. And this is something I'll be coming back to on this podcast and in my work because I think it matters, not just personally, not just for the women I even sit with, but collectively. We are at a moment where women are being asked to lead, to build, to mother, to hold entire ecosystems together. And we're doing it while carrying centuries of unfelt, unnamed, and unprocessed anger in our bodies. That is worth paying attention to. Now I want to leave you with an image. My son, he's now six years old. When he gets angry, and he does fully, completely, the way the average six-year-old does, he will scream in right away. Or then he transform transforms it into stomps, or he finds a way to move it through his body before it moves through someone else. And we give him what gave him one rule quite early. You're allowed to be angry, you're not allowed to be mean. And he took that and made it his own. So recently, actually just yesterday, we were driving home in the car and I said something that was kind of disappointing, and I could see why he was angry. And he said, I'm angry, but I'm not taking it out on you. Six years old. I had to relearn what he already knows: that anger is allowed to exist, that it doesn't have to hurt anyone to be real, that there's a difference between feeling it and weaponizing it. He didn't get that from a book. He got it because we told him his anger is allowed. And then he ran with it. That's what I want for you. Not to perform your anger, not to justify it, just to stop pretending it isn't there, because it is there and has always been there, and it's been waiting a long time to be something other than a problem. So today I want to leave you with one question. You don't have to answer it out loud, you don't have to fix it, just sit with it. Where in your body are you holding something you haven't let yourself call anger yet? Just notice it. That's enough for now. I'm Leslie Turner. This is the intuitive drop. If this landed for you, share it with a woman who needs to hear it, and I'll see you next week.