Relational Rage - An Essay
Five Lessons From An Angry Person And Why You'll Always Be A Monster To Those Who Avoid Themselves
What happens when a woman finally expresses anger inside a relationship that only loved her while she was easy?
I want to talk about relational rage.
It is the Holly Moon very soon, after all; a moon representing sharp edges and even sharper boundaries.
Very often, rage and anger step in when we need protection, justice and safety… something society at large doesn’t seem to understand… instead, viewing these louder emotions as simply inappropriate; scary for the receiver and sinful from the giver.
How often do we judge the screaming woman in the supermarket and empathise with the quiet boyfriend, never knowing the cause of it all, shunning the spectacle over the potential sin?
It’s conditioning we never saw coming and it’s pacifying us all.
The last twelve months have seen some rather simmering times for me and I must admit, rather than being silenced, my Substack draft folder is now sitting on some rather scorching stuff.
So, let’s start gently… shall we?
This is part of the From Liminal to Intentional series, where we examine transitional spaces in life, dispel expectations, explore authenticity and embrace our righteous selfishness…
This is not an article about excusing harmful anger. This article does not ignore the impact of anger by way of abuse, punishment by neglect and violence. Instead, this article focuses on the theme of rage in relation to everyday conflict.
I wanted to write about rage because I believe that women are dying because of it. Not just the typical murder, assault and domestic violence — because that’s more than enough — but I mean the inner kind, the kind where we swallow the injustice and smile through our pain.
That kind of death — spiritually, emotionally and quite literally.
Autoimmune diseases are sky-high for females and we’re only just starting to really understand the concepts of the nervous system, fascia impact and benefits of somatic healing through expressing ALL emotions.
In my life, the time I had the strongest fatigue, pain and at my height of my thyroid issues was also the time I was in an abusive relationship and racing towards a mental breakdown at work. I was angry, cornered and smothered, all at the same time.
How poetic that the chronic illness was through chronic inner-destruction.
It all made me sick, because of what I wasn’t expressing.
Every time our loud righteousness isn’t expressed, the power fuelling it has to go… somewhere. And so the rage, the defiance, the grief, the repression, the pressure… it just soaks down into the mind, body and soul… rotting away.
How wrong is that?
All for the sake of staying quiet inside your own life.
Smile And Carry On
I could write about women’s rage on a societal scale all day long, and maybe I will, but today I want to talk about the more intimate kind. The rage that appears inside friendships, families, partnerships and long-held connections when you finally say: you hurt me and I need you to hear it.
The most common cost for voicing your pain is ultimately the risk of social and relational disconnection.
By standing up for ourselves, very often, the recipients feel stood on.
Apparently, we can be quietly miffed, not loudly defensive.
Declaring a boundary or voicing hurt is sometimes a bigger threat than the initial injury and so, we commonly push it down and plough on.
But at what cost?
I did this with people in my life. And each time I didn’t speak up, I could feel it decaying inside me. It’s not about ruthless honesty and violent anger. It can be education of limits, sharing of triggers and honest check-ins, instead.
On the other hand, it’s also having the adult brain of knowing that one day, your perfectly imperfect self might just do something wrong and might just hurt someone and/or piss someone right off… and being ready for that day to come sooner than we think.
Lend Me Your Ears? No?
In order to effectively voice our rage, anguish and received pain, most often, there needs to be at least one pair of ears that aren’t our own to receive it all. And what happens when those ears don’t want to hear it or believe you, no matter the volume?
Our intuition is already well aware of how those around us deal with conflict and their own anger. We know before we’ve even spoken up, the odds of being listened to.
In my experience, it’s not often that I’ve voiced an issue with someone close to me, that has resulted in responses like, “thank you for telling me that, I want to understand further, let me make it right and allow me to give you the required time.”
Even, “huh, that’s not how I see it, can we tussle this out and find a middle ground here, because this is important?”
In most cases, the victim becomes the villain (i.e. me), with the story often turned and whirled around. The guilt trips begin, the awkward silences, the ghosting, the arguments… even the aggression.
I’m not just talking about genuinely seeing things from both sides, I’m talking about total avoidance and scapegoating… it’s shocking and disgusting.
And I want to know why some women think this is acceptable behaviour and where we’ve suddenly learnt this from. Because it appears to be the world we’re falling into.
And us, on the receiving end, soon learn that in order to be loved, we’ve needed to be placid.
Turns out, we’ve been surrounded by conditions, not care.
It turns out, in order to care for ourselves, ironically, we have to sometimes lose people.
Shame (1 - 0) Love
The pain that comes from this kind of forced disconnection after being the one that was hurt can be incredibly unbearable, especially when you thought the foundations were solid and true.
It’s incredibly important for the rage to be the gatekeeper of this process.
At the root of a lot of relational breakdown is the unavailability of accountability; we just don’t always want to admit that it’s even possible to rupture with this or that person. Mix that in with their potential lack of emotional depth and poor communication and you’re left with a pretty chunky cocktail impossible for anyone to choke down.
As you get older, you hope that those you’re ageing with are also the ones that you’re growing with and are picking up these skills alongside you on the way. You also hope that alongside the statements of “we’ll always be in each other’s lives”, that you’ll also be working with individuals prepared to be wrong and imperfect.
You’ll have built up examples of seeing each other’s extreme emotions and feelings. You’ll understand their weaknesses, their sins, their flaws. And you hope that expressing your anger will also have your past effort and love at the other end of the scale to balance it all out — but nine times out of ten, it won’t.
And because of this, you discover that people would much rather choose their shame than choose you.
To Demand A Perfect Friend, You Have To Be A Perfect Friend
Now, there are many types of reasons for feeling relational rage. I’m just giving the personal example of what I’ve had to deal with the last year, because I’m hardly a rare case here and suspect a lot of us have been damaged by this.
I always remember the dating quote, “to demand a king, you have to be a queen”; the same goes with any relationship: to demand perfection from someone is to demand it of yourself.
It is actually perfection that these kinds of people are seeking — hear me out…
Because if we were never destined for repair, then the whole connection was built on my required perfect behaviour to never get it wrong, to never speak up, to never get angry, to never voice my hurt.
They expected perfection and all I expected was care.
If you don’t allow someone to be angered by you, what does that say about how you love people?
It’s the wounds we carry, the stories we’ve woven and the identities our egos love more than those around us that fuck all of this up… much more than what most fallouts and conflicts bring in the first bloody place.
But it’s much easier to just see the other side as faulty and disposable.
One example of this is when (after being a little quiet from my side) I kindly asked a friend to give me some space whilst I processed something (if they had hurt me or if there was a wound that was simply my shit to sort, or both). The friend poked and poked until they quite literally provoked me, with each statement their side moving further and further away from actually hearing me, my needs, my boundaries and my feelings.
This led to, yes… rage. 🌶️
I am not pretending my anger was pretty. I am not pretending I delivered it perfectly. But I am no longer confusing imperfect expression with undeserved pain.
And because I’d hoped that that friend who’d said that they’d be “lost without me” and “I wouldn’t be here, if it wasn’t for you” would have had the strength of character and awareness to hold that space; the realisation that all they did was use me, felt themselves attacked and decided to ghost, simply fucked me up.
I never claimed to be a perfect person. I just didn’t realise that I was being judged for it anyway.
The Animal Within
Behind every animal that is full of rage is an animal that is trying to protect itself, whether we see it as warranted or not. Rage is rarely irrational to the hurt party and never sporadically occurring. There’s always fuel for the fire, sometimes gentle air, sometimes stringent gasoline.
A cornered animal, a triggered animal and a threatened animal… are all trying to defend their survival, it just isn’t always that obvious on a human level. But it’s there, all the same and we’ve forgotten to draw this animalistic comparison.
We can suppress it or express it… either way the animal in us is injured.
And so, to show teeth is to warn.
Not necessarily to always fucking bite.
Where Are You Silenced?
The opposite end of my righteous anger was fake connection on the other side.
I see the dynamics a lot elsewhere. You probably do too.
It’s a society dissolving its sovereignty and swapping it for fabricated calmness and fake control. Reminds me of the film Equilibrium, actually.
I watch people who won’t be honest with their own partner, who won’t say no to a boss, can’t disappoint a parent, won’t put a boundary in place with a colleague, confront a family member, hell, some can’t even be annoyed with themselves.
I watched all the yes-people around this ex-friend of mine and what happened when some put their own hands up in hurt. They shed those people, only keeping those that told them what they wanted to hear or could keep at arms length until needing to be used later on.
This isn’t connection… this isn’t relationship. This is toxicity. This is abandoning the self for crumbs from people who only require perfect obedience or else be forfeit.
It’s suffocating true community, growing scapegoating culture and chopping down real connectedness.
And it’s killing us, killing each other and killing the planet.
Dramatic, but there, I said it.
So, the lessons I’ve learnt about relational anger…
Lesson Number One - Witness
The biggest lesson for me in all of this is to always witness how those around me deal with their rage.
Because it’s a sign of what will be heading my way.
If I see them people-pleasing, gossiping and moaning behind people’s backs, rolling their eyes at their partners and avoiding their way through life… I know that that is how they’ll treat the average human in their life.
They will avoid conflict, prefer their fake peace, their fake connection and will most likely dispose of you if challenged and they’ll deny the pain they cause.
With the example of the friend I separated from, I would tell them all the time that their spirit animal was an ostrich, always with their head in the sand. It’s a shame I never told myself that, too and got the fuck out of Dodge.
Instead, if someone seems to need regular “talks” with people, even in a seriously stern way, I’d pick that “scary” person over the toxic fake-smiley one any day. Lesson learned.
How ironic that the very type of “scary” person I’d want to be around now is the same “loud, opinionated, crass and over-passionate” type that I’ve always been accused of being myself.
Turns out, it’s better the monster you know.
Lesson Number Two - One-Sided Expectation
Another lesson was realising that it’s often the demand of perfectionism that’s at play here. Relationships which are not allowed to be ruptured are demanding perfection… or otherwise, it’s the eject button.
Think about it.
People who cannot survive your rightful anger are often asking for a relationship with no possible chance of rupture. That requires your silence and your performance over anything else.
And that is way more disgusting than someone raising their voice in defensive anger.
If you did something wrong and it provoked someone’s (rightful) protective rage and then you had the nerve to become the victim, that means that you demanded zero issues from the person you supposedly loved to ever be voiced and it was only your own hurt and rage that was allowed.
That is toxic. Avoid. 👋
Lesson Number Three - Boundaries
Boundaries aren’t just there for you to maintain like some stoic, unfeeling soldier at the footbridge of your feelings. They are there to decipher the dishonest and detain the damaging.
When I looked back at this friendship example I’m giving you, I knew who she was, I knew I deserved better… but I did what I thought was kind.
Kind to her. Not to myself.
I thought when the day came that I needed her that she would be there. She wasn’t.
I thought the day I needed to voice strong boundaries to be respected, she would understand the risk that this could cause if she kept provoking me. She didn’t.
She continued to prioritise her pleasure over everything and everyone else, like I’d seen it so many times before.
So now, my needs will no longer be sacrificed to keep any friend.
Lesson Number Four - Depth
This was a big one.
This lesson slipped from my mouth as if on autopilot, as I was vlogging my anger processing one day a couple of months back (which I may post soon too).
I said something like, “you have people trust you on everything, calling you wise and asking for your advice constantly… and the second you say that they’ve hurt you, they say no, that it can’t be true. All of a sudden, that can’t be true. And instead, they go and head for shallower mirrors where they’re more comfortable seeing themselves.”
To consciously decide that depth in relationship is to be avoided is to admit that you want ease. Not just ease of life… ease of control with people around you. That’s coercive and toxic.
Because, at some point, you’re bound to piss someone off (if the connection is based in any decent amount of honesty)… and so, by default, you’re admitting you don’t want that reflection.
Shallow isn’t lighter, it’s easier to manipulate.
We are mirrors to each other. All the time. And it is often during conflict (a kinder, more abstract way of saying pissing each other off), that we’re given the opportunity in life to learn, communicate, bond, grow, repair.
And when you have these people say that despite them causing you pain, that your rage doesn’t suit them… honey, you go find that shallow mirror.
I’ll be living my life over here.
Lesson Number Five - Rage Allowance
Rage can bring grief too and both require time and capacity.
As someone with CPTSD connected to neglect and abandonment, when I am abandoned or ghosted, it’s a special kind of despair and terror I wish on no one. This has made me ill for quite a while, which you may have seen in previous articles. It’s not new news to people in my life…
So when people who say they love me leave me in that way, because they can’t handle their imperfection, reflection and shame… the damage of that produces an allowance of rage that I get to spend how I need to in order to heal.
And through spending that allowance, the grief lessens over time, and you wake up one day and realise that what you were gifted was a true representation of who this person was at their core. You realise that you don’t want to be a part of their life now. That “loss” is actually on them.
The rage after all this damage allows me to feel passion, integrity, righteousness, inertia, energy… life! And even though it hurts so much, giving permission to the depths of its fire is what is necessary to be healthily in love with others and build an even healthier connection with yourself.
Rage is a fire cycle and in its embers, it ironically soothes.
Bonus Lesson - The Innocence Of The Avoidant
Put incredibly simply, people seem to forget that when anger arises on the other side of a relationship, it’s usually because of something they have done.
Read that again.
Obvious, I know. 🤦🏼♀️
Whether the rage is warranted or not, is not up to them to decide.
They don’t get to decide the impact.
In order to keep control and a sense of righteousness, they can accuse you of playing a game, overreacting, even being harmful yourself — there’s a difference between a two-sided rupture where both are equally hurt and the tennis response of batting it back to maintain your own story of innocence.
In this example I’m providing, that is exactly what happened. And despite their responses to nearly all of my (provoked) reasonings (and them responding “that’s fair” repeatedly), they still chose not to take accountability, blame depth for being the issue and then act the victim by ending it from a distance after months of stringing me along.
Curated innocence for the sake of avoiding accountability with those that have loved, housed, fed and counselled you is disgusting and I’m glad I’ve been able to see the behaviour for what it truly was as a barometer for a style of friend I will never fucking be.
Anger doesn’t knock once with damage like this, and yet, I’m grateful to be this side of it, rather than them.
My conscience is clear and I sleep better for it.
How To Use Anger As A Fuel 101
Suppressing anger and rage has kept women in line for most of our recorded existence. There’s a list longer than a giant’s arm that would explain the benefits the world’s systems receive from keeping us contained in this way.
I was judged for being angry when someone hurt me and it’s a shame I refuse to feel. That is on them.
I won’t lose myself to neglect triggering, chronic pain and emotional sickness, just to maintain a connection… with anyone, especially those who want shallow connections to use and lose.
Your expression is your best friend. It is your freedom.
Because, when you look at this at a micro level within your own life, you’ll see how every moment you don’t express, is a moment you are contained.
How much more will we enjoy our own cages?
And our escape looks like gentle, micro movements…
Saying no without giving a reason
Listening to people you’ve hurt and looking at their rage from both sides
Looking for expectations and questioning your part in them
Digging a hole in the ground and screaming into it
Sharing your hurt with a friend long before the issues compound and pile up
Journaling past anger to help get the old stuff out of your body
Giving permission to kids to be angry
Talking to your body when activated and telling yourself it’s ok to be angry
In Fiery Summary
If, during all of this work with righteous anger, you lose people, then you lose people.
They were never your people if they’re that easy to lose when it comes to your boundaries, expectations and needs.
Someone who loves you would never want to hurt you and if they still managed to, they’d want to understand, debate it out, repair and crack on. They’d trust in the character that you are 99.9% of the time and respect that their actions may have triggered a nastier-looking 0.1%.
That’s the reflective quality we need to see more of.
“People give you what they are, not what you deserve.” Patricia W.
☝ This.
Don’t let their inability to see you make you feel like you don’t see yourself, especially when you are wronged. Welcome anger like the oldest friend you have and the expression of it, the BF you’ve always wanted.
They tell you that healing just comes from things like breathwork, eating well and letting go. It doesn’t.
Your anger is your guardian.
Your expression is your ward.
Don’t let the world silence you.
Scream.
Lilith x
Thank you so much for reading and being here with me on this messy, beautiful journey.
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