What Do We Do with the Feminine Rage?

There’s a simmering pot inside of every woman, whether she’s aware of it or not. It has scalded many a woman and man across the ages. And every time that burning steam has had a brief escape, the response is always the same: quickly put the lid back on.

That simmering pot is feminine rage. 

There is no single event that any woman has lived that justifies the rage, just like a pot of water doesn’t boil the moment you turn the stove on. Instead, it’s a slow buildup, the accumulation of a generations of anger accentuated by the burden of being quiet about it. 

Before I continue, I want to acknowledge that men carry their own collective wound. I certainly don’t want to write an article about feminine rage that is in any way taken to imply that men aren’t also wounded. The men and women who harm other men and women were also victims in an endless cycle. Men are also harmed by the systemic issues that squash women. 

I'm choosing to write about feminine rage because not only do I specialize in working with women, but also because women’s anger gets even more vilified than men’s. 

Feminine rage is a deep-seated, accumulated, righteous anger that is passed down generation after generation for the lifetimes of violations that women have experienced, which they/we have historically had very little recourse to correct. The centuries of squashing women’s rights has gotten so deeply embedded in our collective norms that it’s sometimes hard to even notice how some of these issues are still alive and well.

But I have something to confess before I move on… 

For many years, I was amongst the women who did not understand feminists. I saw them as angry, raging bitches who hated men, didn’t want to wear bras or have the car door opened for them. I was class valedictorian. I got hired into incredible companies. I’ve always loved the chivalry of a door being opened for me (still do.) When I was in my twenties and early thirties, I honestly couldn’t understand all of the fuss. 

It was only after I started working on the sexual trauma I carried, and then started helping other women do the same, that I began to come into contact with the anger. 

Oh yes, once the shame and pain of abuse begins to be addressed… oh baby, there comes the anger… 

…and RAGE.

What I didn’t realize when I was a 22 year old that I now know deeply as a 52 year old is that we all carry ancestral and collective trauma in our cellular memory. What Yung called the collective unconscious has been proven to be scientific fact, as epigeneticists have shown that current generations can carry the emotional imprints of seven generations ago. This means we all carry emotional scars from war, famine, rape, slavery, and all other forms of oppression, control, and harm that befell our ancestors since the 1700s.

Recently, during a session of my Sovereign Rising program, I was facilitating some energy work with the group. We were working on stepping into our sovereignty and claiming our rightful place as the stewards of our own lives. And suddenly, we came into contact with a deep, boiling, red-hot lava inside all of the women: the silent, suppressed rage of centuries of women being told, “know your place, woman!” 

Know. Your. Place.

Stay. In. Your. Place.

This collective rage is spilling out as events like the Cornell 57 rock the psyche and remind everyone of the realities of what’s happened to women over centuries…

Pause for a breath… 

Please join me. 

Let’s take a deep breath together. 

Slow, full breath in. 

Gentle, soft breath out.

I pause because I’ve really struggled writing this article. Once you start to scratch at the surface of the rage, it easily gets stirred, and it can be hard to not get yourself boiling over. Once the volcano starts erupting, you can’t quite stuff it all back in tidily… and we all need to go about our day.

I don’t want to get you all stirred up and then send you off. 

So what do we do about this rage that is so old and runs so deep?

How do we keep ourselves from exploding as raging maniacs?

How do we not lose the plot in the moments that we get fired up and the anger is totally disproportionate to the situation?

The hard truth? 

There is NO quick tip.

Here’s what I’ve found is necessary: deep healing and skill building. 

In the session with the group I mentioned earlier, we spent a good portion of the call clearing some of the imprints of that rage. It was good. It was powerful. And it takes consistent work. Because clearing centuries of pain and rage will never be the work of just one day or one session… just like you can’t bail out a sinking boat with a single scoop of a bucket.

But what you can tap into today and at any moment is compassion. 

Compassion is the cooling water that tempers the fiery rage and helps put it out. 

If you have touched some of your rage today, can you meet it with compassion?

Take a moment to validate the mountains of pain from the centuries of violations experienced before you (and the ones that happened to you.) Hold those earlier parts of yourself, and hold the women from the past, with deep loving care. 

Tell them, I see you. 

I’m so sorry that you’re enraged. 

I’m sorry they hurt you so profoundly and made you to ‘stay in your place.’

This is just the beginning. There’s so much work to do in clearing this collective rage; and it’s important that we do it because rage is too big, too powerful to try to wield into constructive action. It leads us into wars and moves humanity towards self-destruction. We all have our part to do. 

As we do the work of clearing the rage, we begin to be able to touch pure anger that is proportionate to a specific situation. That proportionate anger is an extraordinary power.

That’s where you tap into the strength that you can so clearly feel inside your anger in order to restore the boundary that has been crossed and claim the rights that were violated. Righteous, proportionate, wise anger fueled the actions of the feminists that came before us. They earned us property rights, voting rights, and made their way onto the universities, boardrooms, and Supreme Court. 

As we continue to do this healing work and tap into our wise anger, we can continue to pave the way so that seven generations down from ours, girls and boys are no longer carrying the imprints of misogyny.

If you’re ready to do some of this work, (or more of this work if you’ve already joined me in the past), I’ll be facilitating another live call:

The Power of Anger

Wednesday, November 18th at 7:00 pm EST

This call will be somewhat different from the previous one because I’m feeling called to do some clearing work on the call, which is not what I did on the first one a few months back. I’m also wanting to touch on the topic of ancestral rage and feminine rage in particular. So if you came to the first one, you might still want to come to this one. 

And please do spread the word! 

The energy and the clearings are always so much more potent when we have a group gathering.