A Dream of Sacred Anger ❤️‍🔥

I just woke up from one of those dreams that are so completely literal, utterly lacking in any symbolism, just a straightforward display of my subconscious fears & preoccupations.

We were at a really excellent gathering. I had that exquisite feeling of being “in my tribe”. I was hosting a workshop. It was going well: people were having a good time, they were happy to follow along with the process I had designed. At some point, I felt the group drift off the rails a bit. People started speaking out of turn, talking over each other. As facilitator, I had asked one of the more reserved participants to share something vulnerable, but we couldn’t hear what they said because other people were speaking out of turn.

So then, the pivotal moment: I raised my voice.

I don’t remember what I said, but the effect was to assert my authority as the host of the space. I used force, just the tiniest eyedropper dose of force, to shut down the background chatter. I felt a small shockwave ripple through the social field as this caught the attention of the group. The backchannel conversations certainly stopped. All eyes on me.

In the first split second, I felt good about how I had returned the group to a state of focus. But pretty quickly I could see that some people were upset with me; I’d overstepped my mandate, lost their trust.

It took a minute for the dust to settle, but then it was clear. By raising my voice I’d fractured the group into polarised camps. On the one side was a group of people “on my team” — either because they value direct communication in general, or because they know me well enough to trust my good intentions. That side believed that no harm was done, some of them celebrated me for taking care of the group, others just thought it was no big deal.

The other side reacted with a mix of fear & outrage. How dare I raise my voice! As a man to be so ignorant of his power! Using vocal tone to implicitly threaten aggression? Typical male entitlement, and who does this power tripping patriarch think he is anyway!?

The workshop ended, the gathering continued, and that’s when the creeping feeling of discomfort started getting under my skin. I remember the transition, from feeling totally free, in my element, deeply rooted in my sense of belonging, to feeling frightened, the sickening sense of a community discussing me behind my back, some opaque process of mob justice evaluating whether I was fit or unfit for membership in the tribe.

Now that I’m awake reflecting on this scene, I don’t know what advice I would give to the me in my dream.

Of course, I could have chosen a different path. Instead of raising my voice in a signal of aggression, a threat of authority, I could have reached deeper into curiosity and found a peaceful next step. Curiosity would notice, hey the group is losing focus, people are speaking over each other, I wonder what that’s about? I could have gently brought the group’s attention to this shift in our dynamic, and we could have found a generative next step together.

But instead of going “up” in cognitive complexity to do this higher reasoning, I went “down” into my brainstem, and allowed a glimmer of my anger to be seen. That’s what caused the dilemma: anger.

In a lot of spaces these days, male anger is not only unwelcome, it’s treated as if it were the most dangerous explosive material on the planet. Of course I understand why this is: male anger is routinely coupled to violence, abuse and the systematic dehumanisation of people who have less power. But that’s not the whole story of what anger is.

Anger is a signalling system: it lets me know when something important is at risk. Anger points to what is sacred. It’s the ignition switch for my protective instinct, it activates my desire for justice, it feeds my creative impulse. My energy for making a better future is mobilised by my anger at the shortcomings of the present.

I’ve spent a lot of time in groups where that raw unprocessed anger is forbidden. It’s met with severe social sanction. We’re supposed to “process” the anger quietly, figure out what message it has to bring, and then find a diplomatic way of communicating it. Maybe that’s the price of civilisation. But I can’t always tolerate this attenuated self-expression, not all the time. I want to be in spaces sometimes where everyone has opted into a social contract that presumes that communication is not violent. I want to be in groups where it’s okay to get upset sometimes, knowing that our bonds of trust & mutual respect can survive occasional moments of intensity, conflict, and aggression.

Do you wanna play?