I want to be in groups where it’s as okay to communicate anger as it is to communicate any other feeling. It is the only group I would trust and feel actually safe with. In my experience the problem with anger only comes from not communicating it soon enough and then acting it out (which could be raising my voice).
Good link - 'communication is not violent'. Something about NVC has always felt a bit uneasy to me. Can't claim to be an expert however - it would be interesting to see a rebuttal from an NVC advocate.
Here for this. I had an incredibly moving experience of anger as beautiful (my own anger) at a personal development retreat - then started running “rage club” a space to play with our anger as a generative force… which both confirmed that anger is beautiful and needs spaces where it’s welcome, and that there are good reasons why people avoid opening it up… paused for the pandemic and in no rush to pick up again. For me there’s distinctions within anger that I haven’t fully grasped, maybe in the same way that for desire we can distinguish Eros from lust. Not like good/bad anger but something like skilful/unskillful anger or even effective/ineffective anger.
The now "classic" counterweight to NVC-style anger-negativity is perhaps Brad Blanton's "Radical Honesty" https://www.radicalhonesty.com/ which when I first read about it did seem both refreshing and plausible. I would now say, for some people, not all! Providing a safe container for the anger of others is a really powerful and worthwhile idea, but from personal experience this is often hard, especially for those brought up in "feminine" stereotypes to deal with "masculine" anger. For many people the "trigger" from people expressing anger authentically is too strong, and when triggered into a "protector part" there's the danger of no IFS "Self" left holding the space.
Can we do it collectively, though? I would hope so, and I see that as the most plausible way forward. Being in a trusted group should give vulnerable people the sense of safety, in that there are plenty of others to restrain any hint of physical violence, so that really can be perceived as no threat.
But your point, Rich, is a really good one, as it is specifically about signs of anger from those in a position of leadership or authority. Maybe here, there needs to be clear culture of shared leadership — one that is not only displayed by the co-leaders but also able to be fully taken in by the other participants? The question that emerges for me is, how can we set up or embody such a culture, in a way that is convincing enough to enable people to let go of their leader-dependency?
Love this - I work with ACT therapy for individuals and couples, and I find I spend a lot of the time trying to validate people's anger (for all gender identifications) - men are often socialised to not feel angry as it's 'aggressive' and for women it's not 'feminine.' Parents often squash their children's anger as it challenges them personally. So children learn not to have their own boundaries or to be able to ask for fairness - which causes all sorts of difficulties in adult relationships (not to mention the world in general). The quote 'Aggression is the absence of healthy conflict' springs to mind. For many people - saying things 'non-skillfully' is a first step towards self expression and healthy boundaries. Saying things well (ie 'non-violently') is an ongoing journey that many people are only at the beginning of. And hey we all go into fight or flight sometimes, and it's nice to have some tolerance of that from others! If our 'imperfect' efforts get demonised or 'crushed' we don't try again and learn to do better. Something I've found helpful in relationships work is education about the physiology of fight or flight (which I call 'red brain') and understanding this as a normal human reaction, which we will ALL go into at some points - (and which clouds judgement). It doesn't make someone a 'bad person.'
At the same time as working with this at the psychological level, I hold it in tension with my strong spiritual beliefs about non-violence and the destructive nature of anger (in Rumi's words 'anger tastes sweet but it kills'). So it's an interesting but productive journey trying to find the sweet middle way between these two sets of beliefs! NVC can be a super helpful tool for this, in my experience, but like any framework it has its benefits and its limits.
Synchronistic maybe, last few weeks I've questioned, in myself the supposed-always-correctness of "non violent communication". What's good about anger, in its hotness, is it's clarity, unlike more liquidy emotions, like anxiety and sadness. I'm all in favour, personally, with anger expressed angrily. How else! I usually prefer actively aggressive to passive aggressive. Owning that bit of "male power" let's say (equally available to female beings) can be empowering. A thunderwave, like "using the Voice" in Dune. If someone only has that angry mode: bad. But on occasion, in moderation, can it be good, forgivable, welcome? Absolutely.
If anger is going to be made into a pariah, it's no good trying to say anger's only bad if it comes from men. The simmering passive forms of aggression that rose up in the modern west (something to do with Calvinism I suspect) are just as bad, if not worse. Perhaps it is a feminine tendency, but like all masculine and feminine tendencies, it is a mistake to overly associate them with the gender a person presents themselves with. And as you say, anger is not always (or even often) coupled with violence or a harbinger of violence to come.
The whole anti-anger racket seems to be about denying the ineradicable, necessary violence that's always under our feet. There is value in trying to manage speech that might precipitate conflict, but this effort conspicuously originates from the late medieval moment when the common folk became
politically articulate. Especially in early modern English political discourse, the common people align with and prefer straight talk and plain, undissembling speech while the elites were associated with duplicitious Machiavels. An uneasy standoff between the two tendencies has remained to this day.
I listened to some standard corporate leadership wisdom this week where an "always be positive" message was coupled with another apparently contradictory point about the value of receiving frank and honest criticism. Perhaps all our positive/negative binary characterizations are too limiting, much like optimism/pessimism, hope/despair. You can't and shouldn't be at one extreme or the other all the time.
There should be a lot of space between these poles, but that space may only be as big as the egos in play.
This 'edge' has definitely been on my mind and heart for the last years and I love the clarity I get with your dream/story.
Besides healing, as people and collective (s), I sense the importance of an 'aim' of growing the range and capacity of our individual and collective beings. Anger definitely is connected to expansion, but at what cost?
The conscious 'separation' (trigger word?) of individuals into temporary groups (e.g. men's and women's circles, or children and adults) to me seems like one potential way of creatively/naturally moving in this.
Thanks for making me (more) excited to be connected to this circle.
The solution might come from the explicit and implicit contracts of the workshop, and from an understanding of what the contrasting parties of those who are having their own conversations versus those who are invested in your engagement of the quiet individual may variously want.
Is there another place nearby where a more intimate discussion may be had? Then you can ask those who are invested to migrate and leave the rest to follow their revealed preference. If a subset of the circle rising to leave catches the attention of the chatterers and they want an explanation, then they face a choice: to break the illusion that they are participating actively in the workshop and consciously commit to the value of their side conversation, or re-evaluate their disengagement and re-commit to the primary conversation with the newfound awareness that their place in it is not a given simply due to where they are seated. They'll have to remember that realizing the value they came to the workshop for in the first place requires their active participation, not just their passive presence in the room.
Of course, there will be those individuals who are reflexively offended that their side conversation is not the automatic center of the workshop. These are the people who will use any ammunition to lower another's status in relation to their own, without the slightest concern for hypocrisy or betraying their espoused values. They have only learned to use concepts like "male anger" and "non-violent communication" as ammunition against those who threaten their egos. You can lead people with this pattern of communication to water, but they won't drink until they're ready. The course in the meantime is to minimize the damage they do to the communities they rely on by accepting them as they are and aiming to protect yourself and vulnerable members from their callousness through the gentlest means possible.
I want to be in groups where it’s as okay to communicate anger as it is to communicate any other feeling. It is the only group I would trust and feel actually safe with. In my experience the problem with anger only comes from not communicating it soon enough and then acting it out (which could be raising my voice).
Good link - 'communication is not violent'. Something about NVC has always felt a bit uneasy to me. Can't claim to be an expert however - it would be interesting to see a rebuttal from an NVC advocate.
Here for this. I had an incredibly moving experience of anger as beautiful (my own anger) at a personal development retreat - then started running “rage club” a space to play with our anger as a generative force… which both confirmed that anger is beautiful and needs spaces where it’s welcome, and that there are good reasons why people avoid opening it up… paused for the pandemic and in no rush to pick up again. For me there’s distinctions within anger that I haven’t fully grasped, maybe in the same way that for desire we can distinguish Eros from lust. Not like good/bad anger but something like skilful/unskillful anger or even effective/ineffective anger.
The now "classic" counterweight to NVC-style anger-negativity is perhaps Brad Blanton's "Radical Honesty" https://www.radicalhonesty.com/ which when I first read about it did seem both refreshing and plausible. I would now say, for some people, not all! Providing a safe container for the anger of others is a really powerful and worthwhile idea, but from personal experience this is often hard, especially for those brought up in "feminine" stereotypes to deal with "masculine" anger. For many people the "trigger" from people expressing anger authentically is too strong, and when triggered into a "protector part" there's the danger of no IFS "Self" left holding the space.
Can we do it collectively, though? I would hope so, and I see that as the most plausible way forward. Being in a trusted group should give vulnerable people the sense of safety, in that there are plenty of others to restrain any hint of physical violence, so that really can be perceived as no threat.
But your point, Rich, is a really good one, as it is specifically about signs of anger from those in a position of leadership or authority. Maybe here, there needs to be clear culture of shared leadership — one that is not only displayed by the co-leaders but also able to be fully taken in by the other participants? The question that emerges for me is, how can we set up or embody such a culture, in a way that is convincing enough to enable people to let go of their leader-dependency?
(And, Hi Lukas!)
Love this - I work with ACT therapy for individuals and couples, and I find I spend a lot of the time trying to validate people's anger (for all gender identifications) - men are often socialised to not feel angry as it's 'aggressive' and for women it's not 'feminine.' Parents often squash their children's anger as it challenges them personally. So children learn not to have their own boundaries or to be able to ask for fairness - which causes all sorts of difficulties in adult relationships (not to mention the world in general). The quote 'Aggression is the absence of healthy conflict' springs to mind. For many people - saying things 'non-skillfully' is a first step towards self expression and healthy boundaries. Saying things well (ie 'non-violently') is an ongoing journey that many people are only at the beginning of. And hey we all go into fight or flight sometimes, and it's nice to have some tolerance of that from others! If our 'imperfect' efforts get demonised or 'crushed' we don't try again and learn to do better. Something I've found helpful in relationships work is education about the physiology of fight or flight (which I call 'red brain') and understanding this as a normal human reaction, which we will ALL go into at some points - (and which clouds judgement). It doesn't make someone a 'bad person.'
At the same time as working with this at the psychological level, I hold it in tension with my strong spiritual beliefs about non-violence and the destructive nature of anger (in Rumi's words 'anger tastes sweet but it kills'). So it's an interesting but productive journey trying to find the sweet middle way between these two sets of beliefs! NVC can be a super helpful tool for this, in my experience, but like any framework it has its benefits and its limits.
Synchronistic maybe, last few weeks I've questioned, in myself the supposed-always-correctness of "non violent communication". What's good about anger, in its hotness, is it's clarity, unlike more liquidy emotions, like anxiety and sadness. I'm all in favour, personally, with anger expressed angrily. How else! I usually prefer actively aggressive to passive aggressive. Owning that bit of "male power" let's say (equally available to female beings) can be empowering. A thunderwave, like "using the Voice" in Dune. If someone only has that angry mode: bad. But on occasion, in moderation, can it be good, forgivable, welcome? Absolutely.
If anger is going to be made into a pariah, it's no good trying to say anger's only bad if it comes from men. The simmering passive forms of aggression that rose up in the modern west (something to do with Calvinism I suspect) are just as bad, if not worse. Perhaps it is a feminine tendency, but like all masculine and feminine tendencies, it is a mistake to overly associate them with the gender a person presents themselves with. And as you say, anger is not always (or even often) coupled with violence or a harbinger of violence to come.
The whole anti-anger racket seems to be about denying the ineradicable, necessary violence that's always under our feet. There is value in trying to manage speech that might precipitate conflict, but this effort conspicuously originates from the late medieval moment when the common folk became
politically articulate. Especially in early modern English political discourse, the common people align with and prefer straight talk and plain, undissembling speech while the elites were associated with duplicitious Machiavels. An uneasy standoff between the two tendencies has remained to this day.
I listened to some standard corporate leadership wisdom this week where an "always be positive" message was coupled with another apparently contradictory point about the value of receiving frank and honest criticism. Perhaps all our positive/negative binary characterizations are too limiting, much like optimism/pessimism, hope/despair. You can't and shouldn't be at one extreme or the other all the time.
There should be a lot of space between these poles, but that space may only be as big as the egos in play.
This 'edge' has definitely been on my mind and heart for the last years and I love the clarity I get with your dream/story.
Besides healing, as people and collective (s), I sense the importance of an 'aim' of growing the range and capacity of our individual and collective beings. Anger definitely is connected to expansion, but at what cost?
The conscious 'separation' (trigger word?) of individuals into temporary groups (e.g. men's and women's circles, or children and adults) to me seems like one potential way of creatively/naturally moving in this.
Thanks for making me (more) excited to be connected to this circle.
The solution might come from the explicit and implicit contracts of the workshop, and from an understanding of what the contrasting parties of those who are having their own conversations versus those who are invested in your engagement of the quiet individual may variously want.
Is there another place nearby where a more intimate discussion may be had? Then you can ask those who are invested to migrate and leave the rest to follow their revealed preference. If a subset of the circle rising to leave catches the attention of the chatterers and they want an explanation, then they face a choice: to break the illusion that they are participating actively in the workshop and consciously commit to the value of their side conversation, or re-evaluate their disengagement and re-commit to the primary conversation with the newfound awareness that their place in it is not a given simply due to where they are seated. They'll have to remember that realizing the value they came to the workshop for in the first place requires their active participation, not just their passive presence in the room.
Of course, there will be those individuals who are reflexively offended that their side conversation is not the automatic center of the workshop. These are the people who will use any ammunition to lower another's status in relation to their own, without the slightest concern for hypocrisy or betraying their espoused values. They have only learned to use concepts like "male anger" and "non-violent communication" as ammunition against those who threaten their egos. You can lead people with this pattern of communication to water, but they won't drink until they're ready. The course in the meantime is to minimize the damage they do to the communities they rely on by accepting them as they are and aiming to protect yourself and vulnerable members from their callousness through the gentlest means possible.
This is a wonderful introspection in the role of a facilitator in a group. I love hearing your thoughts on this topic at this depth.
Which part of anger is reasonable or can negotiate?
Left brain without a mirror to study the face?
Surely the sandbox can be shared at this late date?