Sticks and Stones: anger, responsibility, and control.
I wrote this a while back and never posted it, partly because it was too rambly and fragmented, partly because it just never felt like time. Now, with all the discussion of bullying and the deaths of an alarming number of young GLBT people, it seems like if not a good moment, then an appropriate one, no matter how rambly it is.
I have much to say about the deaths, much to say about how deadly homophobia and transphobia are to young people, how they have no place in compassionate parenting no matter what your religion says about it. I have a lot to say about bullying. I have a lot to say about how shitty it is to be a child or a teenager, even if you are straight, white, and male, and how nobody wants to actually think about that. I don't know if I will ever find the time or the stomach to do it. This is only a tiny fraction of what should be said. Still, I'll say it.
So. Onward.
. . .
Seen on a church sign near my house this week:
He who angers you, controls you.
Right, right. Heard this one before. It's a variation on "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
Wow, is that ever an unhelpful thing to say. Seriously. That is an asshole line if ever there was one.
Let's look at the implied coda:
"Words can't hurt you; you can only let them . . . and you should never let them, or the pain is your own fault. YOU are the problem, not the asshole insulting you. YOU are letting them control you.
This "letting others control you" crap implies all of the following:
* That the listener is not qualified or able to judge when they really are being controlled, and when they are acting in their own best interests.
* That anger is always a wrong reaction to harmful words. (How many of us have been told we need to not be "so angry?")
* That emotional pain is either deserved or is not real. (How many of us have been told that we aren't "really" angry or that we don't "really" hate something or someone?)
My grandmother once told me I didn't really "hate" the kid who gave me a concussion in junior high. Trust me, I hated him. She was just really uncomfortable with the idea that a thirteen-year-old girl was capable of wanting to wind someone's guts around a tire iron and twist it.
But you know what? I was never as angry as I was when I was a teenager, because I was never so trapped and so fucking helpless. I was being bullied constantly. If not actively, then passively. Being ignored, being excluded. I was not actually violent, not really; I never acted on this anger in any way that caused another human being physical pain. But I wished I could. And a huge part of that was that I had no outlet for the frustration and pain, because every time I tried to talk about it, to express it, I was shut down or ignored, often with this "sticks and stones" shit pinned on.
I once spent an hour in religion class being told that the pain I felt when someone insulted me was actually my fault, because I chose to get angry and be hurt. That's when I figured out that if you write "TURN THE OTHER CHEEK" on a piece of magical Paper of Uncomfortable Truths and hold it in front of a mirror, it reads "BLAME THE VICTIM."
It was an attempt to control our emotions by telling us that we were not qualified to judge them. It was an attempt to neuter our anger by telling us that our pain was our own fault, and that defending ourselves was just as bad for us as what hurt us. It was an attempt to shame us out of showing an undesirable emotion. It was a way of maintaining authority over us by telling us what to feel.
They weren't trying to teach us this technique to be helpful. If that religion class been meant to truly help, it would have taught the communication skills needed to defuse and avoid conflict. It would have addressed how to express anger appropriately. It would have taught us how to deal with pain, instead of simply telling us not to feel it.
No such attempts were made. It was just "Try harder to not feel these things that suck." We were told that if we were just good enough people, we could live in the shittiest world conceivable without suffering at all. If, in a feat of emotional bootstrap levitation, we just refused to feel hurt when we were hurt, we would not be hurt. It made no sense to me at all. It still makes no sense to me.
That is not what you tell people you expect to go out and make extraordinary changes in the world. That is what you teach people when you want to control them. And that's bullshit. "Sticks and stones" is a bullshit approach to dealing with pain and anger. Any approach that first puts the burden of evading hurt or anger on the victim, or which tells them to ignore it, is a wrong approach. Factually wrong: it doesn't work for most people. Morally wrong: it causes harm.
Yes, a lot of people express their anger in a negative way - especially young people. I remain convinced that this is because they haven't been taught to deal with it honestly. If someone is told they shouldn't feel anger, period, instead of taught to express anger in a way that is constructive and useful to them, they are probably going to express it negatively. What else do they know how to do? People should absolutely be taught to cope with strong negative feelings, but the goal should never be to eliminate those emotions altogether.
Because of anger's ability to create both positive and negative change, it is usually one of the first three feelings to be censured. (The second is lust, and the third is grief or sorrow, neither of which are considered seemly to admit to feeling in any strength or for any length of time, and all of which are strictly governed in terms of how it is "appropriate" to demonstrate them, for how long, and toward whom. Especially grief, q.v. "Just a cat!" and "Just some actor!" and "Get over it already.") Deny a person their anger, and you are denying them an enormous part of their self.
Because I have resisted allowing others to take that part away from me, I've been accused of being an "angry person." I don't understand this. I don't enjoy being pissed off. I don't go looking for reasons to be pissed off. I don't spend most of my time pissed off. I just don't pretend not to be pissed off when I am pissed off. Apparently that makes me an "angry person."
I do think I am high-tempered, a feature often dismissed as "high-strung," "high-maintenance," "too sensitive," and "overly emotional," or, perhaps, if we're not talking about a woman, "hair-trigger," "discriminating," "brooding," or "moody," all of which completely overlook the great strengths that come with being high-tempered - strengths that will go to waste if you spend your whole life letting other people tell you how to feel.
Maybe I have a different take on this because telling me not to be angry or hurt, to let something go, or to feel differently is doomed to failure. I'm bipolar. I don't have feelings. I have weather fronts. "Choose your attitude" has proven as effective for me as walking outside when it's a hundred and ten in the shade and "choosing" not to be hot.
But that's just it; turning the other cheek doesn't work for everyone. It's great when it does, but it's not a morally superior approach. Insisting that there is something inferior about the people for whom it is a hopeless prospect and telling them that it would work if they just did it right is flat-out malicious.
There's a tendency among people who are really, really good at letting stuff go to think of people who cannot easily detach themselves from their feelings of anger as less enlightened at best, and at worst as actively participating in their own self-destruction.
I hope everyone reading this can see how deeply patronizing that is.
There's also a tendency to conflate anger with hate, which is aggravating as hell.
I don't condone hate - though I understand it and I feel quite a lot of it - but anger, anger I like. We're old friends. Anger is energetic, it is alert without being fearful. When my anger sputters out and is replaced by depression and panic attacks and rancid irritability, I know I'm hitting a bad place. I feel anger when I'm at my most healthy. That alone tells me it is a healthy emotion and serves a vital function.
That there are people out there telling others not to engage in a necessary and natural emotional state is sick.
There's always a finger-wagging disclaimer at the end of articles dealing with the harmless or even beneficial effects of some supposedly unhealthy thing. "A glass of wine with dinner is probably not going to kill you! You actually do need to eat to survive! Sex: fun for everyone! But DON'T OVERINDULGE!" It's kind of like they put that in there so that you have a line or two where nothing important is being said so that you have time to roll your eyes.
Similarly, there's always the warning tacked to the tail end of any conversation about healthy anger which says something about not letting anger control you, often along with a conflation of "angry people" with people who are abusive, and anger with hate. There's a warning about people with Anger Problems - as if the people who tell you not to feel angry are not the single most common anger problem there is. If the author doesn't say it, someone else is sure to in comments: "But anger is so dangerous and negative! We should all be made of sunshine and gratitude, all the time! Anger festers! It's bad for you! BAD!"
I'm not going to say that here. We don't usually warn people about the perils of hope as false guide, or of optimism's occasional inability to see reality as it is, or love which blinds you to a bad person's true nature. We generally don't tell people to shut up about their hopes that things will change. We tolerate people making asses of themselves over love to the point that it's been a major touchstone of storytelling since long before Paris and Helen of Troy. We don't heave bricks at optimists as a sign of our disapproval, even though the temptation can be dire. All of these things - hope, optimism, love - can fuck your shit up just as surely as anger can, and yet we save criticism for the things that, culturally, are considered negative and unseemly, even though they serve a useful function. Specifically, anger and lust and sorrow.
So I ask, as you go about your life, full of emotions, that you remember to leave yourself room - and leave others room - to feel anger, lust, and grief. Feelings, even the "negative" ones, are not states that you should rush through, trying to spend as little time there as possible. People feel these things because they need to. And they have every right to it.
Remember this if you are a parent, especially. Listen to your children, don't dismiss them. Anger and fear and sorrow are adult emotions, not childish ones. That they are having trouble dealing with things is not a sign of their immaturity, it's a sign that they are growing, and they need your help and guidance.
As adults, we tell ourselves and one another that we don't need validation for our feelings. Well, children do. Until at least age twenty. And I'm not kidding about that. Kids, even precocious ones, do not have the emotional sophistication that adults have. They don't have the wiring that allows them to ignore pain, and telling them to ignore it doesn't actually make that rewiring take place. Cumulatively, it does not bring about emotional toughness. It brings about a terrible fragility and a truly pitiful helplessness, because they are being asked to do something that they not only cannot do, but that they should not have to do.
Kids need to be taught to deal with pain, fear, anger, grief. Adults need to remember that these feelings are not bad things to be stamped out.
And there's no reason to single out any particular emotion for warning: any emotion is harmful if you let it control you.
This does not mean we should not feel.
I have much to say about the deaths, much to say about how deadly homophobia and transphobia are to young people, how they have no place in compassionate parenting no matter what your religion says about it. I have a lot to say about bullying. I have a lot to say about how shitty it is to be a child or a teenager, even if you are straight, white, and male, and how nobody wants to actually think about that. I don't know if I will ever find the time or the stomach to do it. This is only a tiny fraction of what should be said. Still, I'll say it.
So. Onward.
. . .
Seen on a church sign near my house this week:
He who angers you, controls you.
Right, right. Heard this one before. It's a variation on "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
Wow, is that ever an unhelpful thing to say. Seriously. That is an asshole line if ever there was one.
Let's look at the implied coda:
"Words can't hurt you; you can only let them . . . and you should never let them, or the pain is your own fault. YOU are the problem, not the asshole insulting you. YOU are letting them control you.
This "letting others control you" crap implies all of the following:
* That the listener is not qualified or able to judge when they really are being controlled, and when they are acting in their own best interests.
* That anger is always a wrong reaction to harmful words. (How many of us have been told we need to not be "so angry?")
* That emotional pain is either deserved or is not real. (How many of us have been told that we aren't "really" angry or that we don't "really" hate something or someone?)
My grandmother once told me I didn't really "hate" the kid who gave me a concussion in junior high. Trust me, I hated him. She was just really uncomfortable with the idea that a thirteen-year-old girl was capable of wanting to wind someone's guts around a tire iron and twist it.
But you know what? I was never as angry as I was when I was a teenager, because I was never so trapped and so fucking helpless. I was being bullied constantly. If not actively, then passively. Being ignored, being excluded. I was not actually violent, not really; I never acted on this anger in any way that caused another human being physical pain. But I wished I could. And a huge part of that was that I had no outlet for the frustration and pain, because every time I tried to talk about it, to express it, I was shut down or ignored, often with this "sticks and stones" shit pinned on.
I once spent an hour in religion class being told that the pain I felt when someone insulted me was actually my fault, because I chose to get angry and be hurt. That's when I figured out that if you write "TURN THE OTHER CHEEK" on a piece of magical Paper of Uncomfortable Truths and hold it in front of a mirror, it reads "BLAME THE VICTIM."
It was an attempt to control our emotions by telling us that we were not qualified to judge them. It was an attempt to neuter our anger by telling us that our pain was our own fault, and that defending ourselves was just as bad for us as what hurt us. It was an attempt to shame us out of showing an undesirable emotion. It was a way of maintaining authority over us by telling us what to feel.
They weren't trying to teach us this technique to be helpful. If that religion class been meant to truly help, it would have taught the communication skills needed to defuse and avoid conflict. It would have addressed how to express anger appropriately. It would have taught us how to deal with pain, instead of simply telling us not to feel it.
No such attempts were made. It was just "Try harder to not feel these things that suck." We were told that if we were just good enough people, we could live in the shittiest world conceivable without suffering at all. If, in a feat of emotional bootstrap levitation, we just refused to feel hurt when we were hurt, we would not be hurt. It made no sense to me at all. It still makes no sense to me.
That is not what you tell people you expect to go out and make extraordinary changes in the world. That is what you teach people when you want to control them. And that's bullshit. "Sticks and stones" is a bullshit approach to dealing with pain and anger. Any approach that first puts the burden of evading hurt or anger on the victim, or which tells them to ignore it, is a wrong approach. Factually wrong: it doesn't work for most people. Morally wrong: it causes harm.
Yes, a lot of people express their anger in a negative way - especially young people. I remain convinced that this is because they haven't been taught to deal with it honestly. If someone is told they shouldn't feel anger, period, instead of taught to express anger in a way that is constructive and useful to them, they are probably going to express it negatively. What else do they know how to do? People should absolutely be taught to cope with strong negative feelings, but the goal should never be to eliminate those emotions altogether.
Because of anger's ability to create both positive and negative change, it is usually one of the first three feelings to be censured. (The second is lust, and the third is grief or sorrow, neither of which are considered seemly to admit to feeling in any strength or for any length of time, and all of which are strictly governed in terms of how it is "appropriate" to demonstrate them, for how long, and toward whom. Especially grief, q.v. "Just a cat!" and "Just some actor!" and "Get over it already.") Deny a person their anger, and you are denying them an enormous part of their self.
Because I have resisted allowing others to take that part away from me, I've been accused of being an "angry person." I don't understand this. I don't enjoy being pissed off. I don't go looking for reasons to be pissed off. I don't spend most of my time pissed off. I just don't pretend not to be pissed off when I am pissed off. Apparently that makes me an "angry person."
I do think I am high-tempered, a feature often dismissed as "high-strung," "high-maintenance," "too sensitive," and "overly emotional," or, perhaps, if we're not talking about a woman, "hair-trigger," "discriminating," "brooding," or "moody," all of which completely overlook the great strengths that come with being high-tempered - strengths that will go to waste if you spend your whole life letting other people tell you how to feel.
Maybe I have a different take on this because telling me not to be angry or hurt, to let something go, or to feel differently is doomed to failure. I'm bipolar. I don't have feelings. I have weather fronts. "Choose your attitude" has proven as effective for me as walking outside when it's a hundred and ten in the shade and "choosing" not to be hot.
But that's just it; turning the other cheek doesn't work for everyone. It's great when it does, but it's not a morally superior approach. Insisting that there is something inferior about the people for whom it is a hopeless prospect and telling them that it would work if they just did it right is flat-out malicious.
There's a tendency among people who are really, really good at letting stuff go to think of people who cannot easily detach themselves from their feelings of anger as less enlightened at best, and at worst as actively participating in their own self-destruction.
I hope everyone reading this can see how deeply patronizing that is.
There's also a tendency to conflate anger with hate, which is aggravating as hell.
I don't condone hate - though I understand it and I feel quite a lot of it - but anger, anger I like. We're old friends. Anger is energetic, it is alert without being fearful. When my anger sputters out and is replaced by depression and panic attacks and rancid irritability, I know I'm hitting a bad place. I feel anger when I'm at my most healthy. That alone tells me it is a healthy emotion and serves a vital function.
That there are people out there telling others not to engage in a necessary and natural emotional state is sick.
There's always a finger-wagging disclaimer at the end of articles dealing with the harmless or even beneficial effects of some supposedly unhealthy thing. "A glass of wine with dinner is probably not going to kill you! You actually do need to eat to survive! Sex: fun for everyone! But DON'T OVERINDULGE!" It's kind of like they put that in there so that you have a line or two where nothing important is being said so that you have time to roll your eyes.
Similarly, there's always the warning tacked to the tail end of any conversation about healthy anger which says something about not letting anger control you, often along with a conflation of "angry people" with people who are abusive, and anger with hate. There's a warning about people with Anger Problems - as if the people who tell you not to feel angry are not the single most common anger problem there is. If the author doesn't say it, someone else is sure to in comments: "But anger is so dangerous and negative! We should all be made of sunshine and gratitude, all the time! Anger festers! It's bad for you! BAD!"
I'm not going to say that here. We don't usually warn people about the perils of hope as false guide, or of optimism's occasional inability to see reality as it is, or love which blinds you to a bad person's true nature. We generally don't tell people to shut up about their hopes that things will change. We tolerate people making asses of themselves over love to the point that it's been a major touchstone of storytelling since long before Paris and Helen of Troy. We don't heave bricks at optimists as a sign of our disapproval, even though the temptation can be dire. All of these things - hope, optimism, love - can fuck your shit up just as surely as anger can, and yet we save criticism for the things that, culturally, are considered negative and unseemly, even though they serve a useful function. Specifically, anger and lust and sorrow.
So I ask, as you go about your life, full of emotions, that you remember to leave yourself room - and leave others room - to feel anger, lust, and grief. Feelings, even the "negative" ones, are not states that you should rush through, trying to spend as little time there as possible. People feel these things because they need to. And they have every right to it.
Remember this if you are a parent, especially. Listen to your children, don't dismiss them. Anger and fear and sorrow are adult emotions, not childish ones. That they are having trouble dealing with things is not a sign of their immaturity, it's a sign that they are growing, and they need your help and guidance.
As adults, we tell ourselves and one another that we don't need validation for our feelings. Well, children do. Until at least age twenty. And I'm not kidding about that. Kids, even precocious ones, do not have the emotional sophistication that adults have. They don't have the wiring that allows them to ignore pain, and telling them to ignore it doesn't actually make that rewiring take place. Cumulatively, it does not bring about emotional toughness. It brings about a terrible fragility and a truly pitiful helplessness, because they are being asked to do something that they not only cannot do, but that they should not have to do.
Kids need to be taught to deal with pain, fear, anger, grief. Adults need to remember that these feelings are not bad things to be stamped out.
And there's no reason to single out any particular emotion for warning: any emotion is harmful if you let it control you.
This does not mean we should not feel.