Restorative Matters
When anger finds a voice
I’ve been sitting here at the laptop for hours.
Three long hours to be more precise.
I’m restless, and I can feel the tension in my body as my left leg shakes vigorously up and down, in a attempt to discharge the tense feeling and therefore keep me seated.
Anyone with an office job may not think three hours at a desk sounds particularly dramatic.
But for me, it feels like an eternity.
My life is usually split between childcare, housework, and running a small business that all require plenty movement.
So to me, three hours is long enough that my eyes are now blurry from staring at the words on the screen.
Even when I write my monthly, I mostly use voice-to-text functions to allow me to pace around the room as I think and form ideas, so this tight feeling in my body and the headache could well be from being so unusually static.
But the task at the laptop wasn’t just overwhelming, it also made me angry, and not just anger, but also something very new to me.
Rage.
Rage that was smoldering beneath the surface, getting hotter and hotter like an underground fire, slowly generating more and more pressure.
Shaky leg aside though, it was becoming impossible for me to keep all this rage keep inside.
This was the kind that builds, still somewhat repressed, the kind that tightens your throat when you try to speak it out, simply because there is too much wanting to come through at once.
Like me, many of us, have no practised pathway to be able to comfortably express such enormous feelings.
Often to women in midlife, this level of anger introducing itself with such force that you can no longer repress it.
No longer can you dampen your feelings and internalise them to accommodate others’ comfort.
For me this new experience of midlife rage felt like a young dragon breathing out its first fire, almost shocking itself, half wondering where in the space this sudden and intense heat had come from.
Sometimes this midlife rage arrives with zero catalyst; sometimes it appears suddenly.
For me, it arrived during the last year spent supporting my ten-year-old child.
It swept centre stage, immediately delivering lines like it had been rehearsing this production for years.
It had arrived in the form of a long and exhausting battle with our local authority, beginning, rather bizarrely, on our family holiday last June.
But here I was, months later, sat at my laptop, left leg shaking, clicking the top of the pen repeatedly staring at the days task: a 34,000-word detailed evidential chronology of the past year’s journey with the local authority as I advocated for my daughter’s disability and educational rights.
And unmet advocacy, it turns out as I sit here, reliving those past 12 months that left my child in a very dark place, can end up accumulating as rage.
Rewind one year though, and I find myself at the start of my journey finding my midlife voice that began on a sun lounger; staring at a sparkling blue pool overlooking the Ionian Sea.
Surely all this could have waited ten days until we returned home? I asked myself.
But by then, home had already become something we were struggling to inhabit.
Sadly, our brilliant daughter was already deep in autistic burnout.
Not an inward shutdown version either.
The all-out, fire-starting, rageful version.
What should have been a once-in-a-lifetime holiday at a beautiful all-inclusive resort in Corfu became something very different.
The nights ended with loud, volatile meltdowns in a hotel room at two o’clock in the morning.
My husband bore the brunt of those nights.
My own nervous system was already struggling under the weight of interrupted sleep, yet I would lie there listening to the chaos unfolding, acutely aware of the other holidaymakers on either side of our hotel room.
I felt dreadful for them, stuck next to our noisy chaos.
Any attempt to quieten my daughter only seemed to fuel her distress further.
Looking back, there is an irony I couldn’t have seen at the time.
She was experiencing and expressing a form of rage that was completely beyond her control.
Meanwhile, I belonged to a generation that had learned something very different about feelings of anger
I’d learned how to internalise them, to give them to my nervous system to squirrel away, to tuck beneath the layers in my body, only later to surface as weird, undiagnosable, chronic health issues.
But those long nights in Corfu, became the beginning of an unexpected journey.
In the beautiful cyclical way that raising children offers their parents continued opportunities for their own growth, experiencing my daughter’s relationship with anger and rage eventually led me to examine my own in the fight to advocate for her.
During the day on our holiday though, we experienced her precursor to nightly dsyregulation and rage, the repeated refrain:
“I’m bored.”
Again. And again.
“I’m bored.” “I want to go”
Often with only a fraction of a second between each statement and an intensity far beyond a typical child's attention span.
Those words weren’t really about boredom.
They were her catch-all sentence for the constant dysregulated state she was in.
We know that now.
Just as we now understand why she would eat nothing but two bites of the same plain Margarita pizza and the same two small scoops of vanilla ice cream every single day on that holiday, despite us staying at a once-in-a-lifetime all-inclusive resort with five different on-site restaurants.
What should have felt like an endless choice somehow became no choice at all.
Most evenings, my husband or I would take turns spending no more than ten minutes at the table before the ‘meal’ was over.
Two bites of pizza.
Two scoops of vanilla ice cream.
Then…
“I’m bored.” “I want to go”
Again.
And again.
And again.
They belonged to a child whose nervous system had simply run out of thread.
Looking back, beginning the advocacy process on that holiday was not strange at all.
It felt inevitable.
When you’re watching your kind, funny, bright child disappear in front of you, there is remarkably little energy left for wondering whether the timing is appropriate.
Coincidentally, for me, this journey of advocacy unfolded alongside the later stages of perimenopause, a period many women describe as a time of heightened emotion, shorter tolerance, and often furious, unexpected anger.
Yet the older I get, the less convinced I am that midlife creates anger.
I wonder whether it simply calls parts of us into the foreground that have spent years waiting beyond the wings.
People-pleasing is a far too common affliction for many females.
For years, it stands centre stage beneath the lights.
Delivering most of the lines as the lead role.
It keeps the audience comfortably entertained, with anger written out of the production altogether, shunned and shamed to the dusty corners of backstage.
Anger has rarely been a quality we have celebrated in women.
We’re taught to admire warmth.
Appeasement.
Compassion.
Patience and selflessness.
We are far less comfortable when those same women become difficult to move, unwilling to shrink, or prepared to say, “No more.”
So perhaps anger wasn’t absent at all.
Perhaps it had simply spent decades being deliberately written out.
Squashed down into the corners of our bodies.
Until midlife, and for me, fierce mothering stands up to rewrite the play.
In her thought-provoking book How Emotions Are Made, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett offers a fascinating way of thinking about emotions that challenges much of what we think we know.
Rather than emotions existing as fixed, hard-wired responses waiting to be triggered, she argues that our brains are constantly interpreting information from our bodies, our memories and the world around us, constructing emotional experiences from moment to moment.
We experience anger not simply because anger exists inside us waiting to emerge, but because our brain is continually trying to make sense of what our body is telling it.
I found myself wondering whether my anger hadn’t suddenly appeared at all.
Perhaps I had simply reached a point in life where the old ways of moving through the world no longer fitted the landscape, I found myself standing in.
So why did this particular fight consume me so deeply?
As an autistic woman, part of me possesses an extraordinary ability to hyperfocus.
To pursue a subject with a level of tenacity that can border on obsession.
Alongside that sits another part of me, one that delights in detail and nuance, together with a strong sense of justice.
Put that together and you get a warrior-like tenacity.
For the last few years, those traits, while obsessive at times, have been directed towards one thing.
My daughter’s well-being.
Researching.
Learning.
Email writing.
Advocating.
Pushing back.
And holding my ground.
And yet, when I would try to speak about this subject to the professionals, my throat would tighten and the words would jam.
I used to assume this was anxiety, a lack of confidence perhaps?
I now understand that something more powerful and complex was happening.
When you have spent much of your life learning to contain anger rather than express it, speaking it clearly to the world becomes a skill, that, like me, you may never have been given the opportunity to practise.
I would worry about upsetting the person I was angry with.
I would imagine the conversation becoming uncomfortable or confrontational.
And so, even when I knew exactly what I needed to say, some part of me would pull back from saying it.
Squash it in.
Take the hit for the sake of someone else’s ease.
That was the restraint I could feel tightening around my throat.
Not a lack of confidence at all.
But I didn’t know that before, so as I attempted to speak my mind, a worry would follow immediately: what if the person in front of me mistook my struggle to speak for nervousness or uncertainty?
The possibility of being misunderstood as nervous would make me actually anxious in its own right, adding another layer of tension to something that had in fact begun with suppressed anger.
Yet at the root of it was a woman who had never properly learned how to express anger with clarity, proportion and respect.
Because I do believe anger has an important place in our lives.
Rage too, at times.
They are powerful emotions capable of alerting us to injustice, crossed boundaries and situations that should not be tolerated.
The difficulty is that many of us are given very little guidance on how to recognise them, express them and then allow them to pass.
Men and women are not universally taught the same lessons about anger.
Although no individual experience fits neatly along gendered lines, many boys grow into men who have been given greater permission to express anger openly, sometimes to a degree that becomes intimidating or deeply unsettling to those around them.
In our culture, we begin rehearsing some of these differences remarkably early.
Walk down the toy aisle of almost any shop and the coding is difficult to miss.
Boys are still offered plastic weapons, soldiers and forms of combative play that we readily shrug off with, “Boys will be boys.”
A few aisles away, the girls’ section announces itself in pink: dolls to care for, wide-eyed animals to nurture, princess dresses and stories in which sweetness and happily-ever-after tend to win the day.
Of course, toys are only one small part of a much bigger cultural picture, but the messages underneath them are interesting.
Boys can receive permission to practise aggression; girls are more often invited to practise care.
For many boys as they grow into men, the pendulum can swing too far, with anger becoming their primary, or most readily available, emotion, crushing any hope of accessing the important emotional cues beneath it, such as fear, sadness or regret.
Many girls are taught the opposite.
To contain it.
To remain agreeable.
To disguise it as politeness, guilt, silence or self-doubt.
Anger pushed continually out of sight does not necessarily disappear.
It may leak sideways through passive resentment, irritability or a general sense of being wronged.
Sometimes it is turned inwards, where it becomes harder to recognise at all.
I recently saw a social-media clip claiming that many autoimmune conditions in women are caused by repressed anger.
The idea stayed with me, perhaps because it pointed towards a broader and more credible question: what happens to us when an emotion as powerful as anger is repeatedly felt but never given a safe route through?
When it bottles up and jams the throat.
A few years ago, we kept chickens.
Each morning at 6am., the automated coop door would slowly wind itself open. The moment they heard the mechanism begin to whirr, all four chickens, with their plump feathery bottoms, would rush towards the exit at once.
Four hens trying to occupy the same small doorway, creating a kind of feathery bottleneck.
That is exactly what this new, untethered rage felt like.
Too much trying to emerge through one opening at the same time.
Yet frustratingly, in my year of advocacy, I had enough knowledge in me to fill days of conversation.
Enough evidence to take the system through a court tribunal three times over, and I felt powered by enough injustice to fuel a small town.
“Plug me in, I’m ready to go” was my constant mood.
But I also wonder whether there is another reason this particular experience found me when it did.
My first sustained experience of rage wasn’t on my own behalf.
It arrived because I was fighting for another, for my daughter.
Perhaps, for somebody who had spent decades becoming exceptionally skilled at trying to keep everybody else comfortable, it was easier to discover the protective power of anger when it belonged to somebody I loved rather than to myself.
Getting my ‘rage wings’ through supporting someone else proved to be an extraordinary apprenticeship, but it also made me wonder about women more generally.
Many psychologists and researchers have written about the ways girls are often encouraged to be accommodating, agreeable and relational from an early age.
Anger, particularly female anger, can be uncomfortable for those around us. For many women, it arrives tangled up with guilt almost immediately.
We don’t simply ask, Am I angry?
We ask, Is it OK to be angry? Have I overreacted? Or my personal go-to: Have I made someone uncomfortable?
Perhaps that is why so many women encounter their deepest rage first through protecting somebody else.
A child. A friend. A parent. A deeply held cause.
Because fighting for something outside of ourselves somehow feels more permissible than banging the drum for ourselves.
But nonetheless, drum banged, and transform me it did.
And transformation rarely feels elegant from the inside.
We celebrate butterflies but forget the chrysalis stage, the gloopy green mess that a caterpillar apparently becomes before rebuilding into the winged wonder we all agree on as a sign of lightness and beauty.
That is where I find myself.
The gloopy green liminal space.
Somewhere between versions.
The people-pleasing girl who carried me through much of my life is still present.
I feel affection for her.
She wants everybody to be happy.
People-pleasing isn't simply a learned trauma response as its often suggested, I think it also comes from a genuine desire to bring peace to others.
But there’s a line.
Self-preservation on one side and kindness to others on the other.
At forty-eight, I find myself wondering whether these changes are also part of what midlife offers.
As well as acquiring responsibility, paying mortgages and, for many, choosing to raise children, midlife is also about becoming comfortable upsetting people.
The spiritual growth hidden within this last year has not escaped me.
The circumstances themselves have been exhausting.
The stress has been real.
The time taken from my marriage, my work and my family has been real.
I would not choose it.
And yet I cannot ignore what it has done for me.
Something has defiantly been 'forged in the fire' of getting in touch with my own rage.
As a Gestalt processor (someone who tends to understand experiences through whole images and patterns rather than isolated details) I spent the last few months of the year fighting for my daughter, returning to a scene from the series Game of Thrones.
With her signature white-blonde plaited hair, Daenerys Targaryen walks calmly into a blazing funeral pyre carrying three gifted dragon eggs.
We watch the last few minutes of the episode believing we are witnessing her death.
A voluntary act made through the grief of her beloved partner dying.
The flames consume everything.
By morning, nothing should remain.
Instead, as the smoke begins to clear, she slowly emerges from the ashes.
She is naked.
Blackened with soot.
Completely unburnt.
She doesn’t just survive.
She is transformed.
The woman who enters the fire no longer exists.
The woman who walks out commands an entirely different kind of presence.
She doesn’t shout, she simply stands there.
And everyone else understands that something irreversible has happened.
This scene, this image, really stayed with me.
As someone who processes life through images and metaphor, it became the one I kept returning to in those last difficult months.
It became a visual anchor.
Whenever I questioned whether I could keep going with it all, the emails, the meetings, the setbacks, I would find myself returning to the image of that fire.
It reminded me that there are some journeys we do not emerge from unchanged.
The scene speaks to something deeply human, and perhaps something deeply feminine too.
Some transformations do not happen gently.
Some parts of us can only be shaken loose when life becomes so hot that holding on is no longer possible.
Those parts cannot simply be folded away or reasoned with.
They have to actually be burned away.
Of course though, there was nothing that cinematic about what I was doing battling the local authority.
In fact it was all rather exhausting, drawn-out and dull.
Emails, evidence collecting, reading books on disability policy, long waits, and carefully worded letters.
On the surface, it was painfully ordinary.
But beneath that ordinary surface, something profound was happening.
Every moment I held my ground when every instinct wanted to apologise, smooth things over or make myself smaller added another log to the already blazing fire.
There were days I genuinely wondered whether the very fire I myself had started would consume me.
In many ways, it did.
It burned away certainty. It burned time with my children.
It burned away the comforting illusion that doing the right thing is enough for the world to respond in kind.
But it burned away something else too.
The unquestioning belief that my role in life as a woman is to try to look pretty and keep everybody comfortable.
I don’t believe that intellectually for even a second, but the echoes of that rhetoric live in my subconscious, and they do for many women.
That rhetoric entered the fire.
It did not walk back out.
Now that my daughter has been awarded the educational placement I spent a year fighting for, there has been a month or so for life to become a little quieter.
The constant email writing has stopped, and her additional needs folder has been closed until September.
In its place, something curious has happened.
The rage has left, and so the quiet should feel like relief.
In some ways, it really does.
Physically, I’m exhausted from it.
I can feel the residual tension.
My jaw.
My neck.
Absolutely across my shoulders.
The constant state of readiness had become physically expensive, my Oura Ring seems to reflect that, showing an undeniable rise in my Heat Rare Variable since the fight with the local authority was resolved.
There is certainly nothing romantic about living with that level of sustained anger.
It consumes extraordinary amounts of energy.
And yet there’s another feeling sitting alongside the exhaustion.
One I almost hesitate to admit.
That is that part of me rather liked the fight.
Not the stress, of course, and definitely not the long hours writing emails, but the extraordinary sense of aliveness that the fight brought to my door.
Like a soldier on the front line, there’s nothing like avoiding death, or in my case losing the fight of advocacy, to keep you feeling insanely alive.
For the first time in a very long time, I had stepped fully into the world beyond my front door.
After years as a stay-at-home mum raising young children, a life many describe as somehow both relentlessly demanding and overwhelming, yet punctuated by long stretches of waiting around for someone to finish feeding, to fall asleep, to get dressed, to get in the car, out of the car, and goodness knows how many hours spent waiting by the door for shoes to go on feet, much of my energy had naturally turned inwards and dulled at the edges.
Less joie de vivre, more constant “Mummmmmmy!”
But here I was, suddenly out there in the world, forward-facing, shield-bearing and fighting.
I was also learning, with a sharp upward curve, I was standing my ground for what was right.
I was becoming frighteningly competent in a world I had never expected to understand.
I had taken on something much bigger than myself.
And, eventually, I had won.
Justice, it turns out, has a chemistry all of its own.
I found myself wondering whether I had become addicted to the adrenaline.
Caught between desperately wanting the whole thing to end… and feeling strangely alive because it hadn’t.
Even after the decision finally arrived, I didn’t stop overnight.
For two weeks, I felt oddly numb.
Six weeks later, I still don’t think I’d entirely slowed down.
It reminds me of watching elite runners cross a finish line.
They don’t stop at the tape.
Their bodies carry them another hundred metres before they gradually begin to realise the race is over.
Although at times I felt more like an injured feral animal, thrashing, hissing and swiping long after the wildlife vet had examined it.
I think that is where I am now.
Learning how to stop running, or hissing.
For a while, I found myself wondering whether I had somehow lost what I had learned.
Had I slipped backwards?
Was that fierce woman only ever a product of circumstance?
Or had she become part of me?
Because anger is an extraordinary emotion.
It tells us that something matters.
That something has crossed a boundary.
That something requires our attention.
Without it, many injustices would continue unquestioned.
Without it, I doubt my daughter would now have the educational future she deserves.
But anger was never designed to become the climate we live in.
It is a signal.
Not a permanent address.
Too little, and we abandon ourselves.
Too much, and eventually it begins to consume everything around us.
In his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky returns to a deceptively simple observation: our physiology is brilliantly adapted for short bursts of mobilisation.
We are designed to respond intensely when something genuinely threatens us and then, once the danger has passed, to recover.
The problem is not the stress response itself.
The problem is when we never leave it.
The more I reflected on that, the more I wondered whether anger might work in much the same way.
I liken it to my two experiences of labour.
I’ve given birth twice and, despite finding pregnancy rather challenging, I genuinely loved labour.
The most valuable strategy I used during my first birth had nothing to do with breathing techniques or pain relief.
It was this:
When the contraction finishes, let it finish.
Don’t stay inside it.
Tensed and bracing.
However intense those sixty or ninety seconds may be, there is space before the next one arrives.
Use it by resting.
Completely.
Relax every muscle you can.
Because nobody can stay inside one continuous contraction for twelve hours.
Women don’t labour for twelve hours.
They labour for perhaps ninety seconds…
…and then they rest.
Then another ninety seconds.
Then another rest.
The wisdom lies in the rhythm.
Engage.
Release. Relax.
Engage.
Release. Relax.
Looking back now, I wonder whether that rhythm applies to so much more than childbirth.
Advocacy.
Conflict.
Grief. Just life itself.
Even anger itself.
The contraction is necessary.
It serves a purpose.
It moves something forwards.
But if we never allow ourselves to leave it, eventually we become exhausted by an intensity we were never designed to sustain.
It’s a lesson for all of us in modern life, really.
Most women labour how we live in modernity: continually, without pause.
Its not encouraged either, not once in the free NHS antenatal class did I hear the midwife educate the group on the power of intentionally settling after each contraction.
Perhaps learning to work skilfully with anger is not so much about becoming calmer.
Perhaps it is about learning when to contract…
…and when to rest again.
Recently, I found myself sitting beside a friend’s six-year-old at dinner.
They were colouring enthusiastically with the grown-up art pens the older girls had brought, one black pen waving animatedly through the air as they explained something with all the wholehearted energy only young children seem capable of.
Then it happened.
Three thick black strokes swept across the hip of my brand-new dungaree suit.
The child froze.
“I’m so sorry.”
Then again.
“And again… I’m really, really sorry.”
I knew immediately this was a genuine accident.
I also knew that the ink wouldn’t wash out.
Those two things were true at exactly the same time.
I was cross. My new dungarees!
I was angry.
Definitely not with the child, but with the situation.
A tiny loss in the grand scheme of things, but knowing that didn’t make that first flash of feeling cross, or angry any less real.
And it made me wonder what we are actually supposed to do with anger like that.
There was nobody to blame.
Nothing to fix. No lesson to teach.
She is six, and she appologied!
My lovely dungarees were simply gone.
First-world problem? Yes, but still worthy of the emotions of disappointment.
For years, I might have described what happened next as pushing the anger down.
Modern life is full of micro-situations that cause mild anger in the moment with no real outlet. On their own, these little situations are almost irrelevant, but they can build up, especially if we are overly conscious of refraining from any expression of them in order to protect someone else from feeling bad.
There is a town in Pennsylvania called Centralia.
More than sixty years ago, a fire began beneath the ground.
It still burns today.
The original cause has long since passed, yet the fire continues beneath the surface, forcing almost everyone to leave.
Whole streets were eventually abandoned.
I find myself thinking about that town today.
Sometimes I wonder whether our constant stream of unprocessed anger in modern life is a little like the town of Centralia.
The original event ends.
Life moves on.
Yet beneath the surface, the fire continues to burn.
Eventually, whole parts of our lives begin to evacuate.
Energy.
Joy.
Curiosity.
Humour.
Playfulness.
And maybe connection.
As if, one by one, they get elbowed out by mounting, unprocessed micro-anger and irritation.
Perhaps this is why balance matters so much.
Too little anger expressed, and we slowly disappear.
Too much, and it burns everything in its path.
Neither feels like freedom.
It is a curious thing to spend decades learning to suppress one of our most protective emotions, only to discover in midlife that it never really went anywhere.
Parts of ourselves we once considered unacceptable finally begin to take their rightful place alongside everything else.
Standing beside kindness and compassion.
I don’t miss the people-pleasing version of myself as much as I thought I would.
She believed peace was something created by making herself smaller. I no longer believe that.
Peace, I am beginning to suspect, comes from something else entirely.
From allowing every part of ourselves a seat at the table.
The gentle parts.
The grieving parts.
The frightened parts.
And yes…
…the angry parts too.
I’m certainly not saying they should always be listened to.
But they do deserve to be heard.
Now that the year of fighting for justice for my child has come to completion, the fire it started in me has not disappeared.
It has become less like a wildfire racing through dry woodland and more like a steady flame in a hearth.
Ready when warmth is needed.
Capable of cooking a meal.
Offering light on dark evenings.
Powerful enough to command respect.
Gentle enough that those I love can safely gather around it.
Perhaps that, more than anything, is what this last year has taught me.
It’s not about extinguishing the fire.
It’s more that I need to continue learning the skill of how to tend it, so it burns steady, bright and calm.
