Your most primal instincts to defend and protect are sacred.
you're not crazy, and there's nothing wrong with you.
What do we do when our instincts to defend and protect start to scare us a little bit?
How do we deal with the fact that in response to the extreme violence and injustice weâre witnessing on a daily basis, weâre discovering that our own vengeful and possibly violent instincts are starting to bubble up to the surface too?
Is there something wrong with us? Wanting to jump in to defend and protect the innocent in more intense ways that weâve ever experienced?
Short answer - fuck no.
Those instincts are sacred. Please, please, please donât pathologise them on colonialismâs behalf.
If youâve been moving through waves of raging intensity like youâve never experienced before - to the point where itâs maybe starting to scare you a little - this one is for you.
May we revel in the glory of our humanity together.
May we resist the indoctrination that we are wrong or shameful for feeling the way that we do.
May we unshame the way that our instincts for justice and radical compassion move through us - however they manifest themselves.
Thanks for being here comrade.
Love and need you.
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when rage starts feeling less like a transient experience and more like a personality trait
Rage reclamation seems to be the theme of the day in the times weâre living in.
As the veil is pulled back and more and more of us are seeing the horrific realities of white supremacy, colonialism, and late-stage capitalism, weâre living through times where learning how to move towards and really feel our rage is no longer something we can to âget to laterâ.
Rage is coming up every day now. If youâre noticing that youâre holding way more rage and anger than you ever thought your body was capable of - youâre certainly not alone.
Our rage is here to stay, and the way we relate to it matters.
Iâve been having lots of conversations with different folks over the past few weeks around the new and potentially scary ways that rage has been coming up. For many people, a new initiation into rage reclamation is happening. A new layer of anger has been reached, and it looks and feels a lot like the primal instinct to lose your shit completely and just start punching teeth in.
And for people who have always considered themselves to be nice, kind, compassionate, loving, peaceful people, these newly uncovered instincts to defend and protect can be a little bit shocking.
First up I do want to say here for legal reasons that all violence is bad all of the time, you should never ever do it, love and light, kumbaya, et cetera.
But the instinct is real and valid and sacred, and we have to find ways to honour it.
patriarchy and so-called niceness
Itâs not a coincidence that weâre shocked and a little shaken when we discover parts of ourselves that genuinely desire a belly-rumbling-roar-with-accompanied-flailing-fists situation.
For women, femmes, and afabs in particular - these instincts have been suppressed and shamed out of us for generations. Patriarchy puts a lot of effort into maintaining the whole nice, polite, docile, submissive, desirable, spineless thing. A world where women and femmes are in full command of their rage is a world where women and femmes are way less susceptible to being controlled - which of course, makes a lot of shareholders very nervous.
In fact, studies have shown that folks socialised as women have a really hard time even recognising their rage in the first place, a lot of the time we just call what weâre experiencing grief, or sadness, or exhaustion. This isnât even an attempt at masking the truth in favour of âkeeping the peaceâ - itâs a genuine lack of frameworks or resources to even recognise the experience weâre having as rage in the first place. Colonial capitalist patriarchy intentionally under-resources us.
Next time someone asks you how youâre doing, and you want to say youâre tired, youâre overwhelmed, or youâre feeling a lot of grief - dig a little deeper for a moment. Is it really sadness or exhaustion youâre feeling? If you get up real close to it and look at it properly, might it actually be rage?
(Little side note here, Soraya Chemaly wrote a wonderful book called Rage Becomes Her that goes into all of this in much more depth and detail, Iâd highly highly highly recommend it to anyone keen on learning more specifics about this!)
So here we are, in a world where we are stripped of not only the permission to experience or express our rage and anger, but also the language and the frameworks to even identify it or name it in the first place.
Itâs no wonder that as a result of the exponentially increasing collapse weâre all living through, our rage is spinning us out a bit. We are intentionally prevented from being able to interact with our rage in any meaningful way.
whiteness and control
Iâve found this gets more and more true the closer we get to systemic power.
The more proximity we have to whiteness, the less in command we are of our rage.
To be clear, when I say whiteness here, what I mean is power as defined by white supremacy. Proximity to power comes in a lot of shapes. Actual whiteness of course being one of them, but also wealth, academia, class, the âcorporateâ world, anything that we benefit from having inside the structure of white supremacy.
White supremacy looooooves control. Itâs all about it. Control of land and resources through colonisation, extraction, and capitalism; control of bodies through policy and the fact we have to exchange our labour for the stuff we need to live, and control over narrative around what anger is supposed to look like, whoâs allowed to feel it, what is âhealthyâ and ânormalâ, what is âdangerousâ or âunstableâ.
Growing up in a white supremacist world (which all of us have) means that weâve spent our entire lives getting absolutely saturated in this indoctrination around control.
Weâre trained to fear âlosing controlâ above pretty much everything else.
(Just look at the way whiteness relates to money, to our bodies, our kids, our homes, our jobs, our health, our fkn everything. Cling to it! Hoard it! Grab it! Make sure it performs correctly! Donât let it slip through your fingers! Control! Control! Control!)
Fully reclaimed and lived-into rage, especially the kind that has us fantasising about decking a bigot in the teeth or throwing a molotov cocktail or slashing some ICE car tyres, represents a total relinquishing of the control that whiteness has us clutching onto for dear life.
Of course your rage is destabilising. In this paradigm, itâs supposed to be. Youâre supposed to run away from it as fast as you can and repress the fuck out of it.
The fact that youâre here reading this is proof that youâre leaning in.
This is resistance. Fuck yea comrade.
there is nothing wrong with you, and youâre not a bad person.
Please hear me on this.
If you are experiencing rage and anger like you never have, and with it a thirst for justice and vengeance that until now, has never really been âyouâ before - there is nothing wrong with you.
You are not a bad person.
There is nothing you need to âfixâ.
You are not crazy, or unhinged, or unstable, or dangerous, or any of it.
You are getting in touch with your most primal instincts, and they are telling you how important it is to defend and protect the innocent.
This is a good thing. This is what these instincts are for. When weâre bombarded by injustice and horrific crimes against humanity on all side, we want our instincts to kick in and call us to deeper action. This is nothing more or less than a signifier of your intact humanity.
It also needs to be said here that the system we are living in is already violent.
Class subjugation is violence. Systemic racism is violence. Denying healthcare to those who need it is violence. Ripping people from their homes and stuffing them in vans is violence. Evicting folks and leaving them on the street with nowhere to go is violence. Climate collapse is violence. White supremacy, patriarchy, and colonial capitalism are all already violent.
Unless youâre a member of the ruling class, this paradigm is already committing a whole bunch of violence against you, all the time, purely by the way the system is designed to work. We live in a violent system.
Anything that happens in response to the violence committed against us can only ever be self defence. The working poor are never the instigators. The marginalised are never the instigators. The oppressed are never the instigators.
If your instincts are kicking in and theyâre telling you how fun it would be to kick that conservative politician whoâs stripping yet more reproductive rights in the guts, youâre not suddenly a horrible terrible dangerous violent person.
These instincts are self defence.
Feel them, hone them, protect them. They anchor you into your agency. They agitate you into action. They are what this paradigm has spent generations attempting to steal from you. Taking them back is resistance.
And remember too - just because youâre now in touch with your primal instincts and the part of you that imagines violence, does not necessarily mean youâve gotta immediately go out and do a bunch of violence.
Super obvious I know but itâs important to say out loud and remind ourselves of. Your brain is attempting to add narrative to the spike of cortisol your body is experiencing, and itâs sending your imagination running wild with fantasies of vengeance. Itâs a narration, not an instruction. Nothing to worry about.
Often, just feeling this instinct and recognising it for what it is will begin the process of metabolising it, and youâll come out the other side with new clarity on the action you need to take for the good of all our liberation.
The important thing is that we allow ourselves to feel these instincts all the way through, without shaming ourselves for them, and without being frightened of them. The instincts that come with the new levels of rage youâre experiencing are nothing to fear. They arenât dangerous, and they arenât making you dangerous.
Celebrate these instincts and all the wild shit your brain does in response to them when they come. Your values are revealing themselves to you. Your body is telling you how important it is to defend and protect the vulnerable. This is good.
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finding regenerative ways to move the rage
Important!! None of this stuff matters unless your relationship to your rage + primal instincts is no longer one of fear or shame!! Focus on that first!!! Let yourself feel it!! Remember how much of this paradigm is invested in you never feeling it!!! Remember that these instincts are your humanity making itself known!! Teach yourself to celebrate them!!
When you are able to step to your own rage without shame or fear, it will begin to show you where your energy wants to go.
Each time the rage comes (especially if it feels particularly spicy), begin by moving your body. Lots of shakes, twitches, kicks, punches, all that good stuff. As you move your body, you might find a scream building in your chest. Let it out. Indulge your imagination, let it run wild with all the fantasies and stories it possibly can. Move your body and keep up the intensity until you feel the visions in your mind and the fire in your body beginning to fade.
Once itâs passed to the point where your muscles donât feel coiled to spring anymore, take a moment to sit with the embers of your intensity.
This intensity is fuel. Itâs action waiting to be taken.
Ask the intensity what needs to happen, what it wants you to do. If the answer is still âfight them! Fight them! Fight them! Raarrrgghh!!â begin the shaking and yelling again. Let yourself really enjoy it. Move it all the way through.
Ask again. Keep going until you land on something tangible and accessible that you can do literally immediately. Whether itâs write a letter or make a phone call to a rep and give them an earful, organise a protest, attend an already-happening protest, research local underground efforts to protect the vulnerable from law enforcement, or articulate your experience and share it with a friend / the world so that it can be witnessed and affirmed - do it immediately. Use the fire of your primal instincts to push you along. Tangible action is the main thing here. We canât just let the rage roll around in our bodies, with nowhere to go and no purpose to serve.
And, in a more long-term kinda way, it might be worth looking into a local self-defence class. Feel back into your primal instincts, and get really clear with yourself around what you would do if people you loved were in physical danger. What would you do if you were at a protest that was getting really amped up, and you could see that vulnerable people are at risk? Would you want to use your body to defend and protect those people, in the moment?
If the answer is yes, maybe follow up on that. Resource and equip yourself with the skills you need to be that specific kind of useful, in that specific kind of moment.
Honestly, even if the moment never comes, being able to physically defend yourself and your loved ones will be incredibly empowering. A lot of the time, when my rage really amps up, itâs made much much worse by feelings of powerlessness, or a lack of agency.
Remember your power. Take it back wherever you can. Lean into your agency.
All of this is what the rage is for.
And most importantly, please remember that extreme sensations of rage and anger do not make you a bad or dangerous person. There is nothing wrong with you. You are certainly not alone in feeling what youâre feeling. Itâs okay. Itâs GOOD. Honour those instincts. Protect them.
Love and need you comrade. So glad youâre here.