Alchemy of Menopausal Rage

Feminine fire is rising and we don’t need to apologise. The fire ball finds anger and alchemises it into a clarifying, cleansing, skillful energy; a truth bomb. Burning woman sits in the fire of her own creation and lets herself be cooked.

Claiming our rage in perimenopause and menopause is natural, says Dr Christiane Northrup, in The Wisdom of Menopause. The hormones that were once driving ovulation find a new role as neurotransmitters in the brain, honing our intuition and discernment. (1)

I love her anger affirmation. “Our midlife bodies and brains fully support our ability to experience and express anger with a clarity that’s not possible prior to midlife. The rewiring and hormonal changes that occur in a woman’s brain in perimenopause makes her vision clearer and her motivations easier to identify. Using anger as a catalyst for positive change and growth is always liberating.” (2)

For many women, anger and all its nuances – irritability, bitterness, frustration, resentment – bubble up in the premenstrual phase, leading into the dark moon. We cannot deny shadow woman who has things to tell us and consequences for not listening. 

As menstrual educator Jane Hardwicke Collings explains, it’s the Dark Goddess showing up and whatever needs to go, can be released with the blood of menstruation. Otherwise it can start getting bigger and bigger and swept under the carpet…until….perimenopause and menopause. (3)

During perimenopause, it is as if a veil lifts. One thing that often happens is that women recall and decide to confront past abuses and losses. 
Dr Christiane Northrup, The Wisdom of Menopause

Repressed Rage

I feel rage as an incandescent ball of white light hovering in my throat. A volcanic vice-like pressure building around my neck ready to explode. I’ve come to recognise this feeling as repressed rage. 

Silenced and voiceless in my formative years, I came to accept rage and the slew of emotions that came with it, as a yoke around my neck. Too hot to hold lightly, too dangerous to stick the hot poker in someone’s eye, I kept it inside. The consequences: insomnia when my marriage ended, overexercising and arthritis, brain and adrenal burnout. 

In menopause, repressed anger can contribute to depression, overwhelm, high blood pressure, headaches or migraines, moodiness, hot flushes that come for some women as power surges. As Northrup says, it’s likely all anger and it’s a signal from our inner wisdom about what needs to change. (4)

It wasn’t until the revolutionary March 4 Justice in the third week of March, 2021 that the volcanic anger started bubbling over in me. I watched women walking in the streets in cities around Australian seeking a voice that could be heard, wanting justice and it gave me courage to confront past abuses in my life.

To express anger skillfully without blame or judgement takes vulnerability and courage. Anger has power; it is valid and creative and nudges us towards healing. Now, naming it and sharing it as not only my rage but as an ancient rage, embedded in my ancestral DNA, in the collective anger of my gender and the patriarchal society I live in helps me find ways to alchemise and galvanise anger, breathe with it, without it destroying me. 

I listen to other women’s experiences of rage and their stories interweave with my own. “I just want to throw things, break things for not being heard”. “I see the fear on others faces when I am out of control angry.” “When I give out anger, I get it back in my face.” “Anger scares me.”  

And other friends who find freedom, resolution and peace when expressing anger…“I feel vital, alive, energised, empowered. I have an embodied experience of rage in the safe container of my body. I sit with it and don’t need to do anything with it.”

And another…“When I feel able to safely express anger and the men in my life apologise for their words or behaviour, I know my fury has landed.” One woman shared that she looks behind the rage and sees a deeply layered complex of “griefragelove” and all the other nuanced emotions that are asking for her attention.

Yet women have been conditioned, like I was, to think that expressing anger in whatever way was indecent, outrageous, even shameful. In a razor sharp New Yorker expose on menopause sent to me by a friend, it argued women’s rage has never been given its proper due. In the same article, the author quotes Germaine Greer’s 1991 book The Change that our aversion to menopausal women is “the result of our intolerance for the expression of female anger.” (5)

My primary symptom of perimenopause…I don’t really have the mood swings that some talk about. I have just the one mood. Rage. (5)

It’s in our Culture

Menopausal rage does not exist in isolation. It is inseparable from our own unique biology, and embedded in our social, cultural and political fabric. But without a safe container for expression, it’s easy to habitually shut down to our own self-expression or equally burn bridges in destructive release of rage. It’s a time when many marriages and relationships can break down.

Our culture and medical system encourage us to medicate anger. Look to any sticky relationship (ie can you give it up?) you might have with alcohol, coffee, sleeping tablets, overwork, sex, pain meds, food – sugar, carbs, chocolate, spice-and you might find ways that you put a lid on your anger. 

Not only is it easy to do, but encouraged by the predominant lifestyle. But as Northrup says again in her wisdom, “we are now strong enough, deep within, to allow the pain and the secrets of the past to rise to the surface and be cleared out for once and for all.”(6)

An Act of Love

Building emotional muscle to hold “griefragelove” seems like a heroes task. But it is possible to do with presence, self-holding with deep love and compassion,. It’s often easier to do in community with others.

Here are a few suggestions I’ve gleaned from my own and others experience: 

1. Writing, journaling, drawing, art
2. Conscious breathing practices – breathe in and release with a deep aaarghhhhh
3. Immersing in water – ocean, creek, shower or bath 
4. Self massage and use of cooling essential oils like peppermint and wintergreen
5. Nature bathing, hiking, striding up a big steep hill, any exercise
6. Yoga and dance – kundalini, 5 rhythms, Nia
7. Trauma counselling, somatic therapy, body work, Emotional Freedom Technique
8. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), acupuncture, Ayurveda 
9. Meditation, such as the “Do no harm take no shit”, meditation by Elizabeth lesser and specific meditations for TCM emotional organ release especially for liver and gallbladder which are the organs that process all emotions especially anger
10. Live lightly and playfully: comedy, laughter, movies

Screaming in cars or underwater is another favourite of mine. There are also rage cage smash rooms popping up around the place if you want to pay for throwing food and breaking things.

I’d love you to share any of your own anger, griefragelove stories as we walk this path together.

 

References:

1. Dr Christiane Northrup, Wisdom of Menopause, Piatkus, UK, 2001
2. Dr Christiane Northrup, Wisdom of Menopause, Piatkus, UK, 2001
3. https://janehardwickecollings.com/autumn-woman-harvest-queen/
4. Dr Christiane Northrup, Wisdom of Menopause, Piatkus, UK, 2001
5. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/where-are-all-the-books-about-menopause
6. Dr Christiane Northrup, Wisdom of Menopause, Piatkus, UK, 2001