Healthy Anger, Toxic Rage with John Lee

All right, Mr. John Lee, welcome back to the show. How are you doing today?

Thank you very much. I'm doing great, and I sure appreciate y' all having me back on your show. I enjoyed it so much last time.

Likewise. Likewise. Well, I wanted to have you back on for a number of reasons, but I think where we're going to start is.

Are men really as angry as society says they are?

Listen, in this day and time, everybody is angry, right? Yeah. That's the truth. No matter what political side or any of that, everybody's angry. Yeah. And what I'm going to do today is. Is.

Make the distinction, which is what I've been doing for 35 years. The distinction between anger and rage.

Okay, yeah, well, let's.

Let's start there. What is the distinction between anger and rage, and why is that relevant, especially for men?

Most men and women.

Rage. They do not express anger. Now, let me. Let me tell you the differences, because once the differences are. Are illustrated and laid out clearly, it's the beginning of communication for a lot of people. Anger is a feeling and an emotion.

Rage is a behavior and an action that numbs people's emotions. I'm going to say it again. Anger is a feeling that everybody has a right to, from childhood to elderhood. Everybody has a right to get angry from time to time at injustice, at inappropriate behavior. Anger is a. Is an emotion that is no more negative than sadness or joy.

Rage is a behavior or an action that numbs sadness, numbs fear, and even numbs anger.

Anger takes moments or minutes at the most to talk about, and rage can go on for hours, days, weeks. Our society currently is in a prolonged state of rage every day, every day, every week, every. It doesn't. It. Rage never gets resolved. Anger gets resolved and gets resolution. I can tell you that I'm angry appropriately about whatever you said to me yesterday. And when we get finished, we'll go have a cup of coffee together.

But if I rage at you.

You'Re not going to want to even talk to me, let alone have coffee with me, say, because. Because rage doesn't bring about resolution or communication. It just brings about more rage.

Well, it would seem that, I mean, there's even, you know, we have rage bait now right online. It's like a lot of the content that's out there is designed to catch your attention by creating outrage, you know, by creating rage about something socially, politically, relationally, et cetera. And it's. It's interesting because it seems. It seems as though, I mean, we could blame the algorithms and social media, which is a, you know, it's an easy thing to do, but it seems as though the systems online, especially the, the social media systems, are designed in such a way that you almost have to evoke people's rage in order to capture their attention.

Yeah, no, that's true. You know, people don't go and watch blockbuster movies about sensitivity.

They. They watch blockbuster movies and people are blowing stuff up, shooting people, beating people. You know, rage. Rage is contagious.

Anger is not contagious. It's rage. If I rage at you, you're going to rage at me back. And then when we get finished, you're going to go and rage at your wife and she's going to rage at you. And it's, it's. It's this repetitive cycle, whereas anger. Let me, let me give you a couple of ways to distinguish. Anger takes moments or minutes at the most, and we're done. Rage takes forever and ever and ever, and we're still never going to get done. Anger is about what's happening now, what you said last night before we said goodbye. I need to talk about that because I'm angry about that.

Rage is always about my past or mine in your past. See, but it could be just my past, or if we've known each other or been married to each other for a long time, it could be about our past. See.

Anger, if it's expressed appropriately, Connor, equals energy, intimacy and serenity.

Rage equals distance, disaster. And divorce.

Say more people get divorced out of mutual rage than people get divorced out of communicating anger appropriately. Matter of fact, the people who learn to communicate anger appropriately are more likely to stay together because they're communicating.

But what is it, what's so alluring or intoxicating about rage specifically that we get caught in? Is it like, as you're talking about this, it seems as though this is like a generational buildup, you know, that we don't have examples of healthy communication of anger. And so what we receive is a lot of rage, a lot of compliance through. I'm going to rage at you. I'm going to become dominant. I'm going to make you afraid of me. And that's how I'm going to parent. That's going to walk through the world. But what is it about rage that's so enticing that we get caught in that?

A couple of things. One, it creates the illusion of control.

So if I'm raging at you, it looks like I'm in control, even though I'm totally out of control. If I'm raging. The other thing that rage does is it releases the endorphins.

And the adrenaline gets pumping, whereas expressing anger appropriately doesn't do any of that.

And so there's secondary payoffs by raging, but one of the big ones is that it creates the illusion of power. The one who's raging, you know, feels like they're in control and powerful. And that's why then the person I'm raging at, they have to sort of sync up with that and then so that they can feel powerful and in control. Now there's two kinds of ragers. There's the enrager.

And the outrager.

And they tend to marry each other, by the way.

The enrager swallows, skews, bottles it up and then explodes. The outrager is cussing, throwing things, slamming doors, throwing pillows. And then they feel like now they've got it out. What's wrong with you? You know, I'm done. See. Well, that's what the outrager does feel. And the enrager goes, I'm still pissed off. Why? Because I've been bottling it up 20 years. You know, you explode periodically and get it out. So one of the things that I taught therapists and people, men for many, many years, is how to discharge and release the pent up anger that they've been carrying possibly since early childhood. And then another piece about that is that a lot, like a lot of boys and girls will pick up the rage of one or both of the parents and that goes into their bodies. And so now they got parental rage, grandparent rage, plus their own rage. And that's why when you say to them, are you ready to get that out? They go, no, because if I ever tap into it, I'll destroy Asheville, you know, and then I'll move on to the rest of the United States, you know, it feels so big and overwhelming. No, I don't want to start doing rage reduction work because I'm afraid I'll never stop.

Yeah, I mean, this is. Can you be both? Can you have both? I think I feel like I have both.

Depending, depending on who you're with more often than not. Yeah, like, like you might be an enrager when you're talking to your dad, right, that you hold it in, you bottle it up because you don't want to hurt his feelings or you're afraid how he's going to react and then, then you go home and you're an outrage. Or to your.

Teenager say, so it depends on context and who the person is that you're around. And you can be both. Yeah, yeah. Mostly we stick to one or the other style until we learn how to express anger appropriately and then we stop in raging or outrage.

Right, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense because I think I got both examples. You know, like my dad, who was an in rager, held it all in, didn't really voice anger or frustration. And then my stepdad in my other family system was massive outrager. And this has been something that I've, that I've been working with now for, I mean, maybe not four and a half years. My son's four and a half, little older than four and a half. But you know, I think I said it on another podcast like nobody has access to the nuke button inside of me. Like that boy, he's got, he's just got like a special access portal.

To this like rage button inside of me. Or I'm like, bro, what is happening? It's so funny. And it's, it's one of those things where I've heard so many fathers talk about this, where it's like they're simultaneously so excited to have a son and equally terrified because they know that at some point they're going to have to contend with the rage that was passed down to them.

That's right. That's right.

That, that's been my experience is like, oh, like I'm having to contend with this. I mean what I said to my men's group is like, it's a violence, you know, there's like a violence inside of me.

That's right.

I had a violence in my early 20s, bar fights and you know, like getting into, getting into real violence. Violence. But, but so.

Where do I want to go with.

That's why, that's why dads want little girls if they can get it.

That's right. I mean my die with, you know, 14 month old daughter and I'm like, I, you know, 14 months, I haven't felt any anger at all.

Not, not towards her. Right.

It's so weird. It's so crazy. But let's, let's talk about that because I think what I hear you saying is that in part we learn to relate to our anger or our rage based off of a lot of environmental factors from parents. So how does anger and rage.

How does a child experience that? Because I think you write about that in your book Facing the Fire. You talk about what it's like for a kid. So can you go into that a little bit?

Well, my favorite phrase is children don't take after strangers.

Yeah.

Nobody's ever said, you know, young man, who. You remind me of that damn mailman that comes around here, right? No, you remind me of your dad or your grandfather or your uncle or your mom. So, like you, my mom was an enrager. And so she got migraines, stomach problems, depression, and my dad was an outrage or an alcoholic. Hitting, throwing, screaming, yelling. So, like you, I got both. But I. I was so scared to be my dad that my first go to was, I'm gonna hold it in and swallow it and stew and get depressed and have stomach problems and have migraines. And I did that until my 30s. And. And then it was like, no, no, Because I was afraid that if I didn't do that, I would go in the direction of my father, and I didn't want to do that. So then my task was I got to learn about this thing called anger and rage, and I got to learn how to express anger appropriately. And. And so that's how I took the deep, deep dive. But until. See, one of. One of the things I've said for decades, most people have never seen appropriate anger. There is no. There are no models for it. And then the other downside of this whole conversation, most therapists and clinicians even use the words anger and rage interchangeably, as if they mean almost the same thing. You ask the average therapist, tell me what your definition of rage, and they'll say, oh, that's just intense anger, or that's just ratcheted up anger. And I go, no, it's not. They're. They're very different things, apples and oranges. But most people squash them together and say, no, it's the same fruit. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. Nobody gets hurt with appropriate anger. Everybody gets hurt with inappropriate, regressive rage.

I say it again because it bears repeating. Anger expressed appropriately equals energy. When I get finished, I'm not going to feel depleted. When I. When I express it appropriately, I'm actually being intimate with you. And then because of that, then I'm going to feel a sort of a peaceful or serene feeling that we connected in, in this way where. Whereas rage, nobody wants to be around it any longer than they have to.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, a huge thing. I love that distinction because it's something that, I mean, I've seen, written about, I've talked about it. There's a great poet, David White, who writes about anger, and he talks about, you know, anger being this. This experience or energy that helps us to protect the things that are most valuable to us.

Absolutely, absolutely.

You know, Francis Weller, I think, talks about, you know, sacred anger as the things, again, that protects. And so I think there's. There's immense value in it. And I think for a lot of men, the experience has not been seeing examples of healthy anger, you know, and so, so let's, let's talk a little bit about. I want to go just a little bit deeper into the. The rage piece of what is that like for a child when they receive that rage? What is that imprint on them? And then maybe what are some ways that we can start to navigate through that rage? Like what. What do we do with it? Because I think for a lot of guys that a lot of the men that I've worked with that have a tremendous amount of rage, it's like, well, what do I do with this? And as you're talking about it, it's like, I don't want to touch that, because if I do, I'm worried that I'm going to, you know, burn everything down.

Well, see, you know, eight out of ten men.

They don't understand. And women too. I got to make this for women, too.

But let's do this way. I'm going to give you the things that most men and women now listen to the word do.

Not feel do when we think we're telling somebody about our anger. So here's the nine things. Shaming.

Blaming, demeaning, demoralizing, criticizing, preaching, teaching, judging, and analyzing. And the 10th one is dismissing.

All of these things. If, if you listen in to somebody who's trying to tell you how they feel.

It'Ll be one or more of these nine things that they're using. Shaming, blaming, demeaning, demoralizing, criticizing, preaching, teaching, judging, and analyzing.

Until you understand that those are raging behaviors, you can't get to appropriate anger. Say the, the. You know, I, I think I. I don't know how many times we've had this discussion. If you had. Have only got into therapy, and I'm just telling you how I feel. If you had only got into therapy when I first asked you to, you know, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. You know, you're actually doing what your father showed you to do.

I met your father. He does the same thing. I'm just telling you what I feel. I'm angry. No, you're not. You're telling me about your rage. You're telling me.

About me. Now. There's. There's the cornerstone, see? Anger. I'm going to tell you about me. Rage. I'm going to tell you about you, and then when I get finished telling you about you, you're going to tell me about me. And then it's my turn again. And then it's your turn again. And at the end, I don't know any more about you and you don't know any more about me. Yeah. Yeah. And we're not going to go. Want to go get a beer together, right? No, I think.

I think in the book you talked about how rage for kids, and this is one of the things that really hit for me because this was. This is how I encoded it as. As a child, you talked about rage equaling pain and abandonment for a kid. I think that was definitely my experience growing up, was that there was a lot of pain associated, a lot of abandonment associated with like, oh, I'm getting screamed at or I'm getting hit or I'm getting called names or, you know, what the fuck's wrong with you? That. That type of stuff.

That's right.

That was a lot of the. That was a lot of the narrative that I received. But how I. How that got imprinted in me was, oh, that really fucking hurts. And then also, well, now I feel alone, right? I'm small. I don't know what to do. And I think that that is the case, if I'm not mistaken for what you are talking about, for how. How it begins to get.

Imprinted into us, you know, or stoked in us, is that we experience that growing up, and then, you know, maybe it gets suppressed for a long time and then it starts to come out at some point later on in life. Is that accurate?

Anger equals pain is what we. The imprint that we received, if that. But see, reason why I had to separate those two. But I never saw my dad angry. For one moment in my life, he was raging. And mom, who. Who was having depression and stomach problems, she was interjecting that rage into her body. See, and. And. And the kid is a. Is an absorption machine. You know, everything that's being said and done, and even not said and done is going into the kid's body.

So this equation, anger equals pain, okay, then I'm not going to get angry because I don't want to cause pain. And then in my first book, the Flying Boy, when Laurel Leaves, I say, you got to tell me why you're leaving me. And she said, you're the most angry man I've ever known. And I'm going, but I teach religious studies and literature, poetry. You're talking about My dad. And. And I really did say this, much to my sadness when she said that. I said, I've never hit you, slapped you, pushed you, or shoved you. That's what I grew up with, with my dad. And so not doing that, I thought I'd put a. Kept a lid on it. But when I really got to examining, what did I find, I was shaming her, blaming her, demeaning her, dismissing her, criticizing her, you know, teaching her, judging her. That's what she meant. And if she would hear this talk right now, she said, yeah, I meant you're. You're full of rage, you know, And I was. And I was. And then of course, the other thing in the story is I said, is there any other reason? And she said, yeah, because you're the saddest man I've ever known. Because if you're going to push one emotion down, you're going to push all the rest down, including happiness and joy.

And. And I thought I just got to. I got to do this. I got to figure this out before I have kids. I was in my 30s. Otherwise, I'm going to do to them the same thing, you know, that was done to me.

And, and, you know, you've got all this at a very early age for your children. See, then they're only going to have to spend a couple of years in therapy, you know, unlike me, who had to mortgage my soul to pay for.

All the fucking decades worth decades, tens.

Of thousands of thousands of dollars. Dol.

Yeah.

Yeah. So let me. Let me give you what I call the four styles of rage. And. And then we'll kind of go from there. Most people, depending on the context in the person, tends to go for one of the four, but can interchange with them, depending. So the first style of rage is what's called, I call the intimidator style. This is the person who gets really big and loud and everybody gets real small and quiet. And then the second style of intimidation is the person who goes so silent that you can cut it with a knife and everybody feels small. So that's one style. The second style is what's called. I call the distancer style of rage.

Who's always, I'm out of here. Even though they're still in the room, I'm out of here. Checked out, shut down, numb.

And. Or literally always looking for the exit and for the door to get out of there. Why? Because anger equals pain. So if I. If I jump in the car and leave, I'm not going to cause you any pain. You can you can't cause me any pain. And then the third style that nobody likes to admit to, including myself, is what I call the poor me or the victim style of rage. This is the person who holds it in, holds it in, holds it in and tries to either take the spiritual bypass or the intellectual bypass to deny that they have it. The, the, you know, my mom, I remember asking my mom in my late 30s, why didn't you ever get angry at dad's alcoholism? And she said, well, honey, it wouldn't do any good, but I prayed for him all the time, you know, and, and it just wasn't meant for me to be happy, you know, and stuff like that. And then the last style is the.

Interrogator style. What time did I tell you to be home? How many times have we had this conversation? How much did you have to drink? Who were you with last night? Just a rapid series of interrogations. And those all four styles are rage. Yeah.

So do we, in order to start to deal with this, need to learn how to better express our anger, or is that we need to be better at regulating the rage? Like, where do we start to begin with dealing with this?

Well, the first, as in every thing we do, you, we have to bring awareness first. Like, like literally when Laura walked out, she said something to me that I'd sort of heard before from other girlfriends back when I was young, but somehow that, that stuck and I thought, she's right, she's right. I don't know what to do about it, but she's right. So the awareness, and then the second stage is now I got to do, I got to find somebody who knows about this.

Right?

And I was very lucky to live in Austin where you couldn't sling a dead cat without hitting a therapist of some guy. And there was a guy who, who really knew his stuff about emotions and expression and is an ex Marine, ex alcoholic. And he was the first guy who really took me into my body in terms of my repressed anger and rage and sadness and grief. He and I ended up becoming partners and trained hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people together for 28 years. And then of course, the third part then was to practice, practice, practice. And, and, and the practice that I taught for almost 30 years was emotional cathartic release work or rage reduction work.

And, and.

Most people don't want to do that. I had to do it because I had so much in me. And the more I got of, of the pent up, sort of ancient rage out and then coupled with the grief work that I've always taught goes with anger work and rage reduction work. Then you know, by, by the time I'm in my 40s, nobody's really saying you're the angriest man. I was still angry, don't get me wrong, because I wasn't done by any means.

But practice, it's, and stay in current. Once, once you get that 10,000 pound bag that you're dragging around, as Robert Bly talked about, once you get it down to £500, you don't want to keep filling it back up, you know. And so that, that was the sort of, the fifth part is now stay current. You know, if you're angry at your wife a day before yesterday, it needs to come out this week, not next month. So awareness is the beginning, the jumping off point.

I found that for me as well.

Being clean and sober.

Oh, absolutely.

Since that, like, I mean, I wasn't an alcoholic or anything like that, but, but just getting rid of the porn and the weed and the booze and all of that shit, that was keeping a lot of it at bay. And I think this is one of the, this is one of the hard things that, you know, I think is challenging for a lot of men when they're looking at quitting porn, getting rid of the booze is that it's, it's like the thing that you're using to keep the, you know, 2,000 pound gorilla at bay and, and kind of sequestering him away with the weed and the porn, the booze, the video games or whatever it is, all of a sudden you don't have that agent in place and then there it is, right. It's like right at the forefront. All that emotion is right there.

Yeah. So, yeah, see, that's why, that's why when people go into recovery and stop medicating, they almost always start feeling angry and, and then that causes the relapse because they don't have any way to channel it. So in my early days with the men's work, because I was in recovery like you, like you, I, I, I, I came to that awareness and recognition is I need to stop numbing this. So in the men's groups that I would run, I'd say, I'm happy for you to join the men's group, but you need to understand that the way I'm running the men's group is that whatever active addiction you're engaged in needs to cease because it's redundant to come here and do men's group night for two, three hours and then go Home and turn on the porn or smoke dough. And, and so in a way, that's, that's how I sort of got labeled the men's recovery guy, because Michael Mead and James Hillman and Robert, they had approached that viewpoint.

And, and I did. I thought, you know what? I, I gotta stop drinking here. And, and, and because this, this is not gonna.

Work with all this emotion that's coming up. So.

Yeah, can you, can you speak to the resistance? Because I want to get into the work here in a second of like, what does that look like? But can you just speak to the resistance? Because I've seen that as well, where there's just this huge wall of resistance that most men have into going into the rage reduction work of getting some of that out. What is the internal fear or resistance that most men are going to feel? Are there some commonalities.

Yeah, that they're going to lose control or that something bad is going to happen to them or they're going to hurt somebody? Like, like, I mean, I did, you know, 10,000 hours of rage reduction work with people, men and women. I never got hurt once. Not once. But, but I remember when I was with Dan, I was afraid I was going to hurt him if, if, if I ever got in touch with it.

And so that, that is, really goes back to what you and I were saying earlier. We're, we were so indoctrinated that anger equals pain that I'm just not going to go there. And, and you have enough people in the psychotherapy community to say, you don't need to, you know, just, just, you know, talk about, talk about, talk about, talk about.

Now, even what we call somatic therapy, which is, is very much in vogue, and there's still very little training about how to express rage in a way where nobody gets hurt. And that's why I wrote the book of Facing the Fire, is to give people some tools that they can do at home and not just be in a therapy group, you know, and, and the truth is, is most people don't want to even talk about it, let alone, you know, do carpet work, like in, in, in the Mankind Project, you know, that that's asking, you know, men to go someplace that, oh, I'm going to lose control, you know, and, and I want to be in control. One of the, one of the greatest illusions that we keep propping ourselves up with is I'm in control, you know. No, no, you have the illusion of control, but you don't really have much control in this, this world. So. And now women now this is, this is something that is. Has been observable, anecdotally true. More women would be ready to get to their rage reduction work than a lot of men. And that's in part because a lot of women as girls didn't get the brutality that a lot of boys did. They got some, believe me, and some more than men. But then the second factor, which is some are going to hear this is sexist. Many women are as girls and women are still connected to their bodies. They have to be. Whereas a lot of men, you know, by the age 6 or 9, you totally disconnected from your body because the whole society is preparing you to go to war.

And, and you can't be a feeling, emotional man and go to war, you know, and, and so those factors are there. So reconnecting to the male body, which is the storehouse of the sadness, the anger, the rage. And so what I figured is, is that it went into my body, it's got to come out of my body. And that's probably not going to happen solely by just talking.

Yeah, yeah. I think, I think also part of the resistance is like, how will I be viewed if I, if somebody sees me let this out, you know, And I think, I think especially now in our modern times, there's such a huge narrative of don't be a dangerous man.

Right?

Don't, don't even go anywhere near indicating.

That you're violent, that you're violent, or.

That you have that capacity within you. And there's counter narratives to that, of course, but I think the prevailing narrative is you want to distance yourself as much as humanly possible from being an angry man or a man that has anger or raging.

That's right. And yet, and yet that man who's doing the distancing from that, like me, was. See, I wanted my intellect and my spirituality to cover all that.

I remember this. I hate this story, but I was, I was teaching college and Laurel, the woman in the flying boy, she and I were having dinner one night at a restaurant and one of my students came up and said, are you John's girlfriend or wife? She said, yeah. And the young woman student said, oh, he is the sweetest, kindest, funniest, sensitive man in class. He just connects with everybody. And she just rolls out these accolades. And finally Laurel looks up at her and then looks at me and goes, him.

Because at home I wasn't any of those things. I was the raging, depressed, sad, controlling. But when I'd go teach my literature class or religious studies class, you know, totally in my head, totally in my performance.

A false self, you know, and, and, and again, that's. That's part of it is, is you got to have somebody to say, come on, you've got to. You've got to shed this false self. And, and, and you're right, though. I mean, the work that I taught for 28, almost 30 years.

It would be hard to get a class full of those folks of men. You know, I remember we were doing a men's thing up at the Boundary Waters, Michigan, and something got triggered in the men's work. And I said, who would like to do some release work? And everybody go, no, no, we're done for the day. I'm tired, you know, And. And so I picked up this huge branch that was laying close to the fire, and I said, then I need to do it, you know, And I just beat the ground and wailed and. And just yelled and kept beating the ground, beating the ground. And. And then, you know, it was like they picked me up. They, like, 15, 20 guys picked me up, took me to my cabin, and I slept for 12 hours. It was like I didn't want to carry any more the next day. And yet, if our culture had seen me doing that, they would go, oh, my God, look how violent. Look, you know, so.

Most people would rather shame you, blame you, demean you, demoralize you, than pick up a big old stick and beat the earth and let that out.

Yeah, I think it's a tough thing. It's one of the reasons why we don't video anything that happens inside of our.

We didn't either. Yeah.

And I think it's hard because I see a lot of men's spaces, you know, filming stuff inside of the retreats. And it's like, out of context, it looks.

Yeah. Looks crazy.

Ridiculous or crazy. And. But when you have a container that you've built and there's, you know, there's. There's safety, there's sanctity, there's a kind of sacredness to it. There's a ritual to it.

Right.

You know, it's a completely different thing. And so I. I underst. You know, part of. I say that as a sort of caveat to. I think some of the resistance is also that we've collapsed the spaces culturally where these things would normally happen. And it's so easy to judge those things online. I remember seeing recently there was a video of women out in the wilderness just that paid whatever, four or five grand to be at this retreat, and they're just yelling in the woods screaming at each other. And, And I was like, yeah. You know, and then the comments section is just eviscerating them, right? Just. Just eviscerating. It's like, yeah. I mean, this is why you don't post that shit online, right? Because. Because there's something. It's like there's certain things that you would get into in therapy that they're not meant to be outside of that room, right. You know, they're not meant to be put up on social media and viewed for. For people's entertainment. Because again, just another rage thing, right? It's going to invoke people shadow and unconscious and blah, blah, blah.

That's why, you know, the, The. The events that Robert Bly and I and. And then even when he was with Hillman and me, none of them was videotaped. And for a while early on, we wouldn't even allow still pictures to be taken. We would literally ask people to leave their cameras. Now, later on, that got relaxed, but still, never any video. Yeah. And. But the pictures, the still pictures, people could look at it and go, wow, these guys are crazy. You know, Hell are they doing? I miss those days so much.

I know I have a tough time with it sometimes because people we've. I've had so many offers, like, I'll come film your event and I'll come. It's like, you see, you collapse some of the. Some of the sacredness of the. Of what's happening, you know, And. And then, you know, men operate differently, right? It's like, oh, there's a video camera right here. While I'm trying to process my trauma, you know, of my father beating me, a camera here videotaping me, like, who's gonna see this? And. And then we're back in our head, right? And then we might as well just be in talk therapy. So. Okay, but how. How can a man, you know, if a man's listening to this, he. He's like, okay, how do I reduce some of my rage? You know, Because I'm sure that there's many men that are listening to this. They're like, I can't wait for a weekend. What can I start doing now?

Well, and that's a real important part. See, a lot of people have this notion of, I'll go do this weekend, and that should get me going. And that's just not the way I talk.

I did myself multiple, multiple, multiple releases scenarios with therapists, body workers, movement therapists out in nature with men and stuff. That, that. It's not a weekend. Kind of thing. It's an ongoing practice that you don't have to do forever but, but for a time. So the, the more gentle ways that are less frightening is what. The most gentle way is to write about it in a journal. And you take off all the sensors and all the editings out of it. You know, you, you write from your body, not from your brain about the traumas, about the divorce, about the beatings, you know, and, and you're kind of stripping away the veneer and coming to a place. So that's the most gentle way that people can do it. The less gentle ways. And again, reason why I wrote the Facing the Fire the way I did is not everybody needs to do it the same way.

But for instance, one of the methods that I use that was pretty gentle in my estimation is to take a bath towel and twist it like you're wringing it out wet and activating your body and speaking what you need to say or wish you could have said and didn't and letting it out that way.

Sometimes I would even have couples, I give them both a towel and I just say, I want you to twist the towel. As much anger as you know you have inside you and that, and you can't say anything. You can just twist. And that non verbal expression is one of the people just didn't feel like they were going to be hit or intimidated. Once you bring out the plastic bats, they, you know, the pillows.

The, the person who's going to do that kind of work needs to know that the person that's facilitating it has done that kind of work.

Totally.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and so, but you can still, I mean, I'd rather a man go in his bedroom and take like three or four overstuffed people and pillows and scream obscenities than him scream at his kid. What's daddy doing? Daddy's in the back rooms screaming obscenities in poor over stuffed pillows. Why is he doing that? Because he, daddy doesn't want to scream at me or you.

You know, and this is something that I've been doing with my son, is just getting him to, you know, I'll ask him all the time, like what's happening in your body? When he starts to. Because he gets. Yeah. I mean, we went to the fair, we took him to this fair this weekend. Lots of people around. It's loud, you know, he's definitely overstimulated, Gets super worked up and you know, kind of dysregulated. And then it's hard for him to come down when we get back home. And, and so when we get back, you know, he's all cranky. I'm like, what's happening in your body? I'm cranky. Where are you on your body?

Right.

Okay, well, let's. Let's go over to the couch and like, you know, let's hit the pillow or let's use the pillow to hit the couch, or let's scream into the pillow and then.

Thinks it's funny when I'm doing it with him. You know, that's always that kind of exercise. And I do it too, right. Sometimes I'm like, okay, daddy's. Daddy's cranky. You know, daddy needs to go do this, right? And then I'll. I'll model it for him.

There you go. See, we. We just didn't have that. Yeah, it was, it was either hitting and yelling or swallowing it and seething and stuffing it. Yeah, that's all we have. You know, people to this day, they'll say, well, how. How do you express anger appropriately? You know? And the answer is, you know, you just tell somebody about how you feel. Connor, Right now I'm feeling pretty angry.

The, the thing that, that got said this morning when we were having breakfast, I've been feeling about it and, and I'm angry about it and. Because it's not rage and it's not pen up. You're going to say.

So what did I say? Or what did I do? Or, oh, I'm sorry, honey, tell me more. And I'm going to tell you more, you know, but. But I really want this to be heard here by the people that's listening in. I'm going to tell you about me. I'm not going to tell you about you. I'm not even going to use what became a leap in communication back in the 80s with this, this thing of when you. I feel I. I even got rid of that. What's wrong? What's wrong, John? I'm angry or I'm sad or I'm scared. Well, then when I tell you about me, you don't have anything to worry about. And you're probably going to say, well, honey, what are you scared of? Or what are you sad about? Oh, I'm sad about what? I saw this guy talking to his son at the restaurant today. See, I'm going to tell you about me, and then I want to hear about you. And, and for some reason, when I'm. Especially when I'm working with couples, they go, I've been telling my wife about her for 25 years and she's not listening. I go, oh, I wonder why. Have you ever told her about you? Well, not really. Right. You know, and I've been telling my husband about him for 25 years, and he's just not listening to me. That's because you're telling him about him, not about you. And in so doing, you're creating the illusion that he's or she is the designated problem. Yeah.

Anything else? People need to know about how to express their anger in a healthy way, being able to communicate that. Because I do think that oftentimes that's the cumbersome part. Right.

Until. And take until you practice it. Practice it. Practice. You know, I didn't ever get to a perfection with it, but I just kept building and building on, on. And. And I have to say that, you know, to use the metaphor, I really had £10,000 in a bag that I was dragging around. And I became aware that that was hurting me and hurting the people I love. Now I gotta find ways to empty this damn bag, you know, and now I gotta keep from putting more stuff in that bag now that I've got it down to find £500, you know, and so however one can do that. But. But what. What I've been teaching and writing about in. In all these years is you got to get it that most people are raging at you, and. And you need to stop that with boundaries. And you need to be able to put limits on your rage. And that's why in my book, growing yourself back up, Understanding emotional regression. I came up with the idea that until I can be in my adult neocortex telling you how I feel with language that you can hear, I need to detour that energy.

Until I can. Or else it's going to come flooding on you. And. And I need you to do the same. If you can't tell me how you feel about something I said, in five minutes or less, I'm probably gonna. I'm gonna probably ask for a break. And. And in my relationships and friendships, I might even say, listen, this feels too. Too much and too big. Would you mind detouring it some and then we'll talk again? Because I promise I'll do that for you. And I. And I might ask you to do that for me because you. You can kind of see somebody who's getting cranked up and going into rage. Yeah.

Well, we'll pause there and we'll pick back up next time on a different topic that I wanted to talk to you about, which is a man and his and his mother and sort of separating those two things. We didn't have time to get into that today, which is good because I feel like the deep dive into anger and rage is actually very, very helpful for a lot of men.

Well, especially, you know, one of the things that a lot of men don't do, and I was one of them. That's why I wrote about it, is I could. I, I got to my anger and rage with my dad almost right out of the gate, but it took me several more years to get my anger and rage around my mother stuff. Because especially in the south, you just don't speak badly about your precious saintly mother. Right. You know, and I swear to God, we'll close it as. But it happened.

I was 38, 39, and my mom and I had been working on our relationship because she was going down and I was going to 12 step program. And so one day we were sitting and she said, you know, when are you going to do to me what you did to your father?

She said, because I'm ready whenever you are.

Dang it. My own mother has to tell me it's time to do my rage work at her, you know, so, and, and so I said, well, I think I'm ready to start. And, and we had this incredibly funny scenario where I, I started telling her and I was telling her and telling her right there. And so about 30 minutes later I got finished, or at least I thought I was finished. And so I got up and I said, wow, mom, thanks for being a witness to that and holding the space for that, and I really appreciate it. And she said, where are you going? And she said, now you sit back down.

And I said, what? I don't remember what she said after this, but it was the funniest thing. She said, you think you've been some kind of picnic to live with.

Huh?

Listen, Connor, thank you again for having, having me and doing this. And I hope, you know, some people find it useful and helpful and, and I gotta tell you and congratulate you on how you're, you're implementing your own work, not only with the, the men and people that you're, you're, you're coaching and helping, but by modeling it for your kids, you know, that, that you. We have a say. Saying down south, people would say, now don't break your arm patting yourself on the back. And I go, no, break your arm patting yourself on the back because they're, they're looking for the model. Good job, good job, good job. So let me know when you want to talk about mothers, sons, and we'll do it again sometime. Okay.

Well, we'll have the links for your website in the show notes so people can check out your books, because we referenced fire in here and we'll have all that in there. And for I'm just going to say one thing to the audience, which is don't forget to man it forward. Don't forget to man it for it and share this podcast with somebody that, you know, could use it, needs to hear it, would enjoy it.

Maybe we'd get a little activated by it and heated by it. But definitely share this one wide and far. Thanks very much, John.

Thank you, Connor. Good to see you, bud. Take care. Bye. Bye.