Hello friends,
Here’s the recording for the third chat from myself,
, and in the wake of our shared fan-girling over ’s searingly honest, hilarious and novel All Fours. Inspired by the themes of the book, we had our inaugural chat back in October followed by one about desire and body image last month.Last night we focused on rage - festive, female, maternal and the rest! We got stuck into this complex topic, one that can be buried under layers of shame about what’s palatable and acceptable to feel and show, especially as women.
(Here’s a great post
wrote about her relationship with anger):
We covered what really might be going on when we feel rage, and how rage can sometimes be masked sadness, anxiety or frustration over not feeling seen or heard. We talk about festive rage and the unequal mental load of Christmas, and the way that feeling and releasing anger is actually healthy and even protective.
We talked feelings of shame when we “lose it” and the conditioning we internalised about how good girls don’t show anger. And we discussed how maybe we also need to practise being on the receiving end of other people’s anger as well as processing it ourselves in a healthy way.
It was fascinating to explore the hormonal aspect of anger - very much a real factor, but often used to dismiss our rightful feelings. If we feel more anger in perimenopause, is this because we’re finally letting ourselves do so?
We talked about personal experiences with HRT and whether it has an effect on mood, directly or indirectly - you can read
’s post about her experience with HRT here:
And
’s reflections after a week on on Oestrogel:
Towards the end we explored the hugely useful idea of seeing emotions as coming through us rather than being “of” us, and helping children notice and process anger. Last of all we talked about the appealing idea of getting more fearless as we age, but not feeling we must use our energy to correct every wrong in the world either.
We hope you enjoy this theme! We’re looking forward to being back in the new year with more live conversations. And we’d love to hear what you’d like to hear us discuss - let us know in the comments.
Chloe, Carol, Layla and Lindsay x
