Anger is a completely natural emotion. It’s not a flaw, but a fierce response to injustice. In the journey of healing, acknowledging and navigating anger becomes a transformative step towards reclaiming power and rewriting the narrative. For survivors of domestic, family, and sexual violence, anger can manifest in various ways.
Inward: Survivors may experience anger towards themselves, questioning why they allowed the abuse to happen or feeling frustrated about the impact it has had on their lives.
Outward: Anger can also be directed towards the abuser or the circumstances that led to the violence. It is an expression of the deep sense of violation of physical, emotional, mental and psychological boundaries.
Generalised: Survivors might experience a more diffuse anger towards the world, society, or institutions that may have failed to protect them or adequately address their situation.
While a common stage of grieving, the connection between trauma and anger is significant, and if not dealt with, it can severely impact every aspect of a person’s life.
Anger is the second stage of the Kübler-Ross model (Five Stages of Grief), and is a crucial part of the healing process. It marks the survivor’s acknowledgment of the profound impact of the trauma and the injustice of their experience. Expressing and processing anger in a safe and supportive environment is vital for the emotional well-being of survivors.
Dr. Lina Perl, PsyD says that anger is one of the basic human emotions. It’s adaptive and rooted in our evolution. The point of anger is to mobilise. That feeling or anger is there to tell your brain that I can do this! It is an emotion that literally amps your body up for action.
Anger can be expressed, in a healthy manner by making your needs known clearly and without hurting others, suppressed and then converted/redirected perhaps by focusing on something positive and moving it to a constructive behaviour, or calmed through outward and inward responses such as walking away to lower your heart rate to calm down, and let the feelings subside.
Support systems like peer-support groups, play a crucial role during this stage. It’s essential for survivors to have a space where they can express their anger without judgment, process their anger by exploring healthy ways of coping and channeling this intense emotion, and become more interdependent and independent.
Adamus Nexus is a post-crisis peer-based support group for women to empower and assist each other via shared experience, understanding and connection through the period after the domestic, family, and sexual violence has occurred. The support group provides a confidential and safe environment for survivors to meet to provide community, connection, and corroboration in an online forum.
As survivors of domestic, family, and sexual violence progress through the stages of grief, the intensity of anger can shift, giving way to other emotions like bargaining, depression, and eventually acceptance. Each survivor’s journey is unique, and the timeline for moving through these stages varies for the individual. Understanding and validating the expression of anger is a significant aspect of providing empathetic support during the healing process.
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Find Your Tribe So You Can Thrive – Tedx Talk with Kristine Hewett
Many people have had a traumatic incident in their lives, and we now all have the collective trauma of COVID. Why is there an expectation that we need to ‘get over it’ or ‘move on from it’? Lived experiences may well have happened in our past, but they have ongoing impact on our now and our future. Kristine wants to help people to do more than survive and to in fact thrive by finding their people or tribe.
