Anger management

Frog and I have become involved in watching a Channel 4 programme called SAS: Who Dares Wins in which women and men who hope to join the SAS are put through gruelling physical and mental tests. Last night’s episode concentrated on aggression and anger - when to use them, when not to use them, and how to switch them on and off. I was riveted.

In my post ‘A solstice walk’ I wrote about how women aren’t supposed to be unhappy. In my experience they’re not allowed to be angry either. Of course we women do get angry, and in a lot of cases we have more right than men to do so, but because we have no way of expressing it we turn it against ourselves. And internalised anger is I think behind the migraines I’ve suffered for forty years.

My internalised anger is specifically against men. Of course I get angry with women too but that anger doesn’t last. Sometimes I can talk to the woman in question, sometimes she apologises, sometimes it just fades with time. But with men the anger festers. It never leaves me. I’m still having imaginary arguments with my father even though he’s been dead for a decade. And I think this is because the fight is unequal, because I have a sense of powerlessness, because I’m frightened of what will happen if I do fight back.

Almost every day it seems I come up against some man for some reason or other, and add to the load I carry.

There is the man who has set up a fencing business one field away from us. Whenever he sees me he finds something about me to criticise. I hate him for this, for his fences that are enclosing the hedges around here, trapping wild animals and me and defacing the countryside, and for the overflowing skip, concrete rubble, rolls of chicken wire, rusty metal gates and general litter lining the footpath opposite the gate to his yard that I walked past this morning.

Then on Friday there was the man who stopped Frog and me and told us we couldn’t walk on the Avalon marshes nature reserve to which we were headed, and for which we’d driven an hour and a half, because we had a dog with us. I did have an argument with him at the time, pointing out that according to the Ordnance Survey map I was holding in my hand the route in question was a long-distance public path. ‘Oh, we don’t bother with the map round here,’ he said. I’m still arguing with him too, in my head.

I used to campaign and I’ve always written – letters, articles, books. But I’m not sure that any of it was ever heard, or made a difference. And I certainly don’t feel any better. I do affirmations, I try to forgive. But I’m obviously not very good at either as nothing changes in me.

Perhaps I should take a leaf out of the book of one of Frog’s nieces who does weight training and can lift a heavy suitcase above her head. Or that of the woman in the programme last night who was made to box with one of the male recruits and in doing so healed some of the mental damage inflicted by a violent partner. She fought back. She landed a punch, and she was praised for it.

I’m fed up with this anger that comes between Frog and me. I’m fed up with migraines. I’m fed up with the world being run by and for men. But what’s to do about it? I’d love to know.