Ep 69: Redirecting Rage into Roles When Gratitude Feels Toxic

Gratitude is a necessary ritual to root us in our dignity. But how do we practice gratitude under fascism when we’re constantly exhausted, enraged, grieving, numbed out, or all of the above? This episode invites you and your family to first work with your rage so you and your children can then practice gratitude that feels honest instead of toxic.

[INTRODUCTION]

Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.

[EPISODE]

Welcome back to episode 69 of the Come Back to Care Podcast. In this episode, you and I are going to experiment with two actions to metabolize our rage so we can get to a headspace and heart space to practice genuine (not performative) gratitude as a family. We’ll connect the dots between Audre Lorde’s teaching and applied neuroscience. If that feels generative to you, let’s hear what your rage has to say. 

Back in 1981, Audre Lorde gave a keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference. Lorde invited the audience to use their anger, saying quote “every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision, it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” End quote. 

Inspired by this teaching, the invitation of this episode is this: Let rage point out what’s outrageous and move us into courageous actions. Did you pick up what I was putting down? Allow me to elaborate. 

When you and I really listen to our rage, instead of picking up our phones to distract ourselves from its wisdom, rage often points out what’s outrageous systemically. My rage, for example, is about how outrageous it is for politicians to spend my hard-earned tax dollars on war, policing, and mass incarceration -- whether in the form of a genocide in Gaza or an immigration raid in my own backyard here in Chicago. A parent in our Come Back to Care newsletter, Rico, shared their rage around the media, specifically the misinformation and disinformation about immigrants that their children are absorbing. And it creates more work for Rico to come correct, to talk to their kids about immigration safety and dignity (like we explored in episode 67), and keep implicit biases from calcifying. If you’d like, what institutional or systemic oppressions are outrageous to you? What is fueling your fury? 

You might have noticed already that we’re not just naming our feelings like “oh I notice I’m feeling enraged” and then calling it a day. This invitation is for us to shift from individualistic rage to radical rage. Radical because we’re “grasping things at the root” to bring Angela Davis to our conversation too. We clearly name the systemic root of the rage we’re feeling individually and collectively. 

And when we’re clear about the root cause of our rage, we can metabolize rage by redirecting rage into different roles you and your family can play in taking courageous actions to care for your community. 

In my conversation with Deepa Iyer, the creator of the Social Change Ecosystem Map, in Episode 66, Deepa described 10 roles we can play, from a frontline responder and disrupter to a healer and a guide. I redirected my rage into the role of a healer and created a few podcast episodes for you to use everyday household chores as body-based exercises to center yourself before demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. I’ll organize every link and resource mentioned in the episode show notes for you. Putting these episodes together is my way of serving community care from the role I picked which was a healer. I remember that as I was doing this my rage was still present but it was reduced to a quiet simmer because it was honored and metabolized. Instead of repressing my rage, I expressed it through collective care. Only then it was possible for me to arrive at my gratitude…gratitude for the land that was holding us in unconditional love while we were grieving the genocide in Gaza; gratitude for my ancestors for guiding me so that I could use my gifts to serve the community. Only when I witnessed my rage could I hold rage and gratitude together, side by side. I didn’t dissociate from my rage because it was ugly and then throw some toxic positivity and performative gratitude to cover up my raw and real rage.

Audre Lorde continued in her keynote address quote “I have seen situations where white women hear a racist remark, resent what has been said, become filled with fury, and remain silent because they are afraid. That unexpressed anger lies within them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first woman of Color who talks about racism. But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” End quote.

The “unexpressed anger” that Audre Lorde referred to is the fight energy in our fight-flight-freeze-fix-people please stress response. This fight energy needs to go somewhere to be used, digested, and metabolized before we can be caring, curious, compassionate, or grateful. We can’t just skip ahead to gratitude without processing this fight energy. And when we’re not centered, we often take this fight energy to the comment section on social media or we blow up, snap, and control people who have less power than we do, our children. 

So, the invitation here is to shift from repressing this fight energy or our rage to redirecting it into roles that you and your family want to play in our collective care. Rico, the parent I mentioned earlier who was enraged by the misinformation and disinformation around immigrants, redirected their rage into the role of a storyteller. They shared historical events where immigrants came together and fought for justice with their five and nine year old children to combat fear with pride. Then, Rico and the kids decided to experiment with the role of caregivers. They made pozole using the family’s recipe and brought it to their local “know your rights” teach-in as an act of community care. There’s no need to state the obvious that gratitude was organically felt, shared, and nourished at that teach-in. 

My dear co-struggler in rage, how would you and your family redirect your rage into roles that you can play in community care today?   

If you’re curious about more ways to literally bring liberation home and practice it with your child, please pre-order my forthcoming book with Wiley, Raising Change Agents: Practicing Social Justice in Everyday Parenting anywhere you buy books today. I’ll leave all the links in the episode show notes for you. 

If this episode fills your heart cup and you have extra bandwidth to support me, please share this episode with your loved ones. So that we can practice liberation together. Or, head over to comebacktocare.com/support to join me in monthly live workshops on Patreon. 

As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.