I was raised as a young girl to be a good Methodist. Anger was not an acceptable emotion in my religion or in my family. Neither my father nor my mother expressed healthy anger. Instead, my mother grew resentful from over-giving and her resentment turned sour as passive aggressive pouting and stomping without clear communication. My father would suck it up, suck it up, suck it up, and then, unexpectedly and without warning, he would explode with harsh, terrifying rage. Neither of them were ever violent with us, but nobody ever modeled or tolerated healthy anger. When I expressed appropriate anger as a child, anger that should have protected me, it got shut down. I vividly remember having access to deep rage when I was tiny, but anger did not work to keep me emotionally or physically safe as a toddler, so by the time I was 4 years old, my anger mechanisms had been effectively disabled. I had been successfully domesticated, silenced into submission and ready to be conditioned into a docile, people-pleasing, compliant good Christian girl who would be ripe for tolerating dehumanizing behavior later in life.
Not until my mother died almost exactly a year ago did I feel an unleashing power surge of rage for the first time in over 40 years. The past year has been about reckoning with that power and learning to be in right relationship with that anger, which not surprisingly, coincided with the timing of the #MeToo movement.
I am not alone in how I was raised. Many of us—women and men—people of all races and sexual preferences—were raised in religious institutions that taught us that anger is a lesser emotion, something to be suppressed or even demonized. Instead of feeling angry when our boundaries are violated or agreements are broken, we were taught to be good little girls and boys who “turn the other cheek” and skip straight over anger into the sacred act of forgiveness.
Others had our anger traumatized out of us. When we first felt it and expressed it, calling upon our rage to show others what is and is not OK with us, our rage failed to change the traumatic outcome. You may have learned that anger didn’t work to stop the abuse. You may have vague, far off memories of being a young child who had easy access to your anger, only to discover that anger failed to do its job helping to keep you safe. Your outrage may have been impotent. The abuse, rape, or bullying kept happening even when you expressed the appropriate anger that would have made healthy people stop hurting you. As a result, your anger mechanisms might have gotten disabled. You may not even feel angry anymore, even when you should be outraged. You may have lost touch with the scrappy warrior of love that once animated you when injustices were happening. You may have learned helplessness, rolling over like a shocked lab rat, frozen in a cage you can’t get to stop shocking you. Or you may have learned spiritual bypassing as a way to skip past your anger, employing the tools of premature compassion or forgiveness that was not a true healing journey, but rather, as Spiritual Bypassing author Robert Augustus Masters calls it, “conflict avoidance in holy drag.”
Most women—and also many men—learned early on that anger was not an acceptable emotion. Because anger, like eros, can be an intense energy that can sweep through us and cause us to engage in dangerous, even violent behavior, it’s understandable that society would try to curb the expression of anger, as a means of domesticating the wildness that can arise like a beast when you are truly angry. However, anger has been disproportionately suppressed in women. It makes sense. If the powers that be set out to dominate women, who have access to feminine powers men find harder to match, such as intuition, the power of the heart, empathy, and mystical access to God/Goddess without an intermediary—it would take suppressing a women’s healthy rage in order to overpower her. Once her power is unplugged in this way, she will let men have their way with her, and she’ll keep her mouth shut and silently support the oppression of all women through her silence.
How do you think men in positions of privilege and power have gotten away with dehumanizing behavior for many millennia? Clearly, it’s not because they’re superior beings taking their rightful place as better, more ethical, more intelligent, wiser citizens. So how has this been possible? Through the use of force—not just military force, rape, murder, domestic violence, and child abuse, but through applying psychic force to those who have been marginalized, disabling their rage and keeping them from challenging the status quo in any meaningful or empowered way.
Although the systematic suppression of the anger of marginalized people as a form of force applies to all dehumanized people, let me limit the scope of the rest of this article to the dehumanization of women and how healthy anger is a necessary part of ending misogyny and rape culture. Think about how systemic is the pressure to shut down women’s anger. Suppressing women’s rage is how men and women alike have oppressed women for millennia. Girls are raised to be pleasing, docile, meek, and quiet, even when they are being mistreated. Mothers are often as complicit in this as fathers, conditioning their daughters to be good little girls who are pleasing and calm, who don’t speak out or act “bitchy,” who don’t challenge the status quo or make waves that might make them less pleasing to men in positions of privilege and power. Add Judeo-Christian-Muslim religions on top of that and now you’ve got men in positions of privilege and power teaching women to tolerate abuse, even when their own children are getting abused by spiritual leaders like priests. Instead of those priests going head to head with an outraged she-bear protecting her young, you condition that mother to prove her religious fortitude by forgiving the people who are abusing her or her children or her sisters, letting the abusers off the hook in the name of forgiveness. Even when those who perpetrate this kind of sexual violence show no remorse and have zero interest in accountability, atonement or making amends, the women are expected to look the other way in the name of “I’m so spiritual.” “Be the better person,” we are told. “Forgive and forget.”
I, for one, have had enough. I am proud of my anger right now. I have hit the edge of my tolerance, and if our culture cannot find a way to make the world safe for those who have been marginalized, I am going to have a fit—and I hope you will too.
#MeToo Women Have A Right To Feel Angry Right Now
If you are a woman in this country, you should be feeling very angry right about now. Our President just gave a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court to a man who has no problem expressing his anger at being accused of attempted rape. Our President then mocked the woman who claims Judge Kavanaugh tried to rape her in front of a mob of angry people at a political rally, screaming, “Lock her up!” The judge’s anger was viewed by many as appropriate for someone who claims he didn’t do it. But what about Dr. Ford? If he did do it, doesn’t she have a right to be angry right now? Don’t all the other women who have had their #MeToo accusations dismissed, denied, defended against, and diminished deserve to be angry if their power surge isn’t helping stop sexual violence? Don’t we have a right to be pissed if men think they can sexually assault us—without repentance—and get away with it?
Many mocked the angry women who protested outside the Supreme Court. The president of the United States, a role many in the world associate as marking the most powerful man on the planet, diminished the angry women on the steps of the Supreme Court, calling them names and making jokes about them. An angry man gets placed in the highest court of the nation. An angry woman becomes the butt of our President’s jokes.
Mark my words. This is no laughing matter. The mockery of how this Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas replay was handled is the last straw for many women, myself included. I would feel equally enraged if the same circus had just played out with a Democratic president and a Democratic judge. This is appalling behavior and it must stop, regardless of what side of the political fence you lean toward.
Personally, I stand for equal rights, basic dignity and human rights for all people. I stand for ending the devastating polarization in my country and in the world right now. I stand for love and do my best to choose love whenever I am conscious enough to know that I have a choice. But I have had it. I am done trying to play peacemaker, tolerating behaviors in this country that are simply against my ethics.
De-Politicizing Dehumanization
This is not about politics, and I’m tired of people dismissing me as some leftist progressive feminist using her platform to promote a political agenda. This is about ethics for me and many of the people with whom I’m close. This is about human dignity, equal rights, and the dehumanization of women, people of color, LGBTQ and other sexual orientations, differently-abled people, and people from opposite political parties. To attack me because I don’t respect our President or the Supreme Court Justice he just put in office is to miss the point. If you think you can write me off and dehumanize me as just “one of those angry feminist women,” I’m sorry. I will not let you diminish me or anyone else as long as I have heart anger fueling my desire for all humans to have the right to be humanized, even if they have made poor or unethical choices at some point in their lives.
As long as any of one of us is not safe from being dehumanized, I have a right to be pissed. So do you. If the people in positions of power and privilege in our country think they can mock a woman who was sexually abused—and then gloat about their victory and get away with it, I feel sickened. I am embarrassed at how people have politicized this, when this is a moral issue. I can tolerate our differences and appreciate our right to have different beliefs and different political views, but I cannot tolerate the blatant disrespect of all of the women who are speaking up with their #MeToo stories—and getting mocked or ignored, having their credibility attacked or accused of being bitchy feminists who can’t just shut up, keep their mouths shut, and forgive their accusers.
People who have had their dignity dashed, people who have been marginalized and dehumanized, people who have had their basic human rights violated have a right to be angry.
Healing Requires Feeling, Moving & Clearing Your Anger
Anger is the first step to healing. If you can’t feel it—in your body, in your bones, in your broken, devastated heart, if you can’t move it and clear it from your system in an embodied, genuine way, you cannot heal.
Be wary of the people who meet your appropriate anger with “Well, that’s a story” or “You should do Byron Katie’s The Work on that belief” or “Anger only hurts the angry person. You should free yourself from that poison and forgive.” Yes, it’s true that we can get addicted to our anger, attaching to the drama of playing the victim, and overindulging in feelings of righteous indignation that cast us as superior and the offending other as inferior. We can recycle an old story ad nauseum, spewing our toxic rage on ourselves and everyone around us. So yes—it’s good to be aware of how anger can become an endless loop that derails us from true growth and anger’s natural dissolving into compassion. It’s helpful to use our anger as a trailhead for healing, something that is calling for our attention and demanding relief, and it’s helpful to avoid looping our trauma stories in a way that just keeps fueling more anger. But anger itself, at least in its pure form, is not “unspiritual” or something it benefits us to disable.
On the contrary, our anger is our ally, a power we can use when quiet, dignified demands for equality and justice are for all people are ignored or mocked. When nobody is listening to the whispers of our gentle hearts, our anger can help us LOVE LOUDER. (Hat tip to Preston Smiles for the phrase Love Louder.)
The Potential For True Forgiveness Must Be Part Of The Healing
I’m not suggesting that we should ditch forgiveness in favor of anger. I’m also not saying it’s not crucial to find ways to let anger take us on a journey that ends in compassion and forgiveness for those who hurt and dehumanized us. I’m certainly not saying we should hate or “other” or marginalize or dehumanize those who dehumanize. To do so would be to commit the same crime those who enrage us are committing. I am saying that all humans deserve to be humanized, and I believe in second chances for anyone who has made egregious, violating, unethical choices in the past.
In the midst of many allegations revolving around abuses of power, tensions rose last week when author and psychologist Robert Augustus Masters, who has previously admitted and come out publicly as being an abusive cult leader 27 years ago, published his new book Bringing Your Shadow Out Of The Dark, for which I wrote the foreword. Before I agreed to write the foreword to Robert’s book, he disclosed to me his history and sent me a copy of the now out-of-print book he had written about that shadowy part of his past. Some of the people who knew him in his cult days are still angry and feel he has failed to properly atone and make amends for his many wrongdoings.
Robert claims to have made attempts to right his wrongs, but some others who were hurt apparently do not feel his attempts to make amends were enough. Having had my trust violated by gurus and spiritual leaders in my own life, I can empathize with those whose trust was violated, and I can empathize with Robert and others who have abused power and hurt people too. When others betray our trust or violate our safety, our anger can save our lives, empowering us with the charge anger brings that leaps us out of our frozen paralysis. Yet, when is it time to turn the anger off, to recognize it for its life-giving and life-protecting qualities and also intuit when enough is enough?
Surely, if we feel that our anger did not result in justice, if those who hurt us are still hurting us or at risk of hurting others, then we are wise not to dismiss our anger. In order for healing to happen, anger has to soften into a real, bilateral, open-hearted, vulnerable, shadow dive of truth and reconciliation. If this is not possible, if the ones who perpetrate the dehumanizing behavior do not express remorse or show, in good faith, genuine humility, appropriate remorse, and an attempt to get treatment, healing becomes very, very hard for those who have been hurt. Anger can linger like a festering wound, eating away at one’s potential to live in peace. At some point, when all efforts to bring about justice fail, when the ones who hurt you show no remorse and offer no apology, when your anger has cycled through you fully, in its own time and at its own pace, perhaps then it’s possible to let anger leave in a way that is not spiritual bypassing; the anger has simply outlived its life span, paving a path that makes true forgiveness possible as an act of grace.
We Must Find A Way To Give Those Who Dehumanize A Chance At Redemption
While anger can help us make necessary changes and bring into being a more loving, just world, we must also decide as a culture what it’s going to take to give those who make horrific mistakes a chance to one day make things right. I’m not suggesting that this should be our first priority. Those who are angry need to feel their anger and be supported in their healing journey as the #1 priority right now. Those who have been dehumanized are finally speaking up—and we need to listen to their stories, make room for their anger, and deal with our own discomfort. Some have used terms like “male fragility” or “white fragility” to refer to uncomfortable feelings that arise when those who have been marginalized get appropriately angry. I’m not suggesting we should coddle such fragility. Those who can’t handle our appropriate anger need to go see their therapists and do their own work. It is not our job to walk on eggshells so people in positions of power and privilege avoid feeling uncomfortable.
That said, we cannot make the mistake of leaving out of the circle of our love those who have committed atrocious acts. To do so is to perpetuate the dehumanizing behaviors. I cannot handle living in a world where it isn’t possible for those who have made terrible mistakes to earn relief from bearing the label of “monster” for the rest of their lives. We cannot simply write off some humans as “evil” and then lock them away forever after a court of law determines that they are, indeed, monsters.
We as a culture are going to have to figure out how to handle this. We cannot just forever write off as damaged goods people who have demonstrated poor judgment and unethical choices long ago. We can—and should—impose consequences for such unethical choices, but then what? Is there ever a time when someone has atoned completely and is now free to earn people’s trust once more?
Perhaps we are deciding we will not accept into positions of power and privilege those who have ever made such dehumanizing choices. Perhaps such power is so easily corrupted that if anyone has ever demonstrated such breaches in integrity, we feel the need to decide—as a culture—to bar that person from politics, the media, corporate CEO positions, celebrity movie stars and rock star status, religious or self-help leadership, or authoring books. But then what about others who hold positions of power and privilege—doctors, lawyers, therapists, bankers, investors, online entrepreneurs with big followings? How are we going to hold one another accountable as we reckon with power and how to use it as an instrument of healing rather than a weapon of abuse?
Heart Anger
Anger is fuel for power, and as such, it can be used for its power to heal or it can be used as physical or emotional weaponry. While anger can devolve into aggression and hostility, in its cleanest forms, anger is rocket fuel for the kind of power that demands change. Robert Augustus Masters talks about “heart anger,” anger that is a form of fierce love, as with the growling Mama Bear or the Hindu Goddess Kali calling out everything that is not love. When cleared of its abusive tendencies, heart anger can be fierce compassion. It’s the power of the heart—with heat.
Saida Desilets calls it “sacred anger” and differentiates it from “righteous anger.” Righteous anger weaponizes the anger, labeling the other as “wrong” and feeling vindicated and superior in taking a stand for “right.” There’s no room for coming together in peace and healing when righteousness fuels anger’s power. But with sacred anger, there is an invitation for anyone who has been hurt as a #MeToo survivor, as well as those who have been cast in the role of “predator” or those who have been silently complicit in perpetuating and normalizing misogyny and the rape culture we live in, to come together in our shared humanity and collectively do what we must to make this planet safe for all beings. With sacred anger, the she-bear energy can stand for what is fair, just, and ethical without demonizing those on the “other side” of the anger.
Anger can indeed be very sacred, as spiritual an emotion as any ecstatic or grateful or compassionate emotion. When our anger is disabled by trauma or conditioning, we are disempowered and vulnerable to abuse. We’ve lost the natural human mechanism that protects us from collapsing in the face of abuse. When a healthy person touches her hand to a hot stove, she withdraws in pain and protects herself from further injury. But when anger has been disabled, someone who is being abused keeps their hand on the stove, incurring more and more injury, without crying out for help or pulling away from that which is hurting. Anger is as natural a reaction to the violation of healthy boundaries as pulling your hand away from a hot stove is a healthy reaction to pain. In its clean form, anger protects love—in yourself and in others who you feel the impulse to protect.
Anger Does Not Equal Abuse
Fiery outrage need not devolve into abuse or attack. It can be a force that takes a strong stand for peace, equality, and justice. Without our anger on tap, we can become impotent and limp, rendering ourselves helpless and, as a result of such listless helplessness, hopeless. Anger can offer us a beacon of hope that fills us with Shakti and motivates us to demand necessary change, not as a hateful act of condemnation and shaming, but as a loving act of moral courage. Anger can help us LOVE LOUDER.
Those who have been traumatized by the aggression of others will often harshly judge those they perceive as angry, even if such anger is justified and appropriate. Especially when women express anger, they are often labeled with insulting labels—shrill, bitchy, diva, cunt. And if you’re both a woman and a person of color, now you’re likely to get extra insults, since apparently, being doubly marginalized and dehumanized is not a good enough reason to be angry.
This does not mean we should start insulting those who insult angry women. To do so is to demean the purity of our anger, to stoop to the levels of those who insult us and dehumanize the dehumanizer. This is not a call for female superiority or an attempt to suggest that people of color deserve to be treated better than people with white privilege. But it is a call to rectify the countless wrongs, wrongs that can never be undone, wrongs that no attempts at atonement can ever undo. We must be willing to reach out to those who are hurting and, even if we’re not aware of how we’re complicit in the hurting, express a desire to finally make things right.
People who have been marginalized and dehumanized have a right to be angry right now. Our anger is our friend. We can channel it to create change if we’re careful with it and harness its raw power for sacred activism. Now is the time to use your anger, to let your rage fuel your love. Now is the time to give your heart and voice a megaphone so your love can get heard over the exploding, angry, immature tantrums of people in positions of power and privilege. Now is the time to let your anger leap you out of your chair so you can do your part to make change in whatever way your Inner Pilot Light directs you to do so. You do not need to agree meekly to the destruction of our species. You do not need to roll over and helplessly agree to Hospice this dying civilization through its death spasms. If there is any fight left in you after all the traumas those in positions of power and privilege have inflicted upon you, use it to fuel your love. Love louder. Now is the time . . .
Taking Sides Without Righteousness Or Polarization
We are making history right now, so it’s time to ask yourself which side of history do you stand on. During the Holocaust, there were those who had the moral courage to risk their own lives to hide Jews, there were those who actively pushed the buttons on the gas chambers, and there were those white Germans who silently stood by and were complicit in their silence, not necessarily because they were monsters but because they felt powerless or helpless or frightened to risk their own lives to stand for what was moral. The same thing happened during the Civil Rights movement. At some point when the tides are turning, you are either actively resisting and taking a moral stand or you are complicit in perpetuating the dehumanizing behavior by doing nothing. Doing nothing means you stand for the status quo. These are the times when you choose which side of history you want to be on. And here’s the koan/paradox—can you do that without polarizing between “us” (the good guys) and “them” (the bad guys)?”
I’ve been waiting for men in positions of power and privilege to stand up and say something, so it was with great respect and gratitude that I watched this Man Enough episode (watch it here), where men in positions of power in Hollywood are daring to risk getting castrated for speaking their minds about #MeToo stood up to say something. They admit that they are the “nice guys,” the ones who don’t commit violent acts against women, but they also admit that they have been complicit through not resisting more than they have so far. I think it takes great acts of moral courage like this to really sweep the tsunami of change into a new cultural reality.
Michael Moore recently spoke out about “protest fatigue.” It can be exhausting to keep resisting, even when it feels like love is losing. I feel that kind of resistance fatigue in my own system. Moore was comparing the resistance to being one voice among many in a choir. If you’re feeling fatigued, it’s okay to take a breath and let others keep singing. If we stagger our breaths, it will all sound like one sustained note. So be gentle with yourself. Take a breath if you need to. Then come back and raise your voice once more.
Healthy Ways To Channel Your Anger
How can you use your rage as an agent of change? Tune into your own guidance, and you’ll know, but in case you’re having trouble accessing the guidance of your Inner Pilot Light, here are a few tips.
- Vote. Marginalized people fought hard to give us the right to vote. Use it. If you’re registered to vote. Cast your vote with gratitude to all the marginalized people who got angry and used their anger to fuel change so YOU can vote. Thank the brave women and men who made it possible for you to have your vote count.
- Speak up. Your voice is needed right now. You have a right to be heard. Open your throat and lift up the power of your speech in whatever way feels easiest for you. Give a TED talk. Write a blog post. Record a video. Get up on stage. Host a town hall meeting. Run for office. Challenge the status quo. Take a stand for what you love most. Speak out amongst your friends. Speak your truth in your churches and temples and schools and jobs. Find your voice among your families. Be willing to trigger people. Silence only helps those in positions of power and privilege. Your voice is your sword of love-filled truth.
- Find your LOVE LOUDER activism. Maybe you’ll use your heart anger to call senators. Maybe you’ll grab a picket sign. Maybe you’ll serve love in your local soup kitchen or volunteer to empower marginalized sectors of our society. Maybe you’ll use the power of your pocketbook to support businesses run by marginalized people. Maybe you’ll donate money to nonprofits that are committed to rebalancing the imbalances of power and privilege. Maybe you’ll listen to someone’s #METOO story with an open heart and invite healing. Maybe you’ll offer a much needed hug to someone who has lost trust in humans. Maybe you’ll interrupt someone’s story of separation with the song you write, the art you make, or the way you show up at work. Maybe you’ll commit shocking acts of generosity that help others heal.
- Get help. See a therapist. Heal your trauma. Know that talk therapy doesn’t work for healing sexual trauma. Trauma that happens in the body needs to be healed in the body. Find a therapist who specializes in this kind of therapy, like those who have been trained in psychosexual therapy (I recommend psychologist and sacred sexuality teacher Saida Desilets, who trains other therapists in her method. Somatic experiencing, psychosexual somatics, and other body-centered trauma healing work can also do wonders for clearing sexual trauma and turning your righteous anger into sacred anger.) If you can’t afford private therapy, find a group like the Healing Soul Tribe and let the tribe help support you. (We just had Saida Desilets as our guest speaker on today’s Soul Tribe call. If you sign up by tomorrow for this month’s Sexual Healing month, we’ll give you the recording from today’s call.) Still can’t afford support, 12 step something! It’s free and there’s a 12 step group for almost anything you might need to heal. Join a women’s group in your neighborhood or through your spiritual community. Join a men’s group (try ManKind Project). Every act of healing yourself is an act of sacred activism.
A Few Tips For The Men
- If a woman in your life is angry and you feel you’ve done nothing to deserve that anger, try holding space. A lot of women and other marginalized humans are angry right now, and you may be bearing the brunt of a lifetime’s worth of suppressed rage that has boiled to the surface and can no longer stay contained without exploding. I’m not saying you should tolerate abuse from the angry woman, but see if you can just be with her emotion (and any emotions her anger is evoking in you). Breathe. Ground. Ask first, and if she’ll let you touch her, offer safe touch. Ask open-ended questions, like “What’s this like for you?” or “How can I help?” or “What do you need right now?”
- Stand up for women and take a stand against misogyny. Every time you view porn, visit a prostitute or laugh at a misogynistic joke, you participate in rape culture through dehumanizing women. Every time a guy says, “I wanna hit that” or “Watch me smash that”- speak up. Say something to defend women and make it safer to be a woman on the planet. Don’t just go along with the program. Take an active stand to help educate your brothers, your colleagues, and your friends. Don’t go along with the “Gentleman’s agreement” to choose “bros over ‘hos” (A direct quote from that Man Enough episode). Realize that we are at a cultural crossroads and tune into what side of history you want to be on.
- If you’ve been oppressed or dehumanized through a bullying father or schoolmates or a shaming mother, grandmother, girlfriend, or wife, you deserve to feel angry too. It’s not just women who have been abused and dehumanized. Your anger doesn’t diminish hers, or vice versa. Just notice if you too have had your anger disabled because it didn’t do any good to get angry when you were being dehumanized early in life. If your healthy, boundary-protecting anger is coming back online as an adult, this is cause for celebration. Get help knowing how to channel your angry warrior energy into love warrior actions that offer your masculine power in service to being a compassionate protector of the vulnerable—in women and children, in nature, and in yourself.
- If #METOO is making you angry because you’ve hurt someone and you’re triggered, please own up to what you did. If you can’t remember what you are accused of doing, be willing to question whether you might have done something you don’t remember—because you were drunk or it was considered normal behavior in your social circle and therefore didn’t even register for you as sexual assault. If you’re not sure whether you’re being falsely accused or whether you may have indeed something traumatizing for someone else, be humble and curious—and get help right away from a skilled therapist who can help you find healthy ways to move and clear your own anger. Please don’t compound the problem by getting angry at your accuser. Don’t have a tantrum and deny what you’ve done just because you’re scared of the consequences. If you know for sure you did not do what your accuser is saying you did, then by all means defend yourself. But if you did it, or if you might have done it but don’t remember, try to feel what your accuser is feeling and sense into whether you believe it’s true or possible that you may have committed a traumatizing and dehumanizing act. If you did do it, please start with the bare minimum of apologizing for what you’ve done. Ask if there’s anything you can do to make amends or atone for your dehumanizing behavior. Ask “What do you need?” and “How can I help?” Follow the lead of your accuser, since every individual who has been dehumanized may need something different. Start with getting treatment for yourself so you don’t continue to hurt others. Get help—STAT. Show your sincere desire for correcting what you violated, not just with your words, but with clear, demonstrable action. Don’t stoop to humiliating yourself, but sincerely humble yourself. Admit your mistakes, even if it feels awful and you’re drowning in your own shame. Be gentle with yourself but fierce with your stand for love and equality for all beings. Let your shame fuel your conscience. Do the right thing. Offer to pay for someone’s therapy. Back pay child support, even if it means selling your house. Pick up the tab for someone’s medical bills. If your accuser won’t let you do anything, pay it forward with random acts of kindness. Make offerings to Mother Earth and beg for Her mercy. Ask that your heart be opened, healed, and purified. Do something proactive to make the world a better place as an act of sacred reciprocity, acts of atonement for your violating actions. Be sincere in your efforts, not just practicing “strategic transparency” as a way to make a comeback, but by humbly, quietly doing what it takes to repair the harm you’ve committed as best you can.
We Are All In This Together
This time we’re in could devolve into full out gender warfare, and it will break my heart if it does, because women can’t rise without men lifting us up with the tide of their love. We rise—or crash—together. Now is the time to LOVE LOUDER.
Are you in?
Loving as loud as I can,
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