Rage Club helps channel anger into ‘aliveness’

Let it out: Rage Club wants to help people turn anger into clarity.

On a recent Thursday night, before sitting down for a potluck dinner, several dozen people gathered at Earthdance in Plainfield to let out pent-up anger.

This was an introductory session for Rage Club, a collective of groups around the world in which participants go through exercises to both get in touch with and release what they call “conscious anger,” which, according to the organization’s website, allows participants to say authentic yeses and nos, to “change things, move things, stop things, start things, invent things,” “get rid of things,” to “take a stand for something or for someone,” “maintain integrity,” “implement powerful intention,” and “take steps and move forward.

“In other words, to do the next amazing thing in your life!”

Facilitated by trained “spaceholders” Daway Chou-Ren, Hannah Hirsh and Meredith Witt, the Earthdance session aimed to help people understand their own rage and turn it into something productive.

“Your conscious anger is the source of your clarity and aliveness. You do not have to be a violent destroyer. Nor do you have to be a voiceless, polite people pleaser with no boundaries,” the event description said.

Rage Club isn’t an anger management group or a therapy session, nor is it a rage room or a fight club. As Hirsh put it, “In Rage Club, we come from the premise that anger is neutral life-force energy, so it’s not good. It’s not bad. It simply is. I can use my anger in these unconscious ways that will come out in resentment or side comments or passive aggression, or I can use my anger in a conscious way to be really clear to tell somebody, ‘No, that’s not OK with me that you did that,’ or to say, ‘Yes, I really want to do this with you.’ ”

“People think Rage Club is about catharsis. It’s really not,” Chou-Ren said. “Catharsis would be like, ‘I’m just going to make loud noises so the energy goes away.’ Rage Club is about using the anger, making the noises, so the body can experience what it’s feeling, but then speaking from the body and turning the anger into clarity of saying, ‘I want,’ ‘I don’t want.’ ‘I have a boundary about this.’ ‘I want my life to be about this.’ ‘I don’t let this person abuse me anymore.’ It’s about using the anger to lend that clarity back in a person’s body so that they can make that change.”

An introductory Rage Club session entails both “high-level” and “low-level” “anger practices.” The latter include things like standing or lying down in positions where it’s safe to let anger out. Chou-Ren mentioned that a man he’d recently met at the California festival SoulPlay said that the Rage Club Chou-Ren facilitated was the first time he’d cried in six years.

“When there’s a big trauma, the body actually has that responsive, ‘I don’t want this, I’m like a full-body no.’ And in those situations where the trauma happens, it’s because the body didn’t have the ability to say no or to stop whatever was happening, so to actually complete the body’s experience of that requires giving the proportional anger. For him, it wouldn’t have been something that he could just write down on a piece of paper, ‘I feel angry about this.’ He actually had to let his body rage about what happened.”

On its face, the idea of giving people a safe space to let out their anger is a good thing, not to mention, Chou-Ren said, “the majority of people that come to our Rage Clubs are really good people trying to have good emotions and good relationships. They’re, like, the best people in the world.”

Still, how do the facilitators know that helping people validate their own anger isn’t giving a weapon to someone who might use that to harm people, in the vein of “weaponized therapy-speak?”

As Chou-Ren pointed out, people who want to harm others emotionally can use any tool of their choosing to do so: “A lot of stuff in religion is about being a good person, and people use that to attack people.” Chou-Ren, who has facilitated about a dozen Rage Clubs (so far), said he’s never seen someone use a Rage Club to hurt someone else.

“What happens is, the angriest people that come in, they start crying,” he said. “They start crying because it’s finally like, oh, there’s enough containment where the reason why they’re prickly and why they’re defensive can drop, and then the heart comes out.”

Chou-Ren and Hirsh said helping people release their anger benefits the world as a whole, not just individuals.

“I think that a lot of the problems we have as a society are because people are numb or ignoring the consequences of what we’re doing, either in our personal relationships or as a society,” Chou-Ren said. Facilitating Rage Club sessions is “really about taking a stand for a culture that’s not numb, for a culture that doesn’t ignore feelings, for a culture that loves feelings. I think that this is our personal stand for the world that we want to create and live in.”

For more information about Rage Club, visit rageclub.org. The next Rage Club in western Massachusetts has not yet been scheduled, as of this writing, but Hirsh said it will return in the fall.