Anger, Aggression, Love and Learning
I wrote this article for Feldenkrais.com It is in the Members only section so only accessible if you are a member. https://feldenkrais.com/anger-aggression-love-and-learning/
A number of years ago a client, Daniel, who I had been seeing for pain and anxiety following a car accident, asked me “What is the Feldenkrais® perspective on anger?”
When we first spoke about anger, my response was general and not altogether different from what I might say on anxiety.
‘It is an experience of emotional impotence that affects an individual’s posture, muscular patterns, and their ability to achieve what they want. When we understand our patterns and habits and find greater choice in our actions we can have a more mature experience with it.’
But Daniel’s question sent me back to Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’ documented legacy to see what he said on the subject and to my delight he did have much to say.
Moshe Feldenkrais spoke of anger, aggression, violence, power and impotence in his teachings and many of his insights are recorded in the "Love and Violence" talk in the Amherst Training and his books The Potent Self and The Master Moves. In the Master Moves, Chapter 10 The Tongue, Jaw and Aggression Moshe offers his most discrete accounts of anger, specifically the distinction between aggression and violence.
Moshe consistently stated that our experience and expression of all emotions, including anger, can be traced back to our earliest stages of development and while all emotions are a physiological and psychological process “the earliest interaction of the child with the external world is entirely physical. The earliest emotional movements become, therefore, associated or linked with muscular and postural patterns.” (The Potent Self, p82)
In other words, how we were parented, educated, and inculcated into our society shows up in our bodies, in our emotional competence (or incompetence), and our daily actions, relationships, and habits.
But it is the distinction between aggression and violence that is at the crux of what Feldenkrais asks us to consider when understanding anger.
In the years since Daniel first sparked my curiosity I’ve experienced continued richness in considering the implications of these teachings. I’ve personally embraced and refined my own anger, I’ve changed the way I meet my partner in emotionally sensitive spaces, I’ve changed the way I parent - namely not inhibiting my children’s natural aggression apprenticeship, and professionally I have come to understand the intimate relationship between anxiety, anger, learning and love.
If we consider Feldenkrais’ distinctions of aggression and violence in the context of animals and children, we can see its biology. Puppies and kittens bite, scratch, pounce, and chase instinctively; but caring mothers may be shocked when their bundle of joy bites at the nipple, snatches a toy, pulls hair, throws cutlery, and kicks and screams.
If we consider these actions in an alternative context, people bite ravenously into a juicy apple, kick vigorously when boot scooting, scream as their favourite band
arrives on stage, pull hard when reaching sexual climax, snatch quickly when playing tag, and punch repeatedly after getting the gig.
Actions, when considered in context, do not equal anger. But are they aggression? Moshe would say yes. This distinction can leave some people uneasy. And in writing this article, I have had many fruitful and at times "warming" conversations with clients and peers as we wrestle with how we feel about these distinctions. Surely aggression is not something we want to cultivate!?!
But “aggression is essential to life” and a human being needs to be able “to caress and to kill.” “Without cutting trees we couldn’t have toilet paper and without killing the beast we would have no meat.” (The Master Moves, p167)
In modern terms, to steal the soccer ball from an opponent, a striker must play aggressively, to save a child from oncoming traffic, a parent must be swift and aggressive, and to show leadership, a CEO must make calculated and aggressive decisions.
But we often “inhibit aggression in children, which is idiotic. It’s incorrect. It’s because we don't distinguish between aggression and violence. Aggression is an essential part of life.” (The Master Moves, p164)
If a child’s early expressions of aggression are confused with violence, parents or teachers may try curb their behaviour. Alternatively, parents may cheer on aggressive behaviour. These directions may allow a child to ‘fit in’ but they can lead to a chronic sense of powerlessness, anxiety and resentment as a natural biological choice is tainted through punishment and reward.
These dependency-based teachings to inhibit or embolden aggression manifests in our posture and actions, what Moshe calls ‘acture’. Poor acture discloses our “doubt, fear, hesitation, guilt, shame, and impotence.” For some, the crucial factor is “lack of affection or lack of approval” but for many of my clients it is “lack of aggressiveness” (or lack of skilled aggressiveness) that perpetuates their anxiety pattern. (The Potent Self, p121)
Like many mothers I encouraged my child to be kind and generous. When my son moved to high school and willingly offered his eraser, pencil, ruler and scissors to whomever asked he quickly found them never returned or returned dishevelled.
This example supports Moshes assertion that “the person who never refuses anybody because he cannot may seem kind, but is most of the time suffering from his own goodness. He does more harm in his own charming manner to himself and to others than do healthy people who are good when necessary and cruel when it is justified.” (The Potent Self, p154)
My son soon learnt when it is wise to be kind but for some clients compulsive kindness acts like a noose around their necks and robs them of their vitality, spontaneity and potency.
These insights also informed my professional work and today I assist parents and children in this vital developmental phase.
Much of the work I do with children presenting with anxiety-aggression conflicts is providing a safe relational space for the child to engage in positive expressions of emotional expressivity, power, desire, aggression and dominance through movement and play. We build towers and crash them down, bang on musical blocks, punch and kick foam rollers, hammer balls into the wall, shoot each other dead, and wrestle and chase each other over fallen objects.
Parents sometimes watch in awe as their sweet child leaps onto a roller like a wild boar wrestling its prey to its death, or imaginarily tie me up and pour hot burning lava over me. But after, when their child puts magic healing cream on my burns or gives me a big bear hug as they leave, the parents see the flip side of aggression – that by encouraging their child to be ‘gentle’ and ‘good’ they may in fact be accidently impeding their child’s full expression of love and intimacy.
To know kinaesthetically your true physical power and to choose how and when you use it is the gift of maturation. We cannot learn this theoretically, it needs to be experiential. As we know in Feldenkrais “learning must begin in the body, in a way we can somatically refine the learning” and “slowly over time it is enough to think” ‘love,’ or ‘anger’ and the physical expression will manifest.
For some people, the challenge is defining the meaning of the words "aggression" and "violence." In other domains the word aggression is used to refer to damaging violence, so we may need to temper our language to meet our client’s sensibilities. An older client who prided himself on being a kind man and “not having an aggressive bone in (his) body” later commented as he struggled to open a chocolate wrapper “Perhaps I could do with a little more aggression,” realised aggression is not so bad after all.
Anger, when seen in through the lens of learning, is a natural process, part of a continuum of possibilities for what it is to be human, what it is to be humane.
So how can we meet our clients in these questions?
The first reckoning I feel must be with ourselves. If we can find a quality of comfortability, self-understanding, reversibility and potency with our own anger we become a wellspring of support for our clients. I would also add that being comfortable with our own anxiety toward anger is vital - I cannot help anyone if their anger elicites anxiety.
So what tools might we use and share with our clients?
Lets start with the considering how we embody anger. Because we sense “our anger long before it is externalized,” a simple body scan can help us you get clearer. (The Potent Self, pg 82)
Explore Yourself with this Body Scan*
1) Take a moment to sit comfortably and then consider something you feel angry about.
How does your posture change? Do you get taller or shorter? Do you get wider or narrower? Do you notice a slight twist creep in as if bringing one side slightly forward or down?
Do you feel tension or bearing down in your belly, do your eyes converge, do you feel changes in your jaw or facial expressions, how has your breathing changed, or maybe you notice something change in your dominant arm, shoulder and hand or leg and foot?
2) Now slightly exaggerate this postural change a little. Everything about it exaggerate it just a little, make it more intense, connect the discrete feelings into one complete connected postural experience.
What are you doing? Are you digging your heels in? Holding yourself back? Clenching your teeth? Locking your eyes on your target?
And what are you stopping yourself from doing? Punching, shouting, crying, kicking?
3) And then stop and give up thinking about it.
How specific could you be about what you sensed? Consider:
location,
tone,
direction,
pattern, and
relationships.
Looking at the expression of aggression and anger across the species we see many distinct characteristics. The mouth open, lips curled, barring the teeth, eyes narrow and forward, head jutting, shoulders up, chest puffed, distended belly, breathing out, vocalisation, curled fingers, nails, flexed spine with bent elbows and knees.
With my clients I modify the ‘snarl and smile’ ATM from Chapter 10 of The Master Moves with much delight and insightful learning. I use push and pull lessons to clarity full bodied limb-led movement. And I use breath, jaw and vocalising lessons, or eyes and qualitative hand lessons to help my clients develop their potency in gentleness - finding a soft agile expression of their power.
Most times what we feel emotionally is more complex than a single emotion, and sometimes I work with my clients to clarify this ‘emotional cocktail’ – Discovering the powerlessness, with a dash of loathing, complimented nicely with defiance, shaken up with desperation, and finished off with a lingering regret.
If we can linger with anger, in safe spaces, there is much to learn. Anger may be
frustration, which is an essential phase in learning. Anger may be fear, what we
commonly call the ‘fight’ response, in which case the client feels unsafe needs
support. Anger may be aggression, which, as Feldenkrais says, is a natural part of
our biological repertoire for survival and success. Anger may be violence, which is
action intended to elicit fear in another (or the self) and we want to spot that early.
And of course anger can be a secondary response to protect vulnerable feelings of
pain, shame or helplessness, and again this requires sensitivity.
We can fail to understand, or dare I say appreciate, anger because of its ‘negative’ or taboo notions. And I will confer that anger is sometimes dangerous and for clients who has been on the receiving end of someone’s violent rage they know the crippling damage. And it is true that it can perpetuate division. But nothing is that simple and anger is at times unifying. As recent rallies demonstrate anger brings people together and it can be a catalyst for positive change.
In considering working with anger professionally, given anger might illicites anger or anxiety in us, we may feel rightly concerned in supporting our clients with such questions. But if we consider anger like all emotions, like all actions and experiences that are part of our apprenticeship toward maturity then we can apply the same curiosity, and from personal experience you will be enriched for it.
I hope with the assistance of Moshe’s clarity and direction you can take time to meet yourself in this potent expression and that you could even support your clients there too.
In conclusion Feldenkrais would often say "do not just agree with me." One of his reasons for this, I believe, is that submission inhibits true learning, but, in the context of our discussions here submission can be a dangerous and fertile ground for eroding an individual’s sense of autonomy and allowing anger to take hold.
For this reason, take time to consider what you think, sense, and feel and to put your autonomy at the forefront of your questions. “What do you notice?” “What has been your experience?” “What do you agree and disagree with?” What would you add?
We may not choose our initial learned and embodied responses to anger, or any emotion, but as adults we have choice in how we act now. Do we want to repeat compulsive habits or would we like to commit to our emotional apprenticeship and find new, subtle and deeply humane ways of attending and responding?
Whatever options you choose, it is your choice now.
*This body scan is informed by Feldenkrais Practitioner Andrew Wright’s work on anxiety.
Special thanks to Daniel Christensen for his thoughtful questions and input.