What do we lose when we’re not allowed to be angry?
In a lot of ways, anger is more taboo than grief. They’re deeply related, as you’ll hear in this two-part episode: both grief and anger are considered “negative” emotions, things you shouldn’t feel, and definitely shouldn’t express in polite company. But what if reclaiming our anger was the way to build the world - and the relationships - we most want?
All of that and more with the best selling author of Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly.
In this two-part episode we cover:
About our guest:
Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion, and media. She is the Director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project and an advocate for women’s freedom of expression and expanded civic and political engagement. A prolific writer and speaker, her articles appear in Time, the Verge, The Guardian, The Nation, HuffPost, and The Atlantic. Find her best selling book, Rage Becomes Her at sorayachemaly.com. Follow her on social media @sorayachemaly
Additional resources
We mention Pauline Boss in this episode. If you’re not familiar with her excellent work on ambiguous loss (a term she coined in the 1970s), check out her website at ambiguousloss.com
To read more about anger and how it relates to grief, check out It’s OK that You’re Not OK. If you want to explore your anger with creative prompts and exercises, check out the guided journal for grief, How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed.
Get in touch:
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Here After with Megan Devine. Tune in, subscribe, leave a review, send in your questions, and share the show with everyone you know. Together, we can make things better, even when they can’t be made right.
For more information, including clinical training and consulting, visit us at www.Megandevine.co
For grief support & education, follow us at @refugeingrief on IG, FB, TW, and @hereafterpod on TT
Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s Okay That You're Not Okay and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed
We are raised in a society that doesn't allow you to believe you should be cared for. This is here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay? This week on here After, Part two of Angerfest, otherwise known as my conversation with best selling author of Saraya Shemali. More on this absolute favorite hot topic coming up right after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in each at every episode, this show is not a substitute for skilled support with a license mental health provider or for professional supervision related to your work. Hey, friends, have you listened to part one of this conversation with Sarria Shmally yet? This is part two and we jump right into our conversation progress now a little bit of a setup in case it has been a bit since you listen to part one, orrior go and rogue and jumping in mid conversation without listening to part one. First, we ended part one as Soriah and I were discussing the media's insistence on happy endings, like even when you're doing a podcast interview and how that insistence on a happy ending or a high note effectively squashes being sad or mad. We'd also been discussing the state of the world and the long, long, long history of repressing anger, especially for women, and part two we get into the concept of resilience, but also we get into connection and related nous and joy. I hinted at this last time in my part one introduction. But friends, embracing your anger, voicing your rage is what helps you find connection and community, especially with the people who hairs passionately about the world as you do. Anger unlocks a whole lot of joy. Okay, let's get back to it. My conversation with Saya Shamali joining it already in progress. I think this is the thing, is like, we really really want a happy ending. We want there to be a solution that means that we don't have to get mad or sad or sad. Right, No sadness, no madness, no, none of those things. And if you keep showing me the state of the world, I Am going to feel things and I'm going to have to take action, and we can sort of come back full circle with like, not only is there no valid way for me to feel the feelings that I have when I really look at the state of the world. But I don't know what to do with it. I don't know what the powerlessness like. I don't know what to do with the rage and the sense of ingut to us that is being lit up in me. I don't know what to do with the overwhelming grief for what has been and what is now like. I don't know what to do with it, and I feel like for me, for me, the answer is anger. Right for me, the answer is is the action that that embodies? But I don't know. I mean, is that so where I don't even know my question is? And there's the right, But there is one what you're saying because when when I was writing, I've been writing about resilience for almost two years now, and so much of what we think of in our culture as resilience is just more sexist bullshit. It's all about being strong and mentally tough and self sufficient and autonomous, and you can't be any of those things without completely exploiting the people around you, either the people who are doing your emotional labor around your mental stoicism, or the people who are clothing you and feeding you and making sure that you can get to work and be productive and all of those things. So the question is what is it? Why? Why do we glorify a type of strength? There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the notion of strength, but we get to define what strength is. And the way we define strength is particularly calibrated to support this status quo system that we have. So how do we dismantle it? And so I think that for me two words became really relevant forbearance and endurance, which established different standards for what it means to adapt, to change and to live in the world in relation to other people. Because I think that if you understand not individual subjectivity is the core of what's important, but relational well being as the core of what it's important, then your standards will shift right, and they'll shift whether you're talking about anger or grief or work. The whole system shifts because all of a sudden you have to consider what it means to be in relation, not just in relation to another person, but for example, dismantling the divide between the mind and the body, or thinking about how we relate to nature. Everything is shifted by that, and this is not new information. We understand that we live in a pluryer reverse. There are many other ways to be in the world, many other cultures who perceive the world differently, whose language constructs the world differently. We've just destroyed a lot of them, you know, We've actively engaged and continue to engage in destroying other ways of knowing. And that's because the only relationship that matters in this worldview is one of dominance, and then you can maintain that is through violence. Yeah, you know, it's not that we don't have a relationship. It's that strength is tied to violent domination. Yes, it's that there's only one channel acceptable, and even that one is not acceptable for most of the world. Because there's a line of yours that I really like, our a quote of yours that that I really like, or you said anger is the most social emotion. I love this because we usually think of it only in that one channel, only that one option of destructive and separatists and all of these things. But what I hear you describing is that it is allowing our full relatedness that will allow us to engage in the world as it is, and the world that we might allow ourselves to hope could be well. And I think too. We are raised in a society that doesn't allow you to believe you should be cared for. Mm hmmm. We have no rights to be cared for in our society, which is just crazy. We have a right to be cared for. It's essential to human cooperation and human thriving and honestly to our survival at this point, right. But in fact, the entire structure, the social contract of our governance is that we don't need care, or that it's weak to need care. It's totally weak. Maybe you're dependent, your elite, your parasite, you want free stuff, all of that. And not only is that corrosive to the social fabric, it causes distrust, it's harmful to our relationships. But it's a lie because in fact, the people who believe that they are all of those things have baked in entitlements in the system of governments that that we have, and so it's an illusion and it's destructive. So what happens if we stepped back and we said, what if we didn't build a social contract around that radical and isolating idea of an atomistic self and as self? No, no one is without dependence throughout their lives. Literally, you're born dependent, Chances are fairly good you're gonna die dependent. And many people along the way need help at various points or all of their lives. So in the end, it's also a profoundly ablest to have the whole world built around this imaginary personhood. And it goes against what we most want, which is connection and relationship. Yeah, that's how we survive and thrive. And you know, I think what's really striking to me. I think people think that the opposite of resilience is weakness or vulnerability, and I think the opposite of resilience is loneliness. Oh right, If there's an opposite to resilience, it is loneliness. And what we have right now is a culture globally where men are profoundly lonely, and in the English speaking world, which is basically an Anglo world, where white boys and men are the most lonely and society. Yeah, and look what they do with that loneliness. And look what they do. They commit suicide or they turn it against others, and so in fact, their strength is their greatest weakness because that loneliness comes from somewhere. It's an ideal it's a kind of a compensatory masculinism in the society that's saying you have to be strong and self sufficient, don't go for this feminizing bullshit in the culture. That's like they're they're just more than enough misogynists and assholes running around saying stuff like that, and kids are listening to it, boys are listening to I mean, it's just such a like complex, clusterfuck, such a complex And that's where you go back to, it's overwhelming. I'm just going to withdraw. Yeah, And I think this is like, this is where it's important to come back to, like, Okay, we have to be able to tell the truth, to see clearly the situation at hand, and then wonder for ourselves, what are my radical acts in the face of this, Like caring for our own bodies, listening to our own bodies, listening to our own related nous and our needs for connection. Like basically, whatever the dominant culture says is a bad thing, Like maybe we want to lean into that more. I I go back to like several years ago, before the pandemic, there was a signal. The health insurance outfit did a study on loneliness and they found that loneliness was a bigger public health risk than smoking. Just find fascinating because like, what I haven't seen a lot related to that study is like what comes out of that study is like, let's change loneliness and not asking the first question, which is why are people lonely? Why did they get so? Like what is it? Right? I was just talking to a friend of mine who was at ce S, the you know, Technology Computer Extravaganza annual Giant Global Show, Las Vegas, and he was describing a new technology which is an immersive viewing experience basically with a headset, so it's kind of a VR experience without having to wear the headset. And it is a big screen. So imagine a giant television in a living room and the person watching it, Let's say they're watching a soccer game. The television monitor will lock onto the eye movement of the person watching, and the entire perspective of the game will take into account where that person's eyes are, so the focal point becomes where the person is looking, which makes this feel much more immersive. And I burst out laughing, and I was like, what happens when there's more than one person in the room and my friend laughed and he was like, what do you mean. I'm like, what happens when two people are watching? What happens? And then we all burst out laughing, And my husband said, it's a technology for lonely white guys who can afford it, right, who want to feel connected and part of what's happening. Yeah, oh gosh, I don't believe technologies are problem. Technology is what we make of it. But we're making shitty technology. Well, I think we're making technology that presumes lonely, lonely white male, like increasing that gaze. And the other thing is like what I heard as you were describing that immersive thing is like, we want you to be able to feel like you're connected, but we're doing it within this realm of disconnection, right, Like, what if we were trying to address that primal human need for relatedness and connection by allowing people to feel what they feel and giving us structures and pathways to talk about what it's really like to be here, Like you want cutting edge, baby, go for relational cutting edge, not tech cutting edge. But you know, this is interesting because I actually think that the you know, the the Internet's economic model relies on our emotions It relies on our effective relationships are effective sharing. It particularly relies on the virility of negative emotions anger, shame, outrage, terror, fear. That's its engine. That's why we have the problems we have with information, truth, misinformation, disinformation, and so people are seeking out those relationships, but in fact they're seeking them out in some of the most destructive ways, because to admit to a lot of those feelings in a interpersonal context is foreclosed to them. Right, Like a man is probably far less likely to look at his wife or his child and say I'm scared shitless, that I'm losing relevance, that I can't make money, that my country is my country you anymore? Like all the white terror that we see, all the despair. He can't say that to his loved ones without feeling shame. But he can hop online and share the experience of saying, we have to be strong, we have to fight back with other people who are feeling the same thing. It's a way to cope with the grief and the fear and the despair in a way that is yeah, in a way that is familiar and sanctioned. Yeah, that's right, And embodied nous is important, absolutely Oh my goodness. Yes, Like you have to be disembodied, you have to be cut off from embodiment and the animal nature of of being in these bodies in order to other people like that. My undergrad thesis or my psych thesis, was on the creation of tortures and how do you do that? Right? But that that is that is a subject for a different day, because I can totally geek on that one. But like this idea that when the only sanctioned and acceptable channel for anger, which is a sense of injustice or violation or respect like rights and being allowed to be who you are, all of these things, like when the only channel for that is destructive, then anger itself gets is kind of off the table. Yeah, that's right. And for us what happens is also due to socialization, you end up just hurting yourself more than anything. Yeah. I don't necessarily believe this is terribly accurate, but I remember studying psychology back in the nineties and one of the things going around back then was depression is anger turned inwards. And a lot of people still say that. I'm not fully on board with that one. I think there's a lot more complexity there, but there is something that we lose when we don't have other ways to express anger. Yeah, we've been talking with best selling authors sayah shmali, let's get back to it. Any repressed emotion finds its way into your body, and so whether it's self harming, behavior's anxiety, depression, there are lots of things that's been linked to cancer rates. It's not that it's causing it, but they are very high correlations between the incidents of repressed anger and autoim Like all the illnesses we think of, particularly as women's illnesses, they share this quality of repression of anger, and I just don't think that's been studied or teased out well enough or you know. But one of my other goals in writing this was that women didn't get sicker, didn't get more tired, could maybe consider what it means to ask for help. And the danger there is that the people you care for don't care. Like that's the best. If you say, I'm really angry because I'm doing everything, I feel taken for granted, I'm exhausted, I don't have any sleep, I have no leisure time. Whatever you're saying, right, I I can't make ends meet. You actually are saying, can you help me work through this. But the person you're you're talking to doesn't want to hear it, then you're really in trouble. Yeah, then you have some big choices you need to make. You have some big choices you have to make. And it's interesting too, because one of the studies I think that is most disturbing to people who read the book sometimes is that in heterosexual couples, women won't express anger as anger. They'll express it as fear or sadness to compensate for the feelings that they have that that feel wrong to them or cause them shame, but in fact they're not wrong because men in those couples they get angry at a woman for expressing anger because they think she's breaking relationships. So instead of actually listening to her and reciprocating or changing behavior or brainstorming, they just shut it down. Yeah, you know, and so instead of listening and saying, let me, let me understand what you're going through, And that doesn't leave the woman much recourse because in fact, what she's left with is the awareness that this man that she's with doesn't care what yeah, isn't willing to make changes to prioritize their needs. That are expressed through that anger. Yeah. Yeah, and this is the thing, Like the anger is the need for change that something isn't working and I need to voice that do something about it takes some action on my own behalf or on the behalf of somebody or something I care about, and systems don't like to change. Yeah, it's very resistant. It's very hard. Hard. Yeah, change is hard. And there's also it's all also tied up with you know, if I say to my partner, like, I'm really angry and this feels imbalanced and unfair, then they take that in as a personal attack in some ways. I think earlier you said, like we we we observe somebody else's anger and give it back as shame or or name it shame, like you think I'm bad, And then we're right back where we started with. Like you know, it's interesting because I've written a lot about me too as a threat to men's identities, because I remember the years building up to me to the sort of genealogy of hashtags that led us to the moment where we could do me too, and me too was global and so many men I knew didn't matter, conservative, progressive, didn't matter, we're just in denial. They're like, this must be an exaggeration. It can't be that bad. What do you mean you feel scared when you walk at night? Like some pretty basic stuff, basic basic stuff, right? And I thought, these are people who clearly care for the women around them, So why why the denial? And in fact, I think that it's pretty clear that me too was like a punch to the gut. For two, primary are things that men associate with being good people, providing and protecting. If women are saying I want to provide for myself. I don't want to go into a workplace where I'm harassed and I can't get a promotion unless I have sex with someone, they're like, I want to provide for myself, that's thing one. And if women can provide for themselves, and what are men supposed to do? And then the thing two is you're not protecting me. You would have to follow me even then you couldn't protect me. You can't protect me on the way to school, in the bus, in the bathroom, in the parking lot, in the office, and the like wherever. So what is it to providing and protecting the left M And I just think it's pretty. It makes a lot of cognitive sense to say that's just not happening, that's just not as bad as you're saying. It's just that does not compute like that that the that people are lying about their lived experience is the most logical and acceptable answer to the situation at hand, because it cannot possibly be that the world is as you say it is, as if it is, Am I a good person? I'd be a good person? How it might be is there a place for me? And we come back again to the root of everything we've talked about is connection and relatedness and being able to be soft and shift and connect and allow the pain of the world to enter into that and enter into our relationships so that we can get honestly, Like in my my most Pollyanna moment is like, we can get what we all long for, which is being seen and connected and supported for who we truly are and valued. Like we can do that when we tell the truth and allow others to tell the truth about their own lives, and when we let that stuff in Like to me, that's the beautiful world, right, But it involves a lot of messiness and a lot of reckoning and a lot of outrage, all of those things, and and it involves all those negative emotions nobody wants to deal with. Yeah, that's really I think a lot of it, Like yeah, and nobody likes to give up power? Who are we kidding? No? And there's I mean, it's it's that shift of what does power even mean? And I think we could probably talk for ten more hours on on the concept of power and what is true power. Actually, I like this idea though, of like we've we've mentioned this several times in our conversation, that we have one acceptable channel for anger and it belongs to a very specific, well described person in a very well described way, and it's not available to anybody else. And one of the things that you said was that there are many ways to be angry. And I feel like, I feel like if we could spend a couple of minutes talking about the ways that we can be angry, because I'm not capable of always ending on a happy ending, especially if it doesn't make sense, and I want to I want to know what to do with the anger, with the looking at our relationships and the state of the world and all there is to grieve and all there is to be angry, about and I have an idea of what's next. So I thought a lot about this, and the conclusion I came to was really this idea that we have to stop thinking of it as a negative emotion. That's thing one. The thing too is okay. Well, once we decided this isn't bad, it is what it is? What do I learn from it? What is it that I want? How can I make that happen. If I can't make it happen, what next I have to accept something? Maybe I am grieving because I understand this won't change. Like I had a fifteen year old come up to me in a high school one day after I've given a talk and poor things. She was so distraught and she said, do you think that patriarchy will end in my lifetime? She was serious, She was so overwhelmed, and she she just didn't know what to do, you know, And it was a little heartbreaking because I couldn't say yes, you know. But I think, then you think, well, what what can I do? You know, what should I do? How do I transcend this this grief? And that's an interesting way to put it, right, transcending the grief, because you have to go through the grief. I think, like there's there's you don't put it aside, you don't climb over it. It's you know, it's it's not a stool, you know. And so I thought in the book, I thought, Okay, well, the fact is it's a kind of an energy that we have, and what can we do with it? Because I've always found that in anger, I think, like grief have come some of my dearest relationships. No activist feminist movement that I've ever been part of did not start with a woman getting angry. And there's so much humor and so much vision, and so much creativity and so much caring that goes into that anger, and the relationships that are borne by it, the recognition that other women, for example, and men, but in my experience it was mainly women. The recognition that we share this anger was a source of comfort and joy and happiness. And and then the anger turns into something different because in fact, it's informed a relationship that has this remarkable potential for connection and change. So I do think that that's all true. And I've been bowled over since I published this book in two thousand eighteen by the share number of people that have contacted me to share their artistic outputs m sculpture, poetry, writing, painting. It's an infinite array of people saying, Okay, you know what I feel this way, I need to do something about it. I can't do X. I'm going to do why, And out of their creativity m's connection comes community comes, this sharing of experience that makes a new meaning for people. And I think that goes back to what we said earlier that it's not just I feel this. I don't want to be destructive with it. I guess I won't feel it at all. It's more like what how can I connect? How can I express? How can I relate with this? There's the list when you when I saw that quote where you said there are so many ways to be angry, you're like joyful anger, creative anger, political, artistic, and social anger, Like there are so many things you can do with your outrage. Yeah, I think so. And for some people it's baking. For absolutely, I don't care what you do with it, Like the it's it's be in relationship with the with the reality of your of your embodied experience, right like Yeah, for other people, it's it's forming community organizations. For other oh, it's starting schools. It doesn't matter what it is. You know why I say it's it's it's social emotion, like we want to call an angry girl or woman sad, because that is an emotion of retreat. Anger is a forward emotion. It in anger itself is hope because you can't be angry if you don't hope that something could change. Yes, I love that. There. I was going to quote you because there's this great thing that you said that anger is the expression of hope. And I and I do try to end each episode here with what is hope? Knowing what you know and living what you've lived. What does hope look like for you right now? So? Can we can we talk about that? Like a very bad day? Hey, they happen. Man, I am hopeless a lot of the time, which is why we're having these conversations because I think for me, hope has always like used grammatically incorrectly, and also it's not realistic, like I hope that things work out for the best. No. Yeah, that's why. That's why I've stopped thinking in terms of hope, and I've thought forbearance and enduring and and not I thing, but endurance as equanimity over time, endurance as a deeper understanding, and a lot of my focus personally is on understanding the way modern culture, modernity created a kind of temporal regime that informs all of our lives, and that was disrupted by COVID by the way, like COVID, COVID through the cadence of modern life into total disarray, and some people came out of that with I'm not going back. I'm just not doing that again. I'm quitting, I'm slowing down, I'm finding a new like whatever it is. They're like, no way am I doing that again? But I think a lot about the standards and what they mean for notions like hope, And how do we think about time when we think about hope, How do we think about time when we think about resilient? How do we think about the linear that the notion of linearity and grief? Right? Our experiences are that there this linearity doesn't exist, So why are we shaping our expectations around it? You know? And so for me, hope is two steps forward, one step back, step to the right, step to the left, go up a little, maybe go down a little. It's just not it's not this thing that's you know, an arrow going back right. Yeah. I like hope as a more a morphous living thing that we find ways to express or find ways to dismiss depending on the day. We didn't think about we didn't talk about this at all. But there's this sort of French postmodern philosophers late twentieth century to Losing Guitari who whose theories of kind of rhizomatic knowledge and thinking they kind of go through loops of being criticized and then having a surgeons. But what I'm seeing that's really funny just in the culture in the last several years is this fascination with mushrooms and my celia, and it really aligned so closely with their thinking about how life works. And we have what they called our our boreal thinking and knowing there's you know, we're rooted in the ground and there's a central core and then things branch off and their logical endpoints they're like, funk that that's just not right right. So, in fact, it's really helped me to think of hope in that way as riz ometic, Yeah, because you don't know where it begins. Incological, mycological. Great great name for something that's mycological. But but definitely this notion that you can begin and end anywhere, and that you don't know, and that things move in every direction at all times. I just like that. It just resonates more. I love that. I think I'm gonna reflect on that for a while. Mike A lot. Hope, what would what would mushroom based mycology? Hope, because I you know, I was a student of Joanna Macy for a long time, and I whenever I was temporarily stuck, I would go with her thinking like a mountain, right, thinking in geologic time, for pacing and all of these things, thinking like a mountain. But I think I think my new, my new form of that is going to be thinking like a mycological organism. I don't know if it's still true, but the last time I went looking for it, the largest known biological organism in the world, is it my ce lamb? It's a it's an It was either I think there was a race for a while between a stand of aspens or a single mushroom system that was like nine miles. The last I read it was the mushroom. I don't know, I'll go back. Yeah, I think there there was some scientific there was some branching there that the aspens didn't really count as a single organism in the same way that anyway full nerd Um and the ways that it relates to what we've been talking about with like, I love this. I love that there is no entry point, there is no exit point. Start where you are, and if you don't like where you are in your understandings of how anger lives in you and what it means to claim that anger and to claim whatever hope looks like for you, Like I don't know, pick a different fruiting body on the mushroom system and explore that one, and you may be surprised, you know, because I think if we're rigid about it. Honestly, it's to me in the end, it's how cognitively flexible can you allow yourself to be? Because you just don't know. I'd never know. I'm like, oh, well, that was surprising. What Why was it surprising to me? What surprised me about that? Perfect variants or place curiosity is really a good and self compassion. I've never been one for the self care industry. I think it's morbi know, it's part of capitalism, sure, part of capitalism. And also it's so easy for neoliberalism to take the language and self compassion and just con turn it into something very unhelpful. But I do actually think that until we understand how are ourselves are formed by our cultures, it's hard to be forgiving, forgiving of the time we need. It, very hard to take time, yeah, take time without that added codissle of take care of yourself, care for yourself so that you can come back and be productive. Right, So it's it's separating that and realizing that listening to yourself and caring for yourself and taking care yeah, is an end stop in and of itself. You don't do that, so that X Y and I don't know if you can see a Tria Hershey's the NAP ministry, Yes, love it. So that's more or less where we came to write, like she exactly that's what she's talking about. And in her case, she's so clear, she's like, you can't talk about rest and self compassion without talking about white supremacy. But you can't do it, so don't do it right, Like if you can't say the whole thing, the whole system, then like you're missing the point of it. You do it and you don't say it. You're part of the problem, not the solution, you know, And that just requires people to sit quietly with their anger, with their grief, with their discomfort, with their shame. It's not easy for anyone know it truly, truly isn't and and conversations about it, naming it Like for me, that is the power of this work is in a way, we're creating structures for people to explore and experiment with by naming what is actually happening, and it's it's giving people options. And I'm so glad that you and I got the chance to talk about the stuff together. Now obviously in the show notes, I'm god a link to your ted talk. I'm a link to your book. Is there anything else you want people to know where to look for you when your next book is coming out? Thank you? I have I have a website that's just my name and then dot com, sal dot com. There are some other books there if people are interested. No, thank you. I think that's good, excellent, Okay, we are going to put that in the show notes. Everybody, Sriah, thank you so much for being here. Stay with us, everybody. We will be right back with your questions to carry with you, or right after this each week I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. And here's the thing for me in this episode parts one and two, It's amazing just how hopeful it is to connect with other angry people. You know what I mean? As Soriah said, anger is a social emotion and connecting with people who feel as passionate about the state of the world as you do. That's the kind of community that I want to be part of. What about you? What's stuck with you today? From this conversation on anger and grief and joy and connection? What parts made you think or cry or feel even just the edge of your own anger brewing and waiting to be free. Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but I do hope you find something to hold onto. Check out Refuge and Grief on Instagram or here after pod on TikTok to see video clips from the show, and please leave your thoughts in the comments on those posts. Everybody's got something to say about anger and I want to hear it. Be sure to tag us in your conversation starting posts on your own social media use the hashtag here after pod on all the platforms. We love to see where this show takes you, and remember to subscribe and leave a review. Reviews help more than you know they're not. Just like I like to see reviews of how much you love the show, but it also helps potential listeners know that this is a pretty rad show to listen to. Anyway, if you want to tell us how today's show felt for you, or you have a request or a question for upcoming explorations of difficult things, send us an email. You can do that right on the website. Megan Divine dot c O. We want to hear from you. I want to hear from you. This show, this world needs your voice. Together, we can make things better even when they can't be made right. Want more Hereafter. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events that clearly divide life into before and after. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic think positive posters is an important skill for everyone. Find trainings, workshops, books and resources for every human trying to make their way in the world. After something goes horribly wrong at Megan Divine dot c. O here After with Mega Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, who produced by Tonya Juhaus and Elizabeth Fozio, edited by Houston Tilly, and studio support by Chris Yuron. Music provided by Wave Crush