Rage Writing to Build Self-Compassion
I gave my biggest Write & Release workshop last week. Nearly 2,000 people from all over the world attended on YouTube Live and over 12,000 people have now watched the replay. Big thanks to Therapy In a Nutshell for sharing her platform of over 1.5 million with me!
In this workshop, I shared a writing prompt invoking anger and rage.
“It is braver to love yourself than it is to hate on others.
Based on this prompt, describe your experience with someone who chose hate over love. (Do not pick the most triggering event.)”
The origin of this writing prompt came from my experience of being severely wronged by a female leader in the fashion industry.
This woman tormented every person she led in her team. She pinned women against each other. She singled each designer out individually at different times and humiliated them in front of cross-functional meetings. She revoked my design responsibilities and forced me to clean closets and file binders after I designed one of the best-selling bags of the season.
I saw design directors quit one by one as she drove the kindest and most talented people out of the company because they refused to stroke her fragile ego. I witnessed a traumatized woman creating a traumatized system on a mission to make anyone in her presence feel powerless.
It took me 6 months after leaving that company to finally feel safe enough to process my anger and rage toward this hurt woman who hurt women.
I remember sitting in my therapist’s office, struggling to feel my anger and rage for the emotional violation this woman committed on my wellbeing.
“I encourage you to write your anger and rage out in a notebook or on your phone,” My therapist told me, “Whenever you feel your anger, pull out your phone and write your truths.”
And so my rage writing journey began in the notes app on my phone. This space was my virtual punching bag as I wrote this woman hundreds of poems, prose, and letters in a fully expressed voice that was not afraid to name-call, swear, or make fun of this woman.
Allowing myself to fully express anger in a safe space resulted in feeling liberated and joyful that I created a persona for this voice called, Sincerely Miss Mary.
Connecting with my anger through this higher version of myself allowed me to slowly heal from the emotional daggers this woman threw at me.
After writing to her unapologetically for years, a breakthrough emerged: She was the way she was because of her inability to see and love herself. Her act of hate towards others was cowardly and weak. She chose hate over love which led me to write the words, it’s braver to love yourself than it is to hate on others.
Her mistreatment of others was a window into how she treated herself. She was a deeply wounded woman grasping onto relevancy as a new (millennial) generation was entering the workforce. The emotional scar she left finally faded and was replaced with the lesson that it is braver to love yourself than it is to hate on others.
This would be a lesson I would then teach to over 2,000 people on YouTube Live and to over 65 students aspiring to work in the fashion industry in an in-person workshop at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Write & Release is a powerful tool to connect with our uncomfortable emotions and adverse experiences. It’s important to believe that our emotional truths are always right, and if we allow ourselves to befriend these hidden parts of ourselves, we can hear an inner voice that relieves our bodies from hard-hitting emotions like anger.
We can become softer with ourselves and slowly build self-compassion.
These are lessons I had the honor of teaching in last week’s free YouTube Live workshop, Building Self-Compassion through Rage Writing, which is available to watch now here!
You’ll learn my most popular writing modality, the IPH system (inner child, present self, higher self), where you can write intentionally to help you release emotions, regulate your nervous system, and build self-compassion.
If you enjoy this workshop, I encourage you to purchase my mini Write & Release eBook, a 30-page guide diving deeper into my writing tools that include somatic exercises and 20 journal prompts for only $10.
Sincerely,
Mary
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