Is Anger the Only Mental Health Check Engine Light?
I was listening to one of my can’t-miss weekly podcasts recently where the host was interviewing a mental health professional speaking about her own experiences with postpartum depression as she struggled with parenting three children in the months after giving birth to her youngest. She was describing a particularly horrifying incident involving her minivan getting pulled over with all three kids in the vehicle because of a taillight issue. She was on her way to drop her children at a relative’s house so she could have two hours to herself. Already frustrated and in a bad mood, dealing with the officer put her in an emotional tailspin that led to her crying in her van on the side of her own street while the male deputy just goes on with doing his job. She accepted the warning, took a few deep breaths, drove the two blocks back to her house, and sat in her driveway until she stopped crying. Then she started screaming.
This woman was very open about the sense of hopelessness and frustration that overtook her that day. She described it as an anger that went deep. It was cathartic, intense, and revelatory. She found clarity that day, an understanding of her own powerlessness in the face of something she had been managing, hiding, and denying for months. She was not okay. At one point in the interview, she talked about anger being the brain’s check engine light and commented that her light finally went on that day. She needed to seek treatment.
As a child-free woman who has elected not to parent, I have empathy and tremendous respect for the journey of all mothers who struggle with their mental health and emotional wellbeing while caring for their children with the paltry resources and support systems that our society has deemed adequate for parents and caregivers. But I found myself responding very strongly to one aspect of her story, the idea that anger is somehow an atypical emotion for not only mothers, but women in general, and that anger is the most pressing sign of something being so “off” that a woman needs help.
As I listened to that interview, I heard ample evidence of something “not being right” for months before her fateful blowup in the car. She suffered through fatigue, social isolation and withdrawal, apathy, sudden feelings of dread, insomnia, and headaches. She spoke of feeling overwhelmed by responsibilities and resentful of the reality of making in-the-moment decisions without her co-parent there to use as a sounding board. She was intellectually under stimulated and a little lonely. Despite all of this, the thing that finally put her on alert that something was “wrong” was her own anger.
This idea that anger is somehow the giant red flag of emotions for women obviously elicited a very strong and complicated response in me. My philosophical take on anger falls in line with that of Dr. Anrea Bayden from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, “Anger is just another emotion, and you are entitled to that emotion.” To frame a woman screaming in her minivan as a sign of a mental health crisis, while simultaneously normalizing all of the other emotions that preceded it, including loneliness, being overwhelmed, sadness, and exhaustion, seems to treat women’s anger as some kind of novelty and a final destination on the journey to needing help and support, instead of acknowledging it as just one more emotion on a spectrum of emotions that most women go through on a daily basis.
Is anger a mother’s mental health check engine light? Probably. But so is loneliness and exhaustion and overwhelm and insomnia and disconnection and social withdrawal and lack of mental stimulation. To skip over all of these experiences as somehow “typical” and land on anger as the sign of a problem diminishes the importance of all the other feelings and emotions that let women know we are not okay, and we might need help. It also makes anger distinct and distinctly negative, instead of just another emotion that all women are entitled to.
Written by Deanna Diamond, LPC
