Conclusiones sobre las fortalezas y debilidades de los programas AICLE en España En líneas generales, el nivel de satisfacción del profesorado, coordinadores y directores, y del

(See the basic method for writing exercises on page 25.)

Write about what you lost, what was taken, what was destroyed.

Write about the extent of the damage. Write about the things you need to grieve for. This is a chance to give voice to your pain, and to write about how you feel about your loss.

When I’m angry, it’s because I know I’m worth being angry about.

—Shama, 25-year-old survivor

Few women have wholeheartedly embraced anger as a positive healing force. Traditionally women have been taught to be nice, con-ciliatory, understanding, polite. Angry women are labeled man-haters, castraters, bitches. Even in new-age psychotherapy circles, anger is usually seen as a stage to work through or as something toxic to elim-inate. And most religious or spiritual ideologies encourage us to for-give and love. As a result, many survivors have suppressed their an-ger, turning it inward.

I’m albino and I get severe sunburn whenever I’m ex-posed to the sun. As a kid, I’d get really pissed about what was happening at home. But you weren’t allowed to get an-gry at my house. So rather than say anything, I’d purposefully go out on a sunny day without a hat or any other protection.

I’d come home blistered and with a fever.

Other survivors have been angry their whole lives. They grew up in families or circumstances so pitted against each other that they learned early to fight for survival. Anger was a continual armoring for battle. And sometimes the line between anger and violence blurred, and it became a destructive force.

I saw men and women angry and rageful when I was growing up. Both of my parents, and other relatives too. I re-member my morn slapping the shit out of this woman in the bar because the woman said, “We don’t allow dirty Mexicans in this bar.” But then my parents would turn it on each other, and on us. Anger, violence, and self-defense are all mixed up for me.

But anger doesn’t have to be suppressed or destructive. Instead, it can be both a healthy response to violation and a transformative, powerful energy.

Anger is a natural response to abuse. You were probably not able to experience, express, and act on your outrage when you were abused. You may not even have known you had a right to feel out-raged. Rather than be angry at the person or people who abused you, you probably did some combination of denying and twisting your an-ger.

One way survivors cut themselves off from their anger is to be-come so immersed in the perspective of the abuser that they lose con-nection with themselves and their own feelings. This approach is en-thusiastically endorsed by most of society. Many people find it easier to sympathize with the abuser than to stand up as a staunch advocate for the victim. This is particularly true once time has passed and the abuser is an older man and the child a grown woman. People will feel sorry for him, perceive even weak attempts toward reconciliation on his part as major efforts, and blame the survivor if she continues to be angry.

But if you are unable to focus your rage at the abuser, it will go somewhere else. Many survivors turn it on themselves, leading to de-pression and self-destruction. You may have wanted to hurt or kill

yourself. You may feel yourself to be essentially bad, criticize your-self unrelentingly, and devalue youryour-self. Or you might stuff your an-ger with food, drown it with alcohol, stifle it with drugs, make your-self ill. As Adrienne Rich writes: “Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.”^*

Having been taught to blame yourself, you stay angry at the child within—the child who was vulnerable, who was injured, who was un-able to protect herself, who needed affection and attention, who expe-rienced sexual arousal or orgasm. But this child did nothing wrong.

She does not deserve your anger.

Many survivors have also turned their anger against partners and lovers, friends, co-workers, and children, lashing out at those who (usually) mean no harm. You may find yourself pushing your child against the wall or punching your lover when you get mad.

I had a lot of physically abusive relationships. I didn’t know how not to fight. My first impulse when I got angry was this [she smacks one hand hard on the other], because that’s what I saw growing up. Whenever I started to get upset with someone, I would literally feel the adrenaline running up and down my arms. My muscles would get really tight, my

* Adrienne Rich, “Disloyal to Civilization,” in Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 309.

fists would clench, and I would break out into a sweat. I’d be ready to smack the person around. I’d want to fight.

If violence has been part of your life and you find yourself ex-pressing your anger in abusive ways, you need to get help right away.

It’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to be violent. (For help, see

“Controlling Abusive Anger”.)

If you don’t physically fight, you may pick verbal fights or look for things to criticize. You mean to tell your son to do his homework and you find yourself yelling or calling him names. Your husband forgets to put all in the car and you tell him he’s a stupid idiot. Even though it isn’t violent, verbal abuse is destructive.

It is time to direct your anger accurately and appropriately at those who violated you. You must release yourself from responsibil-ity for what was done to you and place the responsibilresponsibil-ity—and your anger—clearly on the abuser.

I had a hard time directing the anger at my Dad. My ther-apist would say, “Well, how did you feel when your Dad picked you up and threw you against the wall?”

And I’d say, “Well, I pretty much felt like he was an ass-hole.”

And my therapist would say, “Hmmm.”

One time, after years of therapy, when he asked me something about my father, I was holding this pencil, and I just threw it across the room and said, “That bastard!”

It was the first time I was ever clearly angry at him. Sure, I’d been mad at my Dad. But it was directed in all the wrong directions. And this was the first time in all those years that I was just mad at him, period, without laughing about it, with-out being sarcastic or defensive. Just full on, “That shit!”

If you’re willing to get angry and the anger just doesn’t seem to come, there are many ways to get in touch with it. A little like prim-ing the pump, you can do thprim-ings that will get your anger started.

Then, once you get the hang of it, it’ll begin to flow on its own.

It’s often easier to get angry for someone else’s pain than for your own. That’s fine for a beginning. Imagine a child you love being treated the way you were treated. Read the writings of other survivors in anthologies and feminist journals. You can listen to their stories at conferences, workshops, and in small support groups. You can look at the expressions of grief on their faces and be touched. You can hear their fury and be incited. Know that any time you cry or get angry for someone else, it taps your own grief and anger as well.

Getting into an angry posture also helps. Physically taking an an-gry stance, making menacing gestures and facial expressions, invites genuine anger to rise. One woman, who described herself as much

more prone to feeling hurt than angry, was quietly weeping during a therapy session. As she relates:

My therapist scooted her chair toward me so that her knees almost touched mine. Then she put out her hands, palms facing me, and instructed me to put my palms against hers. “Push,” she said. “Push against me.” I pushed against her palms and she pushed back. As I pushed harder, she met me with equal pressure. It took all my strength to maintain.

Within seconds I was angry. The tears were long gone. I was mad! And it felt powerful.

Therapy and support groups can be ideal places for stirring up anger:

I felt incredible anger, but I never allowed anger my whole life. It was really a difficult thing to let out. One day my therapist got up out of her chair, and she said, “Your fa-ther’s in that chair.” And she handed me a rolled-up towel and she said, “I want you to hit your father.”

It took me a long time to psych myself into doing that, but once I started, I couldn’t stop. I pounded and screamed until I couldn’t move anymore. It was such a relief.

That was an important turning point for me. After that, I did a lot of pounding on beds and screaming and writing an-gry letters to my dead father. I even worked with a punching bag.

Another way to get in touch with your anger is to role-play a situ-ation that made you angry in the past. A therapist, friend, or group member can play the part of the person with whom you are angry.

You describe the body language, gestures, and words that made you angry originally, and then you recreate the scene. This time you can respond with your genuine anger, and experience release and relief.

In order for this kind of exercise to be safe, the people involved have to be trustworthy and able to handle strong feelings. There must be guidelines for the expression of anger—for example, no hurting people, no hurting yourself. Also there should be an agreement that you can stop whenever you’ve had enough.

If you prefer to work with your anger alone, there are a number of writing exercises that can rouse your ire. Make a list of all the ways you’re still affected by the abuse. If you do this in detail, you can hardly avoid at least some anger. You can also write a letter to your abuser. Try beginning with “I hate you.”

Eva Smith arranged a satisfying outlet for her anger (for more of her story, see here):

I had a friend who made ceramic things, and if they were cracked or whatever, he’d set them aside for me. I’d come around at midnight. I’d go around the back and throw them against the fence. It was a miracle no one called the police because I’d be out there throwing stuff.

Piggybacking your anger at your abuser to more accessible anger is a good, sneaky way to bring it past your internal censors. If interna-tional issues like apartheid in South Africa easily inflame you, let yourself get worked up over those problems, and then, when you’re really angry, remind yourself that the mentality that allows whites to torture blacks is the same mentality that allowed your abuser to vent his twisted, uncontrolled needs, fear, and ruthlessness on you. You can slide your own trauma in with the rest of the ills of the world, and you’ll find yourself finally angry.

Although our culture usually criticizes women for being angry, it does not hesitate to direct anger toward women. Women, and specifi-cally mothers, are frequently designated as the recipients for whatever anger needs a target. This is sometimes evident in the extreme, as when a mother is blamed for the father’s abuse of their child.

Fathers have habitually blamed their wives for the fact that they abused their daughters. Many psychologists and sociologists have en-dorsed this position as well. They cite the wife’s failure to meet the husband’s needs for nurturing or sex. They refer to her drinking, ill-ness, working nights, or being otherwise unavailable. “And so,” the father pleads, holding up his hands in a gesture of helplessness, “I turned to my daughter.”

This is preposterous. It is never anyone else’s fault when a man abuses a child. Regardless of how inadequate a mother may have been, no behavior on her part is license for any man to sexually abuse a child. It’s time to stop blaming women for what men have done.

Some survivors perpetuate this blame of mothers, remaining far angrier at their mothers than they are of their abusers. There are logi-cal reasons for this: Society supports it. Blaming mothers is more ac-ceptable because on the whole, we are more threatened by men than by women. As a group, men wield more clout in our society—they’re bigger, richer, more assertive, more apt to be violent. Many of us have personally felt the sting of their indiscriminate power. So when it comes to expressing anger, or even just feeling it, we’re usually more comfortable pointing it at a woman. And there’s a precedent:

most survivors have been angry of themselves for a long time.

At the same time, you do have a right to be angry at your mother.

Mothers of abused children are often fearful, self-protective, and denying. If your mother did not listen when you tried to tell her, did not leave an abusive or alcoholic man, did not offer the warmth, at-tention, or understanding that you needed, you have a right to hold her responsible.

Although some women direct all their anger at their mothers, oth-ers are afraid to get angry at them at all. You may identify so much with your mother’s oppression that you minimize or negate your own.

You may feel allied with her as women in a patriarchal society and

think that acknowledging your anger would threaten that bond. But if your mother didn’t protect you, looked the other way, set you up, or blamed you, you are inevitably carrying some feelings of anger. It is necessary to experience, validate, and express those feelings. This is not only your right; it is essential for your healing.

However, unless your mother was your abuser, you must not di-rect all of your anger toward her. The abuser deserves his share. Be-sides, as you allow yourself to know the genuine depth and range of your anger, you will find there’s enough to go around.

Many survivors are afraid of getting angry because their past ex-periences with anger were negative. As one survivor put it, “I don’t get the difference between anger and violence yet. When I hear loud noises, I think they’re coming after me.” In your family, you may have witnessed anger that was destructive and out of control. But your own anger need not be either. You can channel your anger in ways that you feel good about and respect.

Even women with no history of violence are often afraid that if they allow themselves to feel anger, they’re liable to hurt or kill someone.

I know the anger is there. I’m too scared to let myself experience it. I’m scared that I won’t be gentle with myself.

That I’ll turn the anger on myself. And I’m so used to watch-ing other people hurt people. I don’t want to be a perpetrator.

I don’t know how to discharge my anger in a way that’s safe.

It is extremely rare for women to violently act out their anger to-ward the people who abused them as children. And for women with no history of violence, the fear that you might hurt someone with your anger is usually unrealistic.

Anger is a feeling, and feelings themselves do not violate anyone.

It’s important to make the distinction between the experience of feel-ing angry and the expression of that anger. When you acknowledge your anger, then you have the freedom to choose if and how you want to express it. Anger does not have to be an uncontrolled, uncontrolla-ble phenomenon. As you welcome your anger and become familiar with it, you can direct it to meet your needs—like an experienced rid-er controlling a powrid-erful horse.

Another aspect of anger that is often misunderstood, and thus keeps women from releasing their dammed emotion, is the relation-ship between anger and love. Anger and love are not incompatible.

Most of us have been angry, at one time or another, with everyone we love and live closely with. Yet when you’ve been abused by someone close to you, with whom you’ve shared good experiences, it can be

difficult to admit your anger for fear that it will eradicate the positive aspects of that relationship or of your childhood.

But getting angry doesn’t negate anything you want to retain of your history. What’s good can still remain in your memory as some-thing from which you’ve benefited.^* You forfeit nothing of your past by getting angry, except your illusion of the abuser as innocent.

Often survivors are afraid of getting angry because they think it will consume them. They sense that their anger is deep and fear that if they tap it, they’ll be submerged in anger forever, becoming bitter and hostile. But anger obsesses only when it is repressed and misplaced.

When you meet your anger openly—naming it, knowing it, directing it appropriately—you are liberated.

At one point or another, many survivors have strong feelings of wanting to get back at the people who hurt them so terribly. You may dream of murder or castration. It can be pleasurable to fantasize such scenes in vivid detail. Wanting revenge is a natural impulse, a sane response. Let yourself imagine it to your heart’s content. Giving yourself permission to visualize revenge can be satisfying indeed.

* It is fine, of course, if you do not love your abuser. This should be obvious, but because many women carry a sense of responsibility for loving everyone, it is necessary to reinforce again and again your right not to love your abuser—even if he bought your food, taught you to ride a bike, read you bedtime stories.

If you start to think about acting on your fantasies, you need to consider how your actions would affect your own future. It’s not wise to seek violent revenge in this society; you’d most likely perpetuate your own victimization.

What I say to myself is, “Wait a minute. I don’t want to go to prison. I don’t want the cops to come.” I grew up with the cops coming. I don’t want to go back to jail for being vio-lent.

You also have to decide if you want to perpetuate abusive

You also have to decide if you want to perpetuate abusive