A woman who does not let herself get angry looks calm right up until she walks through her own front door. There the anger comes out all at once, over nothing, at people who had nothing to do with it. Then shame arrives, and the loop starts over. Peruquois, a top World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, author and facilitator of self-development trainings for women, explains where the real break in that chain is.
Where the actual line runs
«Anger is not the problem, the problem is suppressing anger,» says Peruquois.
That one sentence turns the whole thing right side up. Anger is a normal emotion that shows up when a boundary has been crossed, and it has a job to do. The damage starts when it is not allowed to do that job and gets locked inside instead.
Where the prohibition comes from
Peruquois names the source directly. «Many women were taught to be a good girl, that you must not make noise, must not raise your voice, must be under control all the time, keep your legs together,» she says.
A girl absorbs this long before she can put words to it. The anger remains, its expression is forbidden, and only one option is left: take it off your face and keep it in your body.
Peruquois adds that you can see where it collects: in the face, in the facial muscles, in the area of the liver. That is why a woman who has not let herself be angry for years so often has a tight jaw and tight cheekbones.
Why the people closest to her get it
You can hold the mask in front of colleagues, in front of neighbors, in front of your husband's parents. You cannot hold it around the clock.
«She may not show it to other people, but on the ones she loves she can dump a ton and a half of all that happiness,» says Peruquois.
This is the answer to the question a woman asks herself for years: why am I polite with everyone and sharp with my own family. Because the entire volume she did not release during the day looks for the safest place, and the safest place is the people who will not walk away.
The second thing that makes it worse is how unconscious it is. People express anger without any awareness at all, says Peruquois, just throwing it around without looking where it lands.
What it means to clear it out consciously
Peruquois puts the question this way: can we consciously clear anger out of ourselves instead of living inside the reaction.
The difference between reaction and conscious release is simple. In reaction, anger runs the woman and picks its own target. In conscious release, the woman picks the time, the place and the form.
«If you are angry, then please, be angry. When it is all over, you can sit down and relax,» says Peruquois. And she adds the key part: if you do this, you can go somewhere and do it there, there is no need to dump it on everybody.
Two conditions are non-negotiable. There has to be movement, because energy held still stays where it is. And there has to be sound, because vibration is what softens whatever has hardened in the body.
How this works in her practice
Peruquois built a separate practice for exactly this, called Emotional Cleansing. In it she works with five key emotions: fear, grief, anger, ecstasy and longing for the beloved.
Underneath it all is a sound bed. Her logic is plain: in film, people cry and feel largely because of the sound, and if you take the sound away the reaction gets many times weaker. For the same reason she created a sound palette with her own voice that calls up the needed emotional state, lets a woman express what she has stored and dance it out.
Children do this from birth
«And then you see that your children do this in the most natural way,» says Peruquois.
A child gets angry loudly, completely and briefly, and five minutes later is playing again. He does not carry a grudge for weeks, because he keeps nothing inside. Nobody taught him this, he is simply built that way.
A woman is built the same way, she was just trained out of it. It comes back faster than you would think, and the first thing women notice when they start releasing anger on purpose is how much easier things get at home.
Anger is not going anywhere, it is part of a living nature and a signal that a boundary has been crossed. The only question is whether it goes out consciously, in its own place, or piles up and lands on the people she loves.
And if you want to learn to move anger out so it destroys neither you nor your relationships, take Peruquois's course Mastering Anger, you will find it on the website under Courses.
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