All day you are polite and collected with people you like considerably less than your own family. Then you hear your own voice saying something to a mug on the counter that the mug has certainly not earned, and the tone tells you the mug was never the point.
Irritation is not born at the moment of the explosion. It accumulates long before, in places nobody counts as irritation, and it detonates where it is safe. Home is safe. Home will not fire you. Where the accumulation actually happens is explained by Peruquois, a leading World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, and the author and facilitator of personal development trainings for women, who has worked with women's states for many years. She reduces the causes to two, and neither of them is character.
The first one she puts like this: “You are afraid to express yourself, because you are living from compromise.”
The compromise nobody knows about
Compromise here has nothing to do with concessions in a negotiation. It is about what a woman does not say, every day.
You did not tell your manager the deadline was unrealistic, because you had already pushed back recently. You did not tell your friend that arriving forty minutes late stopped being a charming quirk. You did not tell your husband that the remark he made in front of his mother landed so hard you are still carrying it two weeks later. Every time the decision looked reasonable: wrong moment, wrong place, I will ruin the evening, we will talk later.
“Everything unspoken, hidden behind the fear of disturbing the status quo,” she says. The status quo holds. The unspoken stays in the body. It does not dissolve because you were gracious and did not make a scene.
It accumulates as tension, and tension looks for an exit. The exit is found where the resistance is lowest. In the kitchen, in the evening, with your own people.
Not being heard
The second cause is harder, because here a woman hides nothing. She speaks. She is not heard.
It shows up most clearly in relationships. A man gives no attention, does not take it in, answers every other time and plainly does not retain what was said. The same thing happens at work, when your proposals go past and turn up a month later in somebody else's mouth.
Peruquois describes what a woman does in that situation: “Such ignoring of our natural need to be heard leads us to try to break through the wall of being ignored.” First we break through it politely, with good manners, then a little more insistently, then however it comes out. And at some point “it is as though a dam bursts in us and all our tension pours out in the stream of speech of an irritated woman.”
From outside it looks like hysteria over nothing. From inside it is the last attempt to be heard, made after forty unsuccessful ones.
What to do in the moment
The first skill is simple: catch the wave while it is still inside the banks.
You learn it by tracking. For several days in a row, notice how irritation actually starts in you: for some it is heat in the face, for some a clenched jaw, for some the shoulders pulling up. Even if you snapped, recall afterwards how it rose. Very quickly you start recognizing the first seconds.
Then stopping and breathing. A slow inhale to a count of seven or eight, a two second hold, an equally slow exhale. Four or five breaths like that, and on every exhale, silently, I release and I relax.
If you can step out, or you are alone, sound works better. A slow counted inhale, and an exhale on an open haaaaa. The sound does not only travel outward, it spreads through the tissues of the body and shakes the tension loose from inside. It is a vibrational massage you give yourself. Four or five times is enough.
There is a third method, for those for whom neither breath nor sound works. Inhale and tense the entire body: arms, legs, shoulders, neck, cheekbones. Stay at maximum tension for ten or twenty seconds without breathing. Then a sharp exhale, with sound if you like, and complete release, like an empty sack. Stay in that softness for half a minute and repeat twice more. The body is built so that release follows tension, and that can be used.
The cost of politeness
These compromises accumulate invisibly, because one at a time each of them looks reasonable.
A woman rarely keeps quiet out of pure fear. She keeps quiet out of calculation: if I say it now I will ruin dinner, and in a week it will be forgotten anyway. The calculation is exactly half right. Dinner is indeed not ruined. Not everything is forgotten. A trace stays in the body, and the traces add up.
A year of such decisions comes to several hundred. Each one negligible, all of them together producing the density at which a mug on the counter becomes the last straw. That is why the size of the reaction never matches the size of the trigger: the reaction is to the sum collected over a year.
There is another side to it. The person you are keeping quiet around has no idea what has accumulated. For him everything was fine, and then you suddenly detonated. He draws a conclusion about your character, you draw a conclusion about not being understood, and you both end up further apart than any honest conversation would have left you.
The liver and food
Irritability also has a very practical side that rarely comes up in conversations about emotions.
On the physical level the liver governs irritability. If life contains a lot of coffee, sugar and stimulants, its work is disturbed, and on the emotional plane that comes out as irritability. Move from coffee to tea, learn to love bitter things, because the liver loves bitterness, add root vegetables, beets, carrots, potatoes. That kind of food slows you and grounds you, unlike white bread and pasta, which give a fast spike and an equally fast drop.
And in an energy drop a woman feels helpless and trapped, and instead of working out what is happening, she snaps.
If irritation has become the background you have been living in for months and managing it in the moment no longer helps, Peruquois has a course called Mastering Anger. You will find it on her website under Courses.
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