Rage is often treated as a problem to solve: regulate it, soften it, understand the trigger, and return to calm. But what if rage is also information? What if it carries knowledge about what has been violated, what we have been asked to tolerate, and what our bodies and histories are trying to tell us?
In this episode of Stay, I speak with psychologist, educator, and author Dr. Jennifer Mullen, known as the “Rage Doctor”, about developing a relationship with rage rather than exiling or being overtaken by it.
Jennifer shares stories from her childhood, her work in prisons and clinical settings, and her own experiences of rage, fear, dissociation, and protection. Together, we explore the difference between anger and rage, the ways rage can carry ancestral trauma and grief, and how power shapes whose rage is seen as leadership, passion, or boundary-setting and whose is pathologized or punished.
We get into what our relationship with rage has to teach us about interpersonal, collective, and global conflict? How do we hold accountability without reducing people to good or bad? And what might become possible if we stopped treating rage as something monstrous that must be killed or exiled and instead became curious about what it has come to teach us?
A conversation about rage, grief, power, responsibility, and the possibility of staying in relationship with what we would rather push away.
