Summary
Self-control and self-regulation are highly valued traits in women, putting ADHD women at a distinct disadvantage. But what if the stories we tell about women, anger, and femininity are all bs? And really what we need is for women to come together and acknowledge that most of our rage, is actually grief.
A couple months back I expressed irritation about something to a colleague and got smacked down hard for my comments. Admittedly, I was being critical but not of that person, it was more about a larger situation numerous people were involved with. I was pretty shocked at the response which was a few hundred words that boiled down to, “sit down and shut up or go away.” Even though I made nice with the person after, that experience definitely reinforced the fact that nobody appreciates a woman that is perceived as angry. And people really don’t appreciate a woman with an opinion in opposition to those in power.
We still cannot tolerate any woman who expresses displeasure, or asks too many questions. Women are supposed to be smiling and compliant in whatever circumstances they find themselves. If you complain too much, or seek explanation you are immediately censured.
If you don’t believe me think for a minute about it how we respond when a woman accuses a man of mistreatment or bad behavior. We focus on her tone and word choice instead of what happened in reality. Let us not forget Christine Blasey Ford and the Kavanaugh debacle that so aptly demonstrated this point on live television. See also Stormy Daniels and the “Slut Defense.” We simply don’t find women credible unless they are smiling and demure.
In her book, On Our Best Behavior, Elise Loehnen writes that the God of the Old Testament was referred to as wrathful, but Jesus was and is thought of as the “turn the other cheek” guy in Matthew 5:38-48 ( Loehnen, 209). Loehnen writes about this difference in order to demonstrate the fact that men have always been allowed to acknowledge their anger, and to potentially seek to make things right through voicing or acting on it. Anger is ok for men, sometimes it’s even celebrated.
For women anger is decidedly not ok, even in 2024.
Angry Women in Stories
Zeus was also scared sh-tless of Nyx, the goddess of night, and her daughter Lyssa who was the goddess of madness and rage. Perhaps his fear was based on their relationship to Maniae, who to the Greeks represented mania and insanity. And we all know Medusa, the snake lady who turned men to stone with her eyes. Special powers + rage and trauma = scary women.
My point is that all of these negative traits as described in Greek mythology are things we would definitely pathologized in the real world. If every woman whose husband was unfaithful took vengeance I’m thinking a) we’d have a lot more women locked up a la Charles Dickens, and b) we’d be returning to a time when women were pretty much the property of men and have no personal autonomy at all. Oh wait…that’s happening now.
Our discomfort with angry women is’t limited to mythology though, it crosses over into the stories we tell about historical female figures.
We all know Anne Boleyn as the sexy, manipulative slut who stole Henry VIII from Katherine of Aragon. She is depicted as scheming, vengeful, and downright scary in most books/plays/screen adaptations. But some historians have recently unearthed evidence that everything we’ve been told about Anne Boleyn for the last 500 years might have been lies. Including her reasons for getting involved with Henry to begin with. It seems her relationship with Henry wasn’t the result of her pursuing power above all else, it was more about her interest in religious reform, education, and caring for the poor. Yes, Anne had a big mouth. And when angered, she fought openly and publicly with those she felt undermined her. That was not acceptable or typical behavior for women in the 1500s and it ended very badly for her.
These days women are usually strangled or shot, Anne got a French executioner who removed her head in high style with a fancy sword. The real injustice wasn’t her death though, it was the misleading stories they made up afterward. She married a sociopath who all but erased her from history after he killed her.
Anne Boleyn was a complicated, imperfect person. As we all are.
Women are not allowed to be complicated, because we’re supposed to be feminine. If you are angry you are less feminine. And if you are less feminine you are more likely to be perceived as a threat.
What Is A Problem for ADHD Women, Is A Problem For All Women
First, as I’ve argued for so long ADHD is not the problem. Anger isn’t the problem for women either. The problem is that we are held to unreasonable expectations about how we should be and feel and behave. It starts when we are young and the pressure builds over the course of our lives. Women with brain-based challenges often feel the unfairness of this and the overwhelming pressure of it more acutely than others.
I mentioned in an email a few weeks ago that I truly believe most of us who’ve been diagnosed with anxiety and depression are deep down very angry. The only safe we to express it is to present as anxious or sad. I got about twenty-five responses of agreement.
Femininity & Self-Regulation
In The Dance of Anger, therapist Harriet Lerner writes about the reasons why anger is only accessible to men. “The direct expression of anger, especially at men, makes us unladylike, unfeminine, unmaternal, and sexually unattractive.” Lerner’s book is older now, but still relevant. Most of us know intuitively that the expression of anger will change the way we are perceived by others. Women are harder to control, and seen as less feminine, when we say what we think and feel.
The root of the word feminine in French is feminin, or the Latin femininus, meaning woman-like or characteristic of a woman. The main characteristics we associate with women are things like softness, compliance, agreeableness. If one is feminine you are more likable and attractive to both men and other women. We tend to think everything is about the male gaze, and much of the time it is. But we also need to recognized that women judge each other quite harshly.
Neurodiverse women will often lament their inability to make or keep friends. We simply cannot “turn on” and perform as easily, and as we age we have less desire to mask for approval. This inability, or lack of enthusiasm, for contorting ourselves goes against our socialization. I might share a portion of my thoughts on friendship in another article, but in general the older I get the more I understand that friendships wax and wane, and that is ok.
ADHD and Femininity
ADHD itself is considered to be a disorder of “self regulation.” Self-regulation includes behavior, attention, and emotional control. In my book I talk a lot about how women are held to very high and very contradictory standards. Many of these standards are built around how we present, or behave. We with ADHD don’t have as much self-imposed regulation. It’s not a choice, it’s a brain thing, but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier.
I could go on a rant about self-regulation and Executive Function, I read entire books on social psychology, and interviewed experts trying to understand why it matters so much for women. The simplest way to explain it is to say that women are expected to be in-control of ourselves at all times. When we are “dysregulated” we are not in control of ourselves.
Self-control is the most highly valued trait in women. For that reason women who appear to have their shit together are revered. We are actually rewarded online and offline for our ability to appear in control of ourselves. Our bodies, our looks, our home environment. “It’s all about the packaging” is a subhead in my book for a reason.
A woman who appears to not be in control of herself is perceived as less feminine, and less likable by family, peers, and society in general. I’m not saying it’s fair, but it is fact. So women with ADHD are at a disadvantage.
ADHD and Anger
When ADHD is part of the picture emotional responses are not within our direct control, including anger. I could go into a whole explanation about the amygdala and the hypothalamus, but that doesn’t seem helpful. For you and I the bigger issues is that we have never learned to sit with anger, we don’t know what to do with it or how to move through it. Instead, we avoid it or suppress it and then wonder why we never feel quite right. In my book I describe the emotional reactivity often present in ADHD as similar to the weather. That’s also where I mention anger.
“If anger is your go-to emotion under stress, I want you to figure out what is underneath that. I’m no psychologist but I’m fairly sure that under anger is usually pain or some kind of unmet need. Also, when you are angry you don’t have access to your prefrontal cortex, making it harder to think clearly…
I also want you to think of anger as useful information. Many women have been trained to suppress anger and always be nice, no matter how poorly someone is treating us. The next time you’re in a situation where you feel the anger rising, see if you can step away for a moment to think about what the rage monster is trying to tell you.”
While this passage is in desperate need of editing, I stand by what I wrote last summer. Anger in and of itself is not dangerous, but it also shouldn’t be ignored.
Why Ignore or Suppress Anger?
Unmet needs are relevant to the conversation about women because we are trained to ignore our own needs and take care of everyone else. Many of us have disconnected from our own needs for so long we cannot identify what they are, let alone ask for them. And really, women who pursue their needs are routinely called selfish, so it’s a losing game and we all understand this. Disapproval, and loss of relationship to others is a potent threat for women. Being called selfish is the ultimate insult or disconnection.
The word selfish is defined as,“caring only for self; characteristic of one who cares only or chiefly for his own personal pleasure.” It is of interest that the words personal pleasure are used here because most of the time when one is called selfish it’s because they are saying NO to someone. Or you are not responding to a demand from someone else (drawing a boundary).
The funny part about the weaponization of “selfish” is that I’ve never met any woman who refused to accommodate someone so they could do something pleasurable. Usually saying NO, or drawing boundaries, is about exhaustion. Not pleasure.
There’s more to suppression than just being perceived as selfish, but for most of us the idea of expressing anger, or even minor irritation feels unsafe. You cannot control how other people will react, and part of being a woman is controlling your public persona. If you’ve always been very compliant or agreeable, chances are the people in your life won’t react well. <see my experience above>
Working With Anger
This part is here mostly because I want us to have alternatives to ignoring our anger. But I also don’t want to pretend like we as individuals can solve the problem of women’s collective anger.
The answer to these issues is rarely based in individual strategies. But here goes nothin’
1. Identify anger triggers
As I mentioned in my Substack, I get heated when someone thinks they know me better than I know myself. I’ve been told I cannot trust myself so many times I now take a hard line on those who seek to undermine my sense of reality. I asked my readers to respond with some of their anger triggers and have listed the responses below.
- Feeling misunderstood, ignored, or sidelined
- Being labeled, corrected, or judged harshly
- The ongoing, escalating injustices suffered by women
- Hitting a roadblock or getting pushback from others
- Lack of acknowledgment for invisible labor
- Being told any expression of anger is “too negative”
- Fear of everything (reprisal/rejection, loss of status)
Just to be clear, if you feel anger it’s not your imagination. You are allowed to feel how you feel and chances are you are totally justified.
2. Notice your patterns
Start to pay attention to how you respond when the anger monster bubbles up.
Do you get loud? Or do you get quiet?
Some of us don’t even recognize anger when it happens, we think we have a headache or our meds are wearing off. As boring as this sounds, sometimes we have to practice naming our emotions in order to get more comfortable with them and then process them.
If your tendency is to lash out at others, my guess is that you end up apologizing quite a bit. When you’re overwhelmed with emotion your logical thinking is not available, so you’re more likely to say something you’ll regret. On the other hand, if you go quiet and don’t tell anyone how angry you are, you run the risk of being passive aggressive or otherwise manipulative. Ignoring anger doesn’t work.
You don’t have to do anything different immediately, I just want you to notice your current pattern. Only then are you in a position to try something new.
3. Ideas for managing in-the-moment
- Step away to clear your head
- If possible read the energy of room/person
- Notice where the anger is in your body
- Gauge the importance of the interaction (is this person/fight worth having?)
- Try some calming strategies so you can think more clearly
- Ask yourself what you really** want to say
Sometimes what we really need is to feel heard.
4. Long term strategies
In my book I talk about Dr. Kristin Neff’s work in, Self-Compassion. Cultivating self-compassion is a necessary skill for ADHD folks. It takes a lot of practice, but over time you do begin to believe that you are not alone, all humans are flawed, and we all make mistakes.
There are a lot of people without ADHD who make mistakes, too. Some real asshats. 🙂
The other long term strategy everyone should employ is finding your people. Community is vitally important to living well with ADHD. It doesn’t matter if you join ADDA or CHADD or a smaller community like my substack. The point is to find people you feel comfortable confiding in.
Anger itself is not the problem. Neither is ADHD.
The problem, as I argue it in my book (sorry for the shameless plug for a book that isn’t even edited yet) is that women cannot be ourselves. We can’t get angry and take action. Just like we can’t feel sad or scared without being told we’re hysterical. The problem is bigger than just ADHD and Anger. It’s about thousands of years of misogyny. And It’s something that we cannot hope to change without massive collective action and cooperation which feels like a huge mountain to climb. I don’t know about you, but this reality makes me feel sad. And then angry. And then sad all over again which makes sense because the root of the word anger, is actually grief.
The etymology of the word anger shows a connection not to violence or vengeance but to sadness. In Old Norse angrmeant “distress, grief, sorrow, affliction.” In Proto-Germanic *angaz arose from the PIE root *angh- meaning, “tight, painfully constricted, painful”.
As I write in my book, underneath anger there is pain. We all know it’s there we just don’t talk about it.
In chapter eight of On Our Best Behavior, Elise Loehnen writes, “anger is one of our most insistent animating energies…when harnessed it can be beautiful …we can use anger to inform us, or use it to run us (240-42).” So we need to express anger in healthier ways. No more policing and judging each other because our own discomfort renders us incapable of seeing how much we actually need to be together, allowing the world to pit us against each other.
This requires us to get more comfortable with expressing our collective anger, and grief, together.
If ADHD conveys any superpower at all, it is our ability to see the injustice of our situation more clearly than our cohort. With that extraordinary ability also comes a lot of questions, most of which cannot be answered by individuals, but instead must be answered in community with other women. This is why I write and why I host discussions.
To support my work, and meet other women, consider joining the Enclave, or my Substack.
Books of Interest: (amazon affiliate links)
Retelling of Hera’s story, out in August
Medusa (my favorite villain), also out in August
Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies (my favorite villainous historical figure)
On Our Best Behavior — I cannot recommend this book enough and fully intend to form a book discussion around it in the Substack.