Summer in the City – Outrage and Being Real

One of my supervision clients, Susan*, works in a large hospice. She is called upon to manage death day and night. These deaths rarely fit the romantic picture of slipping easefully into eternal sleep. Most are messy, involving fear, sometimes terror, argument, confusion and great grief. They are distressing for family and staff alike. We talked recently about how to encourage the nursing staff to not panic, and to resist rushing straight into their repertoire of coping mechanisms: a fall-back to procedure, an appeal to higher authority or paralysis. I was struck by her caring attitude: no blame, instead an understanding of their fear – of death, of ‘getting it wrong’…

There have been two fatal stabbings in my local area in the last two weeks, one of a teenage boy by another teenager, the second of an off-duty bus driver on our local common. Between the two, the frenzied attack at a children’s dance class in Southport. I live in a lively, ethnically and socially mixed area of North London, where on the whole people get on with one another. People are understandably shocked and distressed by this sudden spate of violence and lives brutally cut short; and scared especially by such murderous rage so close to home. The neighbourhood WhatsApp streams veer from exclamations of outrage to a fearful silence, from the need for ritual to demands for more safety measures. 

By definition it’s hard to stay with unbearable emotions. The psychoanalytic term ‘evacuation’ describes well how we eject intolerable feelings of fear, anger, horror, disgust. We might go numb, fall into denial, or seek to rationalise and explain. Our human instinct drives us to ask, Why? Fuelled by that volatile and satisfying emotion, outrage, a common way to rid ourselves of the profound discomfort of strong, scary emotions is to project them out onto the nearest person or institution that provides a hook to hang them on. I notice my own fretful internal scanning for answers is heated with latent outrage against injustice, like gas waiting for ignition. It is all too easy to succumb to outrage, especially when it is maliciously exploited by trouble-makers, addicted to their fattening diet of moral superiority and entitlement, who know too well how contagious this emotion is and how easily whipped up to foment rageful acting-out. **

Our psyche hates not knowing, and we hate feeling in the wrong. So we seek answers (as neatly simple as possible) and we seek someone to blame. And yet, maturity is all about getting good at tolerating not knowing, paradox, the arbitrariness of life, and the truth that there are rarely simple answers. The world is complex. Life is likely at some point to face us with difficult, sometimes unbearable emotions. 

Back to Susan. Following a ‘withdrawal of breathing’ for a woman dying of motor neurone disease, surrounded by fourteen family and friends, Susan told me that she “took a half hour walk to process it all”. Knowing she wouldn’t be up for anything much that evening she got takeaway meal from M&S, watched TV and had an early bed. The point here is that Susan knew exactly what she needed to do to remain fully present – her body, mind, spirit and feelings staying with the turbulence, slowly digesting and allowing it to pass through her. The image I have is of flowing water versus the fists of fear and distress. 

Recounting this story, sharing her awareness of her own needs, enabled Susan to notice the emotions that uplifted her: the woman’s strength of character, how she lived life to the full within such severe limitations, Susan’s pride at having gained the family’s trust over the time, able therefore to advocate for them and help with difficult decisions. By slowing down and taking time Susan was able to derive nourishment from this dying, where so many would be crushed or stunned.  

“It’s about being real, not reactive” she said, almost in passing.

In that moment I was struck that this is a profound realisation: because without Frankl’s famous pause***, there truly is no choice, not just of action, but also to be “real” – enabling “a real moment you can build on”. This is not the brutal, overwhelming Real of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, but something tender and elusive: the complex tangle of emotion, thought and sensation that hides behind the flashier expressions of outrage or terror: something we can build on…

So it goes like this:

STOP – pause, breathe, take time to be with the situation

REGROUP – reflect, alone or with others, essential to allow the “real” – which liesbeyond outrage or terror – to form and emerge

BE REAL – express a genuine feeling, thought, response (instead of blurting, exploding, repressing or running away)

MOVE ON – the 3 stages above can lead now to effective action as part of the flow of life.


* not her real name

** For more on outrage read psychologist Terri Apter’s article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/domestic-intelligence/201803/the-dangerous-pleasures-outrage

*** “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Viktor Frankl

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