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Anger Therapy Session No.2: / All Welcome: NoNaming, NoPointing
December 5, 2016 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am UTC-5
Anger Therapy Session No. 2: / All Welcome: No Naming, No Pointing
Mon, Dec. 5th, 10-11am: Ahmadieh Lecture Hall, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse, Duke University, Durham.Creative Constraints: Anyone is welcome, no matter your immigration status, age, background, religion, gender, race, or sexual preference, or voting preference. No names will be asked or used. No individuals, groups, or isms will be allowed as the target or source of our anger. As we express and give form to our personal and collective anger, we will intentionally avoid blaming anything on Trump, Hillary, Bernie, Stein, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, men, women, LGBTQ individuals, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Russia, Wikileaks, the 1%, immigrants, refugees, Capitalism, Socialism, racism, sexism, etc. It will of course be a challenging session, but we hope some helpful ideas and unexpected issues will emerge through this particular creative constraint. Even if none do, it should be liberating to express ourselves outside of the above mentioned frameworks, many of them so abused in recent months.
Mon, Dec. 5th, 10-11am: Ahmadieh Lecture Hall, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse, Duke University, Durham.Creative Constraints: Anyone is welcome, no matter your immigration status, age, background, religion, gender, race, or sexual preference, or voting preference. No names will be asked or used. No individuals, groups, or isms will be allowed as the target or source of our anger. As we express and give form to our personal and collective anger, we will intentionally avoid blaming anything on Trump, Hillary, Bernie, Stein, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, men, women, LGBTQ individuals, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Russia, Wikileaks, the 1%, immigrants, refugees, Capitalism, Socialism, racism, sexism, etc. It will of course be a challenging session, but we hope some helpful ideas and unexpected issues will emerge through this particular creative constraint. Even if none do, it should be liberating to express ourselves outside of the above mentioned frameworks, many of them so abused in recent months.
If you would like to organize similar Anger Therapy Session at other campuses or anyhere else, like or follow the FHI Social Practice Lab Facebook page and write to us there, or contact lab director Pedro Lasch. We would like to help make this a national effort.
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About the series:
Between children yelling ‘build the wall’ at their classmates, attacks across the country, explosive social media comments, screams of ‘lock her up’, and shouts of ‘not my President’, Americans are more divided and angry than ever. The aftermath of the most hate-filled electoral campaign in decades seems to include the normalization of the deliberate harnessing of anger into political power.
The FHI Social Practice Lab at Duke University invites you to join one or more of our upcoming Anger Therapy Sessions (A National Response). Each session has a unique set of creative contstraints and guidelines that will let those who attend share their anger, without getting violent. If you are angry, you are most certainly welcome, but you don’t have to be. We cannot, however, welcome anyone whose anger has led them to believe that hate of any social group on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation is an acceptable public expression. For such individuals, we hope there will be other forms of therapy available.
Our sessions are first and foremost an expressive, experimental and constructive tool to reinterpret and redirect the high levels of anger so many of us are feeling. This may involve some healing, but that is not their main goal. Neither is a sense of appeasement or conflict resolution. We also want help build spaces on campus that may manifest and address emotion and affect, complementing healthy and legitimate habits within institutions of learning, where cool-headed reasoning tends to be prioritized as a foundation.