Rage Club is Not Catharsis. Rage Club is Cathexis.

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Defensive Learning and Expansive Learning

When I was 19 years old, I encountered a quote that sums up one of the biggest inhibiting forces for discovery and learning. It goes like this:

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a [person] in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” — Herbert Spencer

Although the word ‘contempt’ usually implies a kind of charged hatred or dislike, in this case, I take it as something subtler and more neutral along the lines of dismissal. If you have already dismissed something prior to investigating it, why investigate at all? And if you dismiss something and then try to investigate it, your investigation is so tainted by dismissal that there is no chance for discovery or newness to emerge. The journey is concluded before it’s begun. Do you know what I am talking about?

When I came across the map of Defensive Learning Versus Expansive Learning several years later in an Expand the Box Training, new clarity and possibilities emerged about the learning-discovery-exploration process.

Map of 2 Kinds of Learning from https://pmthoughtmaps.mystrikingly.com/.

Defensive Learning is an approach to learning that allows a person to only learn things they already know about. In order for new discoveries to even register on the radar of a person practicing Defensive Learning, these discoveries must fit into the context and knowledge that the person already has. In a transformational training, a Defended Learner might say things like: “This is just like holotropic breathing” or “What you are talking about is called ‘Atman’ in the ancient vedic texts” or “According to Bessel Van Der Kolk, the shaking that is happening in your body in this process is a trauma response that all animals do, but as human beings, we are conditioned out of it” or “Oh, yep, I have done this before.”

These comments might seem like innocuous contributions. The peril of such comments, and the Defensive Learning approach from which they spring, is that they prevent a person from entering unknown territory and actually learning or discovering something new. Since every new piece of information has to be contorted to fit in with the old clump of the known, anything that fails to fit (anything truly new) becomes unobservable or invisible, and is discarded. If you learn that purple is the only color, then everything is just a shade of purple, and every un-purple nuance gets washed down the drain (a drain which is also purple…).

Discovering completely new territory means starting the learning journey from scratch, without reference. This can be a difficult task, especially at first. Modern schooling, which is based on the principle of Defensive Learning, trains people to automatically categorize information and experience into areas already explored, and then to build on these known territories. An alternative to Defensive Learning is Expansive Learning. In Expansive Learning, you willingly submit yourself to the unknown. You toss aside the habits of Defensive Learning and treat new experiences and domains as completely separate knowledge continents, untouched lands where discovery can happen unconstrained by influence or previous experience. But how to do this? Here are a few hints:

• Stop comparing your current experience to previous experiences. Regard it (and guard it) as a unique experience.
• Lose interest in categorization.
• Drop phrases like “I know” or “I already did this” from your verbal repertoire.
• Replace these phrases with “They say there is nothing new under the sun. I want to find out for myself.”
• Draw no immediate conclusions.
• Draw no un-immediate conclusions.
• In fact, toss conclusions out the window. Have they really been so useful, afterall?
• Practice noticing the world with something other than your Mental Body.

Catharsis and Modern Culture Thoughtware

Rage Club is not the only transformational space on the planet where people yell, shake, scream, and rage. Sometimes, people who have been to Rage Rooms and Smash Rooms, Primal Therapy, Osho’s Dynamic Meditation, et cetera, will come to Rage Club. If these people are used to Defensive Learning, when they enter Rage Club, there is a risk that they will show up thinking, “Uh huh, I have done this before. It is the same as XYZ. This is the part where we yell and we get it all out. This is when I move and release all the energy. This is where I shake it off and free my body of blockages.” What these people are familiar with — what they are seeing Rage Club through the lens of — is Catharsis.

It can be shocking to discover that most Catharsis practices actually start with the same old Modern Culture Thoughtware about feelings, namely that feelings are bad and should be done away with. The majority of Modern Culture does away with feelings by suppressing and numbing them to the point where people are completely cut off from their hearts. Evidence of this is everywhere. Just walk down the street. Whose face is not flat, or automatically smiling? Who is feeling something (really feeling something) other than a kind of pale and vacant joy? Can you find even one person alive in their feelings, other than a homeless jabberer or a few weird souls putting on a street theater piece or hangers-on yelling in a parade or lit up with booze or drugs?

In Catharsis spaces, instead of getting rid of feelings by numbing or suppressing them, the practice is to get rid of feelings by expressing them loudly and intensely until they are all out, all used up, all shaken off, and a person experiences themselves as reborn. Although Catharsis might be satisfying in the same way that scratching an itch is satisfying, Catharsis spaces are mostly not transformational. I say “mostly not transformational” because for people who grew up in a culture where the only thing to do with feelings is to repress, deny, and medicalize them, allowing yourself to feel the feelings as big and as loud as they actually are is, in itself, transformational. It upgrades your thoughtware from “feelings should be repressed” to “it is ok to express my feelings,” which is a shift toward more possibility, even if both pieces of thoughtware ladder up to the same chunk of thoughtware that feelings are bad and you should get rid of them.

The transformation in a Catharsis space ends when a person has successfully shifted from “feelings should be repressed” to “I can express my feelings, fully, loudly, and clearly” (i.e., “I can yell, laugh, scream, or cry”). After a person’s thoughtware has been upgraded to “I can express my feelings,” each new experience of Catharsis simply gets rid of the energy of the feelings or emotions — energy that could be used for creation and transformation — while ignoring the information that comes along with those feelings and emotions — information that is also needed for creation and transformation.

Catharsis is not bad. Catharsis is not wrong. Catharsis is Catharsis, and at a certain point (sooner than you might think), Catharsis stops yielding transformation.

Rage Club is Cathexis, Not Catharsis

To Catharters, Rage Club might initially look like Catharsis. But Rage Club is not Catharsis. Rage Club is Cathexis.

“Catharsis,” comes from a Greek word meaning “to purge, to expel.” Cathexis, on the other hand, means “to hold, to hold onto.” In Catharsis spaces, the idea is to get rid of all the intense energy and feelings by making it big and washing it out, like the spider and the water spout.

The Cathexis space of Rage Club starts with the thoughtware that anger is not a problem or design error, but a source of energy, clarity, and power you can use for your life. You do not need to get rid of it. Instead, you keep your anger, and learn to use its energy and the wisdom of its information for living and creating. How you use the anger depends on whether the anger is a feeling or an emotion.

A feeling of anger is an experience of anger that arises right here and right now, and is about this moment. It lasts no more than three minutes, and it goes away after the energy and information have been used. For instance, if you feel angry because the door is ajar, you can use the energy of the feeling (anger) and the information from the feeling (“I feel angry because the door is ajar”) to stand up and shut the door. As soon as you have stood up and shut the door, the feeling is complete, and the anger goes away.

Feelings (including the feeling of anger) are for handling things happening right now.

The emotion of anger often feels identical to the feeling of anger. However, instead of being about right now, emotions are about the past, and they last longer than 3 minutes. No matter how much you use the energy and information of an emotion to handle things happening right now, the emotion remains, because the emotion actually has nothing to do with what is happening now, even if it seems to. For instance, maybe you feel angry because the door is ajar, but your anger is an emotion, not a feeling. You stand up, close the door, and an hour later find yourself still grumbling, “I cannot believe he left the door open when he walked out — again! He never pays attention to anything. He is so inconsiderate.” Sound familiar? The emotion might subside eventually, but even then, it is only going back into hiding until the next time he leaves the door ajar…

Emotions (including the emotion of anger) are not for handling things happening right now. Emotions are for healing incomplete feelings from the past.

If you allow your anger about the door to grow and follow it back in an Emotional Healing Process, you might soon discover that the real origin of the anger is not about right now, but is instead about all the times your father left your door open when you were a child, how he did not take care of your privacy, how you were left exposed, and how you were not allowed to be angry about that without your father retaliating or ignoring you. No matter how much you use the energy and information of your emotional anger now to make requests from your partner or to take care of shutting the door yourself, the emotional anger remains and repeats itself because it is energy and information from your past, and its use is to heal things in your past. As the Emotional Healing Process goes along, you might discover that the anger can be used to change your mind about allowing yourself to be exposed, or to clear out your father’s energy from your energetic body, or to use your Voice Blaster to shoot voices that say “You shouldn’t need privacy,” or any other type of healing that is necessary. When you have used the emotion for healing, and the healing has been thorough, the emotion of anger about the door will be healed and will not return. It will be swept down the river of time, giving you more freedom of movement and more right-here-right-now presence the next time someone leaves the door ajar.

Hints About Suppression, Catharsis, and Cathexis

How can you tell when you are suppressing, catharting, or cathecting? How can you tell when your clients or the people you are holding space for are suppressing, catharting, or cathecting? Below is an inexhaustive list of hints. (HINTS, I tell you, NOT rules.)

Suppressing

1. Biting or pursing lips.
2. Analyzing the feelings or emotions instead of feeling.
3. Thinking about feelings or emotions instead of feeling.
4. Not allowing the sounds to come.
5. Feeling just a bit, and then coming back to the mind to talk about it.
6. Clenching the jaw.
7. Using anger to tighten the body and not experience the fear or sadness underneath.
8. Using any “less bad” feeling or emotion to cover a “more bad” or more scary feeling or emotion.
9. Swallowing down the feeling or emotion.

Catharting

1. Blowing the feelings or emotions out the mouth in heavy exhales.
2. Hyperventilating.
3. Feeling big, but without any words.
4. Saying, “I just need to get it all out. I just need to express.”
5. Shaking hands, wrists, arms, legs, head, et cetera, after feeling big to get rid of the energy.
6. Raking the energy of the feeling or emotion off of the body after expressing it big.
7. Forcing the feeling or emotion to become big even if you are not authentically feeling the feeling.
8. Letting the feeling get big in order to get rid of it.

Cathecting

1. Letting the feeling or emotion get big, and allowing the feeling or emotion to speak.
2. Using the information from feelings to handle things.
3. Using the information from emotions to heal things.
4. Allowing the energy of the feeling to circulate through the bodies after expressing it big, often breathing deliberately through the nose rather than hyperventilating through the mouth.