I am a white woman. I am also a therapist. In this career I’ve had the opportunity to study the emotions of my clients; the process of what happens when they feel an emotion and the different ways they might respond. And one thing I know for sure (both from my own personal experience and from seeing it time and time again in my office)—women in America are often trained not to show anger. When I say “trained”…I want to be clear. Obviously there’s no class in school to teach y

One of the concepts of a type of therapy called ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) that I have always found helpful is clean pain vs. dirty pain. Think of clean pain as the pain that is an unavoidable part of difficult experiences. The sadness that a relationship has ended, or the grief felt after the loss of a loved one. Clean pain can also be physical—the ache in your chest when you hear bad news, or a headache. Dirty pain is essentially all the pain we experience as a