ABSTRACT
The way rage is defined has important implications for informing interventions and for client engagement. This chapter challenges the idea that rage is a patriarchal power and control issue as the feminist-inspired Duluth model conceptualises it, or that it results from faulty appraisal or irrational thinking or behaviour, as cognitive and behaviourist therapists contend (Meichenbaum, 1977; Novaco, 1975, Dryden, 1990; O’Neill, 2004). I will argue that rage is an experience-processing issue and a relational issue that arises either because an afflicted individual has never developed the necessary emotional skills, because their earliest relationships did not engender ‘good enough’ (Winnicott, 1965) holding and soothing and they have been traumatised ever since, or because of a later trauma which they have been unable to process and which estranges them from their previously functional experience-processing skills.
