Screaming as a way to cope with these crazy times

Completely different from yelling—and feels great too

Photo by Evgeniy Smersh on Unsplash

I’ve been meaning to write about screaming as a coping strategy for a while now. What has spurred me to make it a priority is Russell Nohelty’s Substack post in which he admits to “the compulsive need to scream” in reaction to what he refers to as the pressures of this “hypercapitalist hellscape.”

You don’t have to share the belief that we’re living in a hypercapitalist hellscape, but if you’re having any trouble coping (as most of us seem to be), you may find this post useful to you.

In case you don’t read the full post, here’s the key take-away: Screaming is likely to be a far better alternative than “yelling,” which I define as the spewing of one’s fear, anxiety, and anger at other people and objects.  

Screaming tends to be an option that expels emotions without harming others, whereas yelling in many cases victimizes both the yeller and the recipient of that yelling.

If you want to flood your body with negative and life-sapping chemicals, continue yelling. If, on the other hand, you want to safely release your emotions without having a negative effect on yourself or others, consider screaming.

Below I give several examples of safe and appropriate screaming and the rewards to be gained. Consider screaming as one potential tool in your coping-with-these-crazy-times toolkit.

But please know that there are many other coping tools and that screaming may not be the right one for you. I will be writing about other tools in future posts because so many people I know are having trouble coping. My advice is therefore to read the post and decide if this feels comfortable or right for you personally. If not, don’t do it.

You may wonder if I myself do this. Yes, I do. I used to yell at the TV or PC screen, but that tended to make me even madder and I could feel the negative effects on my body—tensing up, a harder time breathing, a headache starting. So now, instead, I let out a three-second scream and that is exactly the release I need. It doesn’t bother my neighbors, and my cat isn’t bothered either. Job done, back to easy livin’.

Finding a place to scream

Have you seen the screaming scene in the film Cabaret? If you don’t fancy watching the clip below (skip forward to 0:45 to get to the key part), here are what I consider to be the key take-aways:

• The main character demonstrates the joy of screaming in a train underpass as a train goes by overhead and drowns out the sound

• She confesses that she goes to the underpass on purpose sometimes just to wait for the train so she can scream

• She looks, no lie, like she’s having an orgasm as she does it

• She screams for six seconds only—that’s it!

• She encourages her friend to try it sometime.

That is one smart piece of advice, and one excellent role model for finding a way to scream even in the midst of a crazy and hellscapish environment (which she is definitely in).

Why is this such smart advice?

You probably can’t remember, but before you became socialized, you screamed whenever you wanted to express strong emotions. Babies and pre-schoolers, as well as animals, know how to safely channel overwhelming positive and negative emotions through and out of their system by screaming.

You might object that, of course, young kids do this because they don’t have words yet. Once kids start talking, adult expectations are that they will “use their words.”

You are making my point exactly, because the main character in Cabaret, Sally Bowles, was overwhelmed with the rising chaos and fascism in Germany and had no words with which to make sense of what she was seeing, thinking, and feeling. Likewise, in today’s “hypercapitalist hellscape”—with viruses, lockdowns, inflation, one war after another, you name it—we don’t have the words to make sense of the craziness that is unfolding around us and what we are experiencing as a result of that.

We are, quite literally, struck dumb. We lack the verbal, mental, and emotional strategies we need to make sense of things. And yet we still need to release all these inexplicable, volatile, and explosive emotions that are piling up inside us. We need a safe outlet for our emotions.

Now, granted, most of us don’t have train underpasses to stand under when we need to scream. But there are other options. Here are a few initial suggestions you might wish to consider:

• If you live in a house, shut the windows, go to an inside room or into the basement, and let it rip

• Play some heavy metal (or any rowdy music) and scream along

• Sing at the top of your lungs in the shower and end with a satisfying six-second scream

• If you’re using a loud piece of equipment, scream along in harmony with the noise

• Find an abandoned industrial, commercial, or residential area where no one will hear you and scream your heart out

• Enrol in a primal scream group or private therapy session.

Things I would caution you to keep in mind when doing this:

• You don’t need to scream for long—as Sally shows, even a few seconds can be a sufficient physical and emotional release

• If at all possible, it’s best not to disturb others (or at least give them fair warning), to avert their complaining to the authorities and trying to get you jailed or committed as a “mental case” or a “threat to society” (I’m half-joking here, but listen, there are deranged people out there so why take the risk?)

• Don’t go anywhere unsafe by yourself, like abandoned buildings or isolated areas—see the next section below on finding people to scream with.

Finding screaming partners and supports

When I lived on a small island in the Pacific for two years, I learned the incredible power of screaming with the support of trusted others.

The island had a tribal culture with indigenous customs and belief systems that had survived and persisted through waves of foreign occupiers and missionaries.

In other words, these people knew how to thrive on a small island they could not escape from, even when it was occupied by fascist invaders who were determined to exert absolute control over them. (Sound at all familiar?)

One night after my roommate and I had gone to sleep, a young guy rapped on the window and spoke to him in an urgent voice.

“What did he say?” I asked after the guy left, not understanding the local language all that well.

“One of the girls in the house up there is possessed by a ghost,” he said, gesturing toward the forested hill on one side of the house. “They want me to come and be with her.”

Photo by Florian Haun on Unsplash

I had heard about people being possessed by ghosts. It was an accepted occurrence in that culture. It was also the case that my roommate had dealt with it before, so it came as no surprise that he was called to help out.

He was gone all night, and it wasn’t until the next day that I was able to question him and better understand what the heck happened. What did they mean she’d been possessed by a ghost? How did they know? What did they do? Since most people were Catholic, did they do some kind of exorcism?

What I discovered is that people on that island had a brilliant strategy for dealing with overwhelming emotions that they could no longer contain, particularly emotions that could ruin their lives on that small, socially insular island if they were expressed directly with the people involved or to an occupying and compassionless authority.

Instead of doing or saying something ill-advised and ruining their life, an individual would become “possessed by a ghost” for a night and release all of their difficult and dangerous emotions by crying and screaming as if they were out of their head. “Go ahead, get down with it and be hysterical to your heart’s content,” seemed to be the message. A group of trusted others would gather round and support them as they did this, to accompany them on their emotional journey, to give witness, and to keep them safe.  

In effect, the community acted in the same way a good parent acts with a child who needs to scream to expel overwhelming emotions. Instead of punishing them, a good parent provides a safe and supportive space in which those emotions can be expressed.

Keep in mind that, contrary to many people’s fears, emotions are not toxic unless they’re allowed to fester and bury themselves in our bodies, or unless they’re accompanied by aggression, threat, or force toward one’s self or others.

Keep in mind also that it’s not your job to own someone else’s emotions and take on the handling and resolution of those emotions as your own. You have enough on your hands handling your own damn emotions, and are likely to screw it up if you advise or tell someone else how to handle theirs.

Your job with them (and their job with you) is to provide a safe space in which to express those emotions without endangering themselves or anyone else socially, psychically, or physically. Supporting them as they grapple with their “ghost” and let out the accompanying cries and screams is a noble task as a family member or friend.

If the culture you’re currently living in does not recognise being possessed by “ghosts” and provide a support system to deal with them, here are some ideas for finding appropriate screaming partners and supports in the culture in which you do happen to live:

• Set up a screaming club in your area (similar to, for instance, a yoga laughter club)

• Find a screaming partner with whom you can take turns screaming

• Hold a scare-fest movie night and encourage and indulge in screaming—maybe even give prizes for the best re-creations of the screams onscreen

• As mentioned in the previous section, find a therapist or therapy group that engages in screaming as a therapeutic technique

• Take an improv comedy or acting class and play a character who screams

• Attend a punk or metal concert where you are encouraged to scream

• Go to a local playing field with a friend and throw or kick a ball around as you scream at one another from across the field

• Join a sport or sports team known for screaming, e.g., football, soccer/football, rugby, tennis, and scream as much as you need to “get it all out.”

Photo by Tom Morbey on Unsplash

As you can see, there are many ways to scream in a socially and politically acceptable way if you get creative.  And to show off your beautiful teeth, like this fellow above.

How to scream

As any singer and actor can tell you, there are ways to speak, yell, scream, or otherwise use your voice that are healthier. One way is to do a lower-pitched scream of frustration from your diaphragm. Another way is to do a high-pitched scream from the top of your throat. Experiment and see what works best for you such that you expel emotions in a satisfying way without hurting your body.

Also keep in mind that you can potentially damage your vocal chords if you scream too long or too often, and that you can damage someone else’s hearing screaming near their ear.

So please use this tool with care and concern for yourself and others.

What not to do: the absolute no-no’s

Under no circumstances are you to try to make others—people or animals—scream, unless they’ve given their explicit consent in advance to doing so, e.g., “Yes, I want to see that scary movie with you.”

The only person you have the right to cause to scream is yourself. Causing others to scream is likely to inflict stress and damage their health and wellbeing.

In other words, you do not:

• Tickle someone until they scream

• Scare someone to make them scream

• Threaten or confine someone to make them scream

• Harm someone or use violence against them to make them scream

• Force them to have sex against their will to elicit screams (even if pleasure is involved)

• Anything you do against their wishes to make them scream.

You may protest that the above doesn’t need to be said, but I insist that it does. There is a noted deficit of empathy and compassion in this hypercapitalist hellscape in which “greed is good” and narcissism and socio-pathology have been lauded and enshrined in our systems and institutions. People do need to be told.  

The benefits of screaming

Bottling up your emotions and not giving them an appropriate outlet is one of the worst things you can do for your health and wellbeing.

It contributes to chronic stress, which depletes the thyroid and exhausts the adrenal glands, which can lead to a veritable host of health problems, including:

• vitamin and mineral deficiencies

• blood pressure problems

• inflammation

• allergies

• hives

• gut lining deterioration and leaky gut

• an inflamed or overburdened liver

• constipation

• brain fog

• depression

• low sex drive

• insulin resistance and heart disease

• cancer

• back problems.

Stress can even change the expression of your genes.

There are a range of ways to deal with stress, and one of these is screaming. Consider it one tool in the stress toolkit that just might work for you.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Also, a bit of reconsidering your priorities in life might be in order. Westerners tend to cling to the idea that their legacy on this earth is all-important and that such legacy consists of the work outputs and accomplishments they produce. This thinking leads to getting on the proverbial hamster wheel of performance and accomplishment and never getting off, to the detriment of one’s health and wellbeing.

In actual fact, your legacy is there in every single interaction you have and the effect that that interaction brings about in others and the world around you. Your being and doing—your presence and the nature and quality of your relationships and actions in the moment—number in the gazillions, whereas your accomplishments over a lifetime number in the tens, hundreds, or thousands. What do you think is more important?

A last very important word on that score. Research on kids who grew up in horrific circumstances (e.g., kids raised in Satanic cults or by severely alcoholic or drugged-out parents) has shown that what makes the difference between those kids who go on to live good adult lives and those who don’t is someone who gives them some positive attention and makes them believe that, even in some small way, they are worthwhile and deserve to be here on this earth. If you do anything, be that adult who makes some child feel that they belong here and that they can have a worthwhile life. Doing that for even one child is an enormous legacy that will resonate down through the generations and affect untold numbers of people.

Go forth and scream, safely and respectfully

There is a lot more that could be written on this subject, but this is enough to get you thinking about screaming as a possible coping strategy, to understand why it’s important for you and for others, and to give you some ideas for how to do it in a safe, supportive, and non-objectionable manner.

And please keep in mind that you are not alone. Most of the people I encounter are struggling with the hard-to-comprehend changes going on in the world.

In particular, kids, teens and twenty-somethings whose brains, minds, and social understandings are still developing need compassion and support. As an adult, I like to think we can model a better way for being and behaving in a world gone bonkers. In particular, I think we can model safe and responsible screaming as an alternative to yelling and vomiting our unwanted emotions on the people around us.

Likes, comments, and forwards are warmly welcomed if you think this post may be valuable for others to read. Let’s help one another as much as possible to cope with this increasingly crazy world.