“Where do I put all this anger?” It’s a question that strikes to the heart of so many trauma survivors. For some, the response might include a baseball bat, a crowbar and a room full of breakables. It was in keeping with the world of so-called rage rooms businesses that specialize in destruction, in breaking things, in exorcising rage in a safe environment. But are these rooms actually therapeutic, or merely a passing stress-relief fad?
Rage rooms, or smash rooms, have proliferated around the world, originating in Japan during a financial crisis in 2008. They have cultivated a following as unexpected vessels of frustration bringing together disparate groups of people: teachers, first responders, bereaved people, scorned lovers, the repressed. At Rage Room Philadelphia, customers can select packages that vary from smashing buckets of breakable objects to wrecking entire cars. “They rip out the seats. They rip out the doors. They tear off the steering wheel,” Johnson, a staff member at the venue, said of the raw power, which of these sessions.
Although this new tendency could be mistaken for a project in some constructionally slovenly university city, it takes aim at something else, something deeper. Harnessing the power of emotion, Dr. Diane Fosha, a founding director of the AEDP Institute, In her work, each emotion has a flow of energy and an action tendency associated with it, as she puts it, and when that energy is expressed adaptively, relief or satisfaction ensues. Anger, as Fosha observes, is ultimately the thing that gives an individual access to feelings of power, worth and boundaries that center one on the constitutional inner being of self. This is similar to what many trauma survivors do in becoming trapped in cycles of unexpressed feeling. It releases these sensations I think, and resets the nervous system, some form of body awareness and motion even destruction (breaking things).
But the rage room which allows people to destroy objects in recovery and group settings has also become a cultural phenomenon in its own right, especially as something that women do, who constitute the majority of patrons who frequent so-called rage rooms like Paris’ Fury Room and Sydney’s Smash Brothers. This trend is no coincidence. Florence Millot writes that female rage tends to be socially unacceptable (“bitchy,” “hostile”), whereas male rage is valorized as “strong.” Court filed for people who just want to release their feelings, women in particular. “We don’t give women many opportunities to express anger or strong emotions in their daily lives,” said Heather Gridley of the Australian Psychological Society.
For trauma survivors, rage rooms hold appeal in part because they render anger visible a particularly important step in recovery, they say. Another survivor described her experience as a means of reclaiming power and agency: “I needed to see the anger. I wanted to make it visible to myself to stop denying and minimizing what had happened years ago.” Having her therapist there made it safer to indulge her anger a bit, and she was able to connect with parts of herself that grief had silenced.
But there is disagreement about their therapeutic value. Instead, critics like Soraya Chemaly have argued that rage rooms commercialize female anger, while sidestepping the source of the problem, whether that is institutional inequality, systemic violence or other issues.
The scientific evidence for rage rooms is also mixed. While destructive real estate may relieve some pressure in the moment, studies have demonstrated that violently externalizing anger can reinforce future aggression. In at least one study, for example, it has been demonstrated that aggressive people who had been provoked were feeling better right after they had reacted retaliatory, but then were more likely to react aggressively later on as well. “For most people, if you get angry and you don’t do anything and just wait 10 or 15 minutes, the anger goes away,” said Tom Denson, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales.
That said, some find rage rooms to be helpful. Exercise releases endorphins, your brain’s natural feel-good neurotransmitters. It can also draw attention back to the present moment, a sort of mindfulness. For those who want to try it, mental health professionals advise putting the experience into the proper context as not a cure for underlying problems but rather an unconventional way to blow off some pent-up steam in a safe setting.
I found it all to be quite cathartic and fun, but as an educator I worry about the implications. Ultimately, rage rooms are a two-edged sword. They can be empowering and liberating, allowing for a manageable way to process feelings that might otherwise seem much too strong to feel. But they also understand that variants are not a silver bullet. For those who have survived trauma, the answer is to lace these experiences into a larger healing tapestry that includes professional therapy, learning how to regulate emotion and practicing compassion for oneself.
Whether rage rooms are a smashing success or a therapeutic fail is subjective. For some, they’re a way to find their voice and use it; for others, they’re just a new means of loosening up. But like all spaces, it seems, the discourse surrounding them reveals the search for healthy and meaningful visions of rage to help people heal from trauma.
