I arrived at Rage RVA three minutes late for my appointment and feeling flustered.
I was coming out of my busy season at work.
I couldn’t find my shoes. I left my keys on the counter.
I caught that traffic light that always lasts forever.
I’ve been practicing yoga for 20 years, and I know how to calm down when facing everyday frustrations like these. I take a deep breath, drop my shoulders, unclench my jaw.
This time, though, I grabbed a baseball bat — one with some heft — and walked into a concrete and cinder-block room. Waiting for me was a beat-up SUV, a crate full of bottles and mugs, and an old dot-matrix printer.
With the drumbeat of AC/DC’s “T.N.T.” filling the space, I picked up a small plate, lifted it over my head and smashed it to the ground, sending shards of glass skittering to every corner. Then I grabbed the bat and slammed it into the printer, “Office Space”-style, until the casing splintered and the ribbon spilled out.
Ten minutes later, I walked out sweaty, with a cramp in my thigh — and grinning uncontrollably.
While the sources of my agitation that day could be attributed to minor inconveniences, the truth is, they’re building on a year of pent-up stress and anxiety. After living through a pandemic and reckoning with the current social justice movement against systemic racism, we’ve all experienced some degree of prolonged grief, isolation and trauma. As our worlds reopen and we move into the aftermath, emotions will crash through to the surface, and we aren’t necessarily prepared to deal with them.
Culturally, we’re inclined to stay positive. When faced with the difficult emotions of others, we put up a wall and say “good vibes only” are allowed in our presence.
But what if the best thing we can do in these moments is to unleash a primal scream, slam through a windshield with a sledgehammer and lean into the full complexity of our emotions?
Rage RVA owner Nicole Cline (Photo by Jay Paul)
Anger
Nicole Cline opened Rage RVA in 2017 after seeing a rage room in Denver featured on a TV show. She thought the concept would make a fun night out, and she had always wanted to own a business.
Within six months, Cline realized she was onto something. Customers weren’t just coming to celebrate a birthday or a promotion. They were going through breakups and divorces, grieving the loss of family members and processing complex traumas. In the past year, she’s also seen people looking for an outlet after being stuck at home, juggling work and family in isolation.
While the name Rage RVA might suggest a dark room with heavy metal screams blasting through speakers, it’s actually a cheery space. While Cline started the business in her home garage, it has since moved to a building on Main Street in the Fan, underneath a salon. The lobby is robin’s-egg blue, with upbeat sayings like “You are my sunshine” on the walls.
It’s an intentional design meant to foster a sense of safety. As with many rage rooms, most of the customers are women looking for a judgment-free place to express their anger.
“Some people are private,” Cline says. “They don't want someone to know what they're going through. They just want to deal with it on their own. And if they need to come here and break s--- to get it out, then come on.”
Since its opening, Rage RVA has seen more than 2,500 customers, and Cline says not one has arrived in a state of rage. Rather, it’s a mix of emotions — including happiness. Some ask up front if it’s OK to cry or scream. For others, a full range of emotions doesn’t manifest until the glass shatters.
The soft-spoken Cline sometimes acts as a quasi therapist. Her wife, Sue, says Nicole has the kind of personality that makes people want to open up.
The Clines would like to see Rage RVA prescribed as part of a therapy program. Several therapists have come in to experience a rage room before recommending it to their clients. The couple are working with the Social Psychology and Neuroscience Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University on a study to evaluate how people feel in the month after a smash session.
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(From left) Saundra Meredith and Felicia Hunter drove from Fredericksburg to unleash their emotions by breaking things at Rage RVA. (Photo by Jay Paul)
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Photo by Jay Paul
I signed up for the Sensory Smash, which is advertised as a “therapist favorite.” For $35, you get 15 breakables and an electronic item, with 10 minutes to smash — enough time to find that physical release without veering into obsession. With your anger behind you, you can find clarity and move forward. Other options range from a five-minute “quickie” for $20 to a $300 team-building session.
“A lot of times, you need therapy after therapy,” Sue says. “It brings stuff up, and what do you do with those emotions? How do you work through that?
“Believe it or not, throwing stuff, breaking stuff in a controlled environment is believed to be incredibly therapeutic. It’s both psychological and physical — it unites the body.”
Slash Coleman founded Laughter Yoga Richmond in 2019. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Joy
Author and storyteller Slash Coleman experienced that physical and emotional link firsthand. Growing up, he was surrounded by family members who struggled with addiction and anger, often leading to fights and violence. Rather than follow in their footsteps, Coleman simply refused to get angry.
It worked for a while. But then he started getting sick. No one could explain it until he started seeing a therapist who recommended he join an anger management group.
“He thought it would give me some insights into what I was struggling with and how to express my anger,” Coleman says. “It’s a legitimate healthy emotion when it’s expressed in a healthy way.”
In the anger management sessions, Coleman would listen to the instructor’s recommendations and quietly do the opposite. He even started a fight club in Portland, Oregon, where he used wrestling to help people with similar trouble accessing their anger. Eventually, he says, he reached a healthy place.
Now he’s focused on a different emotional expression: unconditional laughter.
After his lung collapsed while he was on a book tour in 2015, Coleman’s surgeon recommended laughter yoga to help with his recovery. Initially, Coleman — a performer with an irreverent sense of humor — thought the on-demand laughter seemed fake. But after his first class, he was hooked.
With laughter yoga, participants engage in a series of deep breathing and laughter exercises. Rather than waiting for inspiration, they laugh intentionally, making direct eye contact with other participants. This, in turn, leads to genuine laughter and connection with fellow gigglers.
Coleman became certified as a laughter yoga instructor and spent a year experimenting with unconditional laughter, which is laughter that isn’t a response to jokes or comedy.
“It wasn’t something [where] I had to memorize or entertain people or put together lesson plans,” he says. “I could just go there and be present and laugh.”
He founded Laughter Yoga Richmond in 2019 to promote the practice, and he currently hosts monthly laughter yoga meditation classes online, as well as corporate team building sessions.
In 2019 he also started exploring how unconditional laughter might benefit people experiencing addiction. While traditional 12-step recovery programs often have a meditation component, Coleman says sitting can be challenging at first. For some people, laughter yoga can remove those barriers and make a meditation practice more accessible.
Coleman also says the release of endorphins and increased oxygen that come from a deep belly laugh can disrupt feelings like anger, frustration and anxiety. He sometimes asks participants to imagine anger-inducing situations — like opening a letter from an ex — and interrupt the scenario with intentional laughter. In time, they can retrain their brains to respond to real-life challenges in this way.
“There’s a chemical cocktail [released] in the body when you interrupt anger with laughter,” he says, “and I think it all comes down to the breath. You could take a breath-work class, you could sit and meditate — all roads lead to Rome. I think laughter is the most fun.”
Grief activist Karla Helbert (Photo by Jay Paul)
Sadness
“Expression of big emotions is something that our culture is so very bad at, and it is harmful ultimately to us as individuals and as a collective people and society,” says Karla Helbert, a licensed professional counselor who focuses on grief and loss. “Often, people don’t even know they’ve had trauma. They’re walking around the world carrying a lot of pain, and we live in this culture that says you’re not supposed to feel it.
“I always tell people that every feeling you have is valid. You hear people saying things like, ‘You can choose to be happy,’ and that’s just not true. The feelings that are difficult have a whole lot more to teach us than the happy ones do.”
Helbert considers herself a grief activist who tries to educate and raise consciousness about grief and give people the language to talk about it.
She comes to it with personal experience. In 2006, her young son, Theo, died of a brain tumor. It was a traumatic and life-altering loss, and it made Helbert realize just how ill-prepared she was for the aftermath.
“In grad school, I took an elective course on death and grief and bereavement,” she says. “We spent a lot of time on hospice [care], but there was no discussion of traumatic grief.
“Luckily, I had something in me that knew I couldn’t run away from it. I had to be in it. And I didn’t have anyone to show me how to do that.”
Helbert’s clients often don’t have the language to talk about their grief. She begins by asking about their story and helps them understand that emotions are meant to be felt and expressed. She explains that they will constantly shift between intensity and softness, experiencing everything from rage to sadness to guilt and regret.
She encourages clients to let go of the idea that there are stages to grief, and she doesn’t leap to diagnose specific conditions. These tactics, she says, encourage us to codify grief and establish a timeline for getting over it. Instead of wondering if we’re grieving the right way, we need to let go of our expectations and just be.
“I think a lot of people become therapists because they want to help people feel better,” she says. “You cannot do that with grief. There’s nothing I can do to fix the problem. All I can do is help you be OK where you are.”
Yoga and making art are among the tools she relies on to help bring emotions to the surface. As she explains in her book “Yoga for Grief and Loss,” our feelings and our bodies are inextricably linked. The more we can tune into the sensations in our bodies, the better able we’ll be to manage our thoughts.
“Expression of big emotions is something that our culture is so very bad at.” —Karla Helbert, licensed professional counselor
After all, she says, the grief never really goes away. A birthday, a holiday or a small reminder can bring everything flooding back. She wants her clients to develop the skills to recognize and lean into emotions when they arise.
“You [sometimes] see in yoga culture this toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing, but really what yoga says is you’re perfect as you are, right now,” she says. “Yoga encourages us to be with those difficult feelings, to try to find that sweet spot in a really uncomfortable space. Whether I use yoga words or not, I’m trying to help people figure out that it’s OK to be uncomfortable.”
While she encourages clients to learn how to lean into their emotions, rather than shying away, she says that it’s just as crucial for a person’s community to give them space for that expression. This will also be critical as we begin to reemerge from the collective trauma and pain of the past year.
Instead of falling back on our tendency to move on, put the past behind us and get back to normal, Helbert hopes to see community spaces where we can gather to tell our stories, grieve together and share what’s happening in our lives.
Not only will we be finding release for ourselves, but we’ll be creating a safe environment for others to do the same. And with that release, we’ll truly be able to move forward.
“Monsters live in the dark,” she says. “The more we talk about the big, scary things, the less scary they’ll seem.”
