In the summer of 2020, the London-based psychotherapist Zoë Aston hit the headlines with a scream-therapy campaign she had devised for the Icelandic tourism board. On a website called Looks Like You Need Iceland, visitors were invited to record a scream which would then be blasted out for you in the vast, frozen wilderness. “And when you’re ready,” the blurb ran, “come let it out for real. You’ll feel better, we promise.” All of which assumes a scream-readiness with which I am patently unfamiliar.
I am famous in my family for never shouting when I drop a glass or cut myself in the kitchen. The bigger the mess, the quieter I get. The angrier I get, the quieter I get, too. I have never screamed or shouted anyone down. A while back, the thought occurred to me that this might be a problem. What if, one day, I needed to yell? What if I, or someone else, needed the kind of urgent attention a scream is designed to attract?
Reading the psychologist Art Janov’s 1970 book The Primal Scream does not help. This is at least partly due to its terrifying cover art, which features a bald figure with a cleft cranium, out of which gapes a screaming red mouth full of teeth – a nightmarish vision matched only by the intense embarrassment I feel just thinking about what therapists call “primaling”. I don’t want to primal. Or vent. Or rage. It’s the actual, audible how-to that’s the problem.
As keen as I am to step out of my comfort zone and start yelling, part of me wonders if my fear of doing so isn’t self-generating and redundant. Fight or flight is an involuntary physiological reaction to a threat – so surely I’ll scream if I need to, whether I think I can or not?
Aston is not so sure. Depending on how extroverted or introverted you are, she explains, research shows that, when faced with a perceived threat, you might not scream: “It might actually deactivate your voice,” she says. Learned behaviours come into it, too. If, like me, you’ve always been the quiet one, that’s likely where you’ll get your sense of safety. “Taking up more energetic space might, conversely, feel very unsafe.”
To unpick that association of “loud” with “bad”, she suggests I try ever louder singing, or positive affirmations. “Something like, ‘I love you’ or ‘I am enough’,” she says. It’s about telling yourself that loud doesn’t necessarily mean anger or danger; that it can be a useful tool.
I ask my friend Shahanara if she knows she can scream. “Uh, yeah,” she says. Then she tells me how, during a period of intense work, she’d get on a train to Farthing Downs in Surrey – the closest bit of countryside to where she lives – for exactly this purpose. “You’d take the train to go to scream in a field in Surrey?” I say, bemused. Then I ask if she’ll go to Surrey with me.
Walking towards her chosen scream-spot, I listen to the rain falling on my jacket hood and I cannot fathom how or why I’d shatter this quiet. The quiet is what I live for. I have brought along my field recorder and mic, hoping that viewing the expedition as an artwork will somehow take the edge off, but they stay firmly stashed in my rucksack. First, Shahanara demonstrates an extraordinary ability to go from quiet up to a full-body scream and back again. When nothing terrible happens as a result of this bellowing, I find the courage to try it myself.
I start by just naming things loudly. That tree. Those clouds. That tree! It’s the loudest I’ve ever heard my voice and, for a soaking wet Monday afternoon, it’s not too shabby, if not quite a full scream.
Back home, days later, I finally turn up the volume on the first song that comes to mind, the one that consistently gives me the most energy, the one that feels like fire – Face Tat by Zach Hill – and without thinking too much I smash my face into a cushion and yell. Ha. I’ve got more range than I’d figured. It comes out more “high screech” than scream – I feel like a parrot under a blanket. I still can’t imagine doing it without the cushion, but I have to tell you, since then I’ve approached Zoom meetings, school runs and deadlines with a new sense of possibility.
