Transcript- Women's Invisible Anger

Women’s Invisible Anger – Transcript

by Angela McConnell

(Edited for length and clarity)

How Women are Mad Came About

Holly - Excited to see everybody here today. We're going to have a fun conversation about women's invisible anger, is what's on the agenda today. And I say "fun" Because I actually think it will be fun and full of glee. So we've got Jennifer Cox here today, the reason you and I connected is because you run a group in the UK called "Women Are Mad," right?

Jennifer - Yeah.

H- Wonderful name, wonderful group. This audience here is all brand new to you, so can you tell us a little bit about yourself, about your group, kind of your background and credentials so we can all get a flavour for who you are?

J- I am a psychotherapist and I originally trained at the Tavistock in London. I've been working, essentially my whole professional life, in forensic and psychiatric settings before I decided private practice would be easier.

But what I noticed quite quickly, working in private practice with mostly women. A lot of the feelings were very similar to what I would feel working with violent criminals, men, from the years spent in locked wards and secure settings.

I started to ask questions about that, firstly just to myself, and then more openly to the patients themselves, and really started to scrutinize the symptoms that they were coming in with.

Often, they'd present with anxiety or depression, but also, as kind of secondary symptoms, have frequent migraines, or IBS, or musculoskeletal things going on.

And what I began to realize as I mooted that what I felt in the room with them was anger, was that they became quite quickly relieved and readily attached to this idea.

Like, "Oh shit, yeah. "I think this is it. "I think this is what I'm feeling." And it was so weird how, as I say, across all these different women from all different walks of life, there had been this just... Not even taboo because I... I mean, I think it is a taboo, but I don't think consciously, they were aware it was.

Just a sort of being asleep to that emotion really, like a shared numbness to the fact that that could be behind their symptoms.

Once it was out, it was out. We could really work with it, with each individual person in whatever way was needed.

I don't know if other therapists are noticing this. It doesn't seem to be that lots of people are talking about it, certainly not in the therapy community, but it is obviously being talked about in the wider world a bit more now.

Journalists especially, I'd say. But I thought "I can't keep this "to myself any longer. "I need to do something about it."
So, I had to get a friend to help me set up a little Instagram account, and added a few people I thought would be interested. I did a couple of In-Real-Life groups with them, talked more.

Then The Guardian basically got hold of it and featured it in this article about women's rage. And from there, everything sort of snowballed.

The Need to Identify and Cultivate Anger as a Woman

H- Well, part of what I get as you tell that story, is this pulse in the community that you're working with of anger that was there. And then as you start to talk to that more publicly, folks just glom on in such a way that you go, "Wow, there's really this need."

You've built this community because you've been a beacon for folks in talking about it, which I think is a testament to how few sources there are in the world really talking about this in this way.

For folks in the room who don't already know, part of the reason that I found this with Jennifer is because I've been thinking about this for a long time.

I have dedicated many a midnight Googling session to try to figure out - when you Google things about anger, what you find is a lot of resources about how to suppress anger, how to be less angry, how to manage anger.

And my experience, being socialized as a woman and raised that way, is that I don't need any practice at that. I'm too good at that, right?

What I actually need is the ability to identify places where I'm angry and almost cultivate that because there actually is a lot of justifiably enraging things that happen when you're raised in patriarchy, right?

We are taught to be small, and polite, and collected about that. And then, when we go online to go, "Hey, what am I going to do about this?" The pulse of anger that you've identified in all your clients, the answer is make it smaller.

So, that was also enraging. There was no help about that on the internet. Until one day, courtesy of this Guardian article, I found Jennifer, and now we all find Jennifer.

I think the work that you're doing is just an amazing gift, and certainly has been for me, and hopefully will be for the folks in this room as well.

5 Things Jennifer is Angry About Right Now

Part of where I want to go to get us sort of started now that we know who you are. This is going to be a talk about anger, right?

We can do that in a polite way, or we can do it in a way that really goes after it, and so we're going to obviously do it in the way that goes after it.

We're going to start off like right from the beginning. Jennifer, tell us five things that you are angry about, viscerally angry about these days. I want to hear it.

I'll follow with my list. And folks, anybody in this room, share in the chat, like, what are we angry about? Let's just talk about it.

J- Yeah, pile in. So okay, on this day, in this hour, I've made a list and it got longer and longer, so I'll try and get it to five.

Yesterday, a report came out on the BBC, "Teenage girls feel unsafe on the streets." I think it was like 44% or something.

And it broke my heart because even in the same report, it said, "But they feel hope for the future." I just thought, "Well, what's that based on?"

I mean, how tragic? It's like this fantasy that suddenly life gets better. It doesn't! It doesn't get better. It starts shit at that point, girls, and it carries on. So that, makes me angry.

Women's body rights being eroded. I mean, you will all have your feelings about this, but I think what I realized... We had Dawn Laguens from Planned Parenthood on the podcast, Because I also do a podcast called "Women Are Mad," and she's a kind of hero of mine.

We're talking a lot about abortion and abortion rights being removed. And what emerged in that conversation was actually how my co-hosts, one of whom is in London, didn't realize that in the UK, abortion is still classed as a crime against the body.

It's not legal.

It feels like a very precarious position really in terms of where it sits in what we're allowed, so that makes me angry.

Women doing twice as much in the home as men, whilst also working at least as hard in their jobs. And I'm not just talking about the hoovering and making lunch, I just mean the mental load.

We know what we carry as women, and we know that men don't carry that. That makes me very enraged.

Medical sexism, don't get me started. So many of my patients, this is what I have to help them with. I write endless letters to consultants, saying, "Just please give this woman a hysterectomy. "She's living in constant pain. "This is all she wants."

The list goes on in terms of how many women I've supported getting the doctors that are meant to be listening to them, to listen to them.

The fact that sanitary towels were only tested with actual human blood this year, this August. That is astonishing.

And then, Holly as you reminded me, the accusations about Russell Brand, the cherry on the cake. That's my five slash six.

H- That's your five slash six, yeah. Jennifer and I were talking about this before we got on this call, going, "Oh yeah, what is our five?" Because it changes, right?

Maybe it's 100 items long and it's just the top five is different from moment to moment, right? When you first start building a list of five things that you're angry about, you're like, "Maybe I only have like two or three." And then, "Oh no, there's this, this, this." And suddenly the list becomes very long.

J- Holly, what's yours?

H- Yeah, so mine, related to Russell Brand and also just our entire trash fire of a society, is sexual assault conviction rates, what a disaster, right?

The narrative that goes along with it about false allegations of assault, that it's this rampant problem. It's a teeny tiny problem, it matches that of every other crime.

Almost nobody ever gets convicted for domestic violence, for sexual assault. Couldn't be more mad about that.

And in particular, the Russell Brand news has got that welling up for me.

J- What we were saying as well was how unsurprising it was, and that's the most shocking thing, isn't it? That we all knew, no one was shocked, how dreadful.

H- Yeah, and there were gossip sites in the days before, going, "There's going to be a big revelation "about somebody in comedy," and people were like, "It could be that guy, it could be that guy."

It's a list of six, seven, 15 of them. And all those ones, we're still waiting on, I guess? I don't know, it's just a disaster, right? So real angry about that whole mess of things.

Another thing that's really in my focus these days is just the extent to which women are excellent enforcers of patriarchy, and item number three on that list is how good I am at reinforcing patriarchy upon others and upon myself.

I've got a real streak of disappointment about me these days. About how well we all uphold the thing that squashes us all. I'm doing a lot of thinking about that these days, and just not loving any minute of thinking about that.

And then Jennifer, along the lines of you, the teeny tiny amount of funding that goes into women's health. Basically nothing, right?

We were talking earlier about how I have Endometriosis, something that affects between 10 and 15% of women, it gets less than 2% of the funding.

It's this massive disease that usually takes people 10 years to get diagnosed, and nothing, right? And it’s hugely disabling.

J- Yeah, people go through hell.

H- Name any women's health condition and that's what you're going to find. Endometriosis is just one example.

So that's particularly frustrating. And then the thing that goes along with that, that you're already talking about, which is medical gaslighting, how hard it can be to get medical professionals to believe you.

To take your condition seriously and not treat you like you have hysteria, which was luckily only just they thought you have a uterus and so that's the reason why you're messed up. That's what hysteria is, right?

It's effectively still a diagnosis, that "it's all in your head. "Have you considered that "it might be psychosomatic?" Which Jennifer is why you have all those patients that have to get you to advocate for them, right?

J- Yeah, yeah.

H- And so I'm having a whole apocalypse about that. That's my list of five reasons why I'm angry.

Again, folks, anyone who's got stuff they're angry about, share in the chat, we'd love to hear it. It's an angry conversation today, we're talking about what's here.

The list is long for most people, right? There's the giant political things, we've both brought a lot of those to the table, but I think for a lot of us, there's stuff that's really personal there, right?

J- Yeah, I think this is the point actually, is how the macro comes into the micro, and like you were saying, how we ourselves enforce these patriarchal piles of shit. But also, how the structure of the family, the structure of the nuclear family, is sort of beautifully designed to really embed these wider problems into our daily lives.

I think majorly what I would say is gaslighting. One of the things I really notice is how, at a massive societal level, we are told,

"Well, but you've got everything, women. We gave you an education, we supported you with that. You are allowed jobs. You might even be allowed top jobs. But we're going to disguise the fact that underneath that, there is still massive amounts of covert sexism.

And a lot of the processes are very tokenistic. They're not really going to help you. Oh, and by the way, the school's going to phone you halfway through this meeting and say your kid has nits and you need to come and get them."

The Lie Women are Told About Their Anger

So, it's this lie, it's a huge lie that we are sold. And I think this is what we bear in our bodies,

"I'm stressed, I'm overwhelmed. I don't have enough hours in the day. My to-do list grows and grows. How weird that I've got terrible IBS, or that I've got to go to bed with yet another migraine. But I can't go to bed. Let me just take tablets, I don't have time to go to bed."

This is what it's doing to us, and we are not allowed to call it anger. We are not allowed to call these feelings, that are getting stronger and stronger in us, and our bodies are having to take the hit on, rage when there's so much to be angry about.

H-I had a conversation just yesterday with a speaker who's going to come and speak at WIMDI at some point in the future. We were talking about how there is so much suppression that happens around all the things that you're just saying, and all the things that are now showing up in the chat.

Like, I'm getting mad looking at the chat. Thanks, you're doing exactly what we asked for. But there's so much to be mad about, and then what we are expected to do and what everybody else enforces around us is that we have to suppress that and make that small and not talk about it, and transmute that from anger into sadness, or into frustration, or into irritation, or into nagging, or... The list goes on.

J- Bitching, yeah.

How We Shut Down Anger So It Doesn’t Become Contagious

H- Yeah, bitching, a common one. One thing that I was talking about with this other potential speaker is that, I quite often feel that if I'm angry about something and other folks haven't yet caught onto that, it's contagious in a way that folks don't like.

Because if I share the truth about it, suddenly then they inherit some of that anger and they have to cope with it. We all have this collective system of shutting that down, so we don't have to be with the reality of our lives, which are legitimately enraging, right?

All the stuff that you're talking about, how are we not rioting in the streets sometimes? I actually wonder. We have these strong societal mechanisms to suppress that so that I think we don't riot in the streets as a big part of it, you know?

The Performance of Being “Fine”

J- I also think because we're brilliant, because women are actually brilliant, we make a really good performance of being fine. We convince people we can do this.

"Yes, you are right, we have got it all. We must have it all because you are saying we do. And because it's too mad if this isn't true. That madness has to be housed within me if indeed it's wrong.”

I'm maybe not making full sense here. But it does feel as if, I think, we are the ones that hold it together. Our bodies take the hit, our brains take the hit, but we make a really good act of being fine so nothing changes.

H- You mentioned earlier that you started to notice this thread in your therapy practice. How do you notice that folks deal with that cognitive dissonance? How do they transmute that anger? Where does it go to?

J- So this is what I think happens, is that they think it's their problem because if you look on an Instagram account, everyone else seems to be doing absolutely fabulously and no one else has an issue.
Indeed, if society is perpetually telling you that you have everything and you should be grateful, I love that one as well. The grateful journals that we're all meant to be keeping.

And so, then if you feel like, "Oh, hang on, there's some dissonance here. Something doesn't feel right here," then it's you, you are the issue.

You feel like "I'm losing my mind. I'm having a panic attack. Give me some drugs. I'm really depressed, I don't want to get out of bed."

No wonder you don't want to get out of bed, look what you've had to walk into.

H- Who would want to get out of bed for this? Christy Turlington doesn't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day, but we get to get out of bed to do the dishwasher again, right?

J- This is it. So when you say "where does it go?" It goes back in. It goes into us.

H- It goes back in, yeah. And what does it do when it's in us? You talked earlier about those physical symptoms, like IBS, that's a common one. What else do you see?

J- If you think about what stress does to the body, so that will raise your heart rate. That really puts stress on your lungs, and basically every other organ because it's fight-flight, you're meant to do something with it.

It's meant to be acute, you get rid of it, you move on. But when this is every single day, potentially for hours on end, this level of, kind of stress and the inflammation it causes ends up just sitting in us.

We get used to it, and we get, "Oh, my back. "My back's really bad." Yes, of course your back's really bad because you're sitting with vast amounts of chronic inflammation in your body.

Equally, the brain suffers in the same way because our brain is in our bodies. You know how you feel when you've, for example, had COVID or something, and you feel very post-viral.

That's your brain reacting to that extra inflammation in your body, well if you've got extra inflammation in your body because you're stressed out of your box all the time, then your brain is going to suffer just like when you've had a virus and you feel dreadful and quite depressed.

It goes somewhere and this is where it goes. But it doesn't leave, it stays.

The Positive Thing About Anger

H- I think there's something really interesting about anger. It's hard to find on the internet but if you find yourself in the right places, and Jennifer is one of those right places.

The positive thing about anger is that it is an emotion that elicits action, right? It's a cue that there's something wrong, that the way that the world is around you or the way that you're being in the world can't continue the way it is without harm.

It enables you and forces you to create change. Part of what happens physiologically with anger is that your body, almost like fight or flight, gets cued up for action.

But because of the way that we hold anger in society, and we hold women in society, that has nowhere to go because what we do is we get small, and we suppress it, and we hop on top of the bomb, and smother it using our own bodies.

And so, just like you find with that fight or flight around trauma, when that gets suppressed into the long term, all that tension goes somewhere. Where it goes to is often harming you.

J- Yeah, it's completely inverted. I'm just wondering, can we read out some of the chat?

H- Sure, yeah, go ahead, Jennifer. Find some of the greatest hits.

H- While you're looking, I saw one earlier that got sent to me earlier this week that really should have been on my list, but there some reporting done recently about how common sexual assault is in the operating room against female physicians.

J- This is where my... Yeah, and I love this, "what the fuck?" Yes, what the fuck?

H- Yeah, "what the fuck" is the only correct response to that. If you want to be really triggered, it's a great piece of journalism to read and just incredibly common.

Some of the responses from that, they interview "both sides of the issue", and there's a lot of more senior male physicians, going, "Well, listen, that's the way it is. If you can't hack it, then you can't hack it. If the fire's is too hot, get out of the kitchen."

J- Oh my God, it's actually insane, isn't it?

H- Yeah, ridiculous.

J- And this is good. The testing of medication on men because this is the whole "women's bodies "just being small men's bodies," basically. No understanding for years and years of our very different physiologies.

That has clearly perpetuated, hasn't it? I mean, we were saying, weren't we once, are women's body's just too complicated? But it's just that they haven't bothered looking. Nobody's interested.

H- I think you get it on one of two sides, either get that it's just small men's bodies, like you said, no need to test, or you get, "Oh, women's bodies? Must be hormones."

And then, that's the whole explanation. They just go, "it's down to the hormones!" And then they go "have a birth control pill," and that's the solution, right?

J- "That's sorted, thank you." The thing that really pissed me off, so the coil, the IUD you probably call it, is this incredible, I agree, medical miracle. Amazing, love it. It’s helped so many women, in so many different ways.

But if you have any issues with it, good luck getting anyone to take you seriously because it's a medical miracle, so shut up!

If there's a problem, it's with you and your weird body that can't somehow adapt to our little coil. Because there was a big lawsuit, you may have heard of it, that's just kind of come up I think in the UK, it might be more global.

This really kicked up, for me, a lot of what I've heard from patients around this, that, a bit like with the pill, "But shut up. "Shut up, it works." "What about these awful side effects?" "Yeah, inconvenient."

H- Well, I've got a speech about this, and then we'll move on just from talking about the things that we're mad about a little bit more.

Quite often, for folks in this room who have had IUDs inserted, the sort of stock line is, "Oh, might hurt a little, just a pinch. "Take some Tylenol," right?

I've never been pinched the way I've been pinched when I've had an IUD installed. Some of the most traumatic things that have ever happened to me in medical settings were IUD installations and removals.

It is bizarre that doctors who concern themselves with women's health can watch folks writhe in pain, the way is incredibly common with IUD installations, and not want to have any amount of thinking about pain relief, other than Tylenol.

There's lots more that folks can do, but it's not something that we do. And that's common across the board with women's health issues. Lots and lots of procedures are just shockingly painful, and no pain killers offered.

It's a really interesting thing because IUDs are incredibly effective as birth control, incredibly long lasting, don't come often with the same kind of side effects that hormonal birth controls do for many folks. But also come with often, for many folks, an incredibly traumatizing beginning and end, right? Whew, we could keep going. We could keep going.

J- We could.

Shutting Down Anger Starts in Girlhood

H-Jennifer, you and I have talked before about, and we've been talking on this call about, how folks shut down women's anger. How do you see folks do that? How do you see yourself, or women, internally shutting down anger, Jennifer? I'm curious.

J- I don't think we call it "anger" for a start. So, I think it gets shut down at such a deeply unconscious level that we don't even probably have a word for it.

We don't really encourage girls, especially little girls as they grow up, to verbalize and articulate their feelings of anger.

They're then left without a vocabulary for it. So, what do you do if you have feelings that you don't have words for, or that you think the words that exist for it don't apply to you?

This is a key part of the problem, and it really assists the gaslighting then because it's like, "Oh, I'm having all these "really uncomfortable feelings. What is it? What is it? Oh, it must be anxiety," because there isn't a word for what it actually is.

And I guess when you say in myself, I mean I suffered with migraine for years, forever, beginning from when I was a tiny kid. At that point, they just decided it was a kind of cyclical vomiting thing, and ignored it.

It was some sort of physiological issue, nothing to do with psychology. Psychology didn't exist in the 80s. I've only realized, putting it all together myself now, what it was and what I had. So interestingly, since "Women Are Mad" began, my migraines have stopped. Since I've been talking every day about anger, openly and aggressively, and not holding back, I'm much healthier.

H- I think that's amazing and we'll talk about this in a second, but one conclusion I came to, and part of how we connected, is that there's got to be an outlet for this, right?

We can't just store it inside like squirrels with some kind of unlimited tree trunk to put all our angry acorns in. We need to have a way out, or the squirrel eventually runs out of places to put the acorns.

And now what? Because nobody wants to see them. I love that that release for you has had such tangible impact. Also, what a tragedy that this very natural thing, this is how we process all emotions.

There's a common saying in therapy, it's like "You can't ever feel one feeling "for more than 60 seconds." We move through feelings, we process feelings, that's the whole thing about therapy.

But when it comes to anger, somehow that's... It's different, it's not supposed to be the same.

Even at the start of this call, Jennifer, you and I were talking about how there's this study that says, “If you feel your anger, that's bad Because it'll just increase it and it'll get out of control." It leads to more, apparently. I'm glad that that release has worked. It's amazing

J- Oh, it's... I can only recommend it, yeah. If a woman is too ill to voice her anger because there aren't words for it, only her body seems to be able to articulate it. She's so consumed with looking after this ill body that she can't possibly go out onto the streets and rage about abortion laws or whatever it might be.

H- Jennifer and I had a conversation a while ago about a couple books about anger in the last year, but in particular, there was a book called "Good and Mad" by Rebecca Traister, and it's all about women's anger politically has power.

Which is why we work so hard as a society to suppress it, right? Effectively, I'm not saying that people get together and have "how are we going to suppress women's anger" meetings or anything like that…

J- They don't need to.

H- They don't need to because they're doing it all the time. There's a really efficient system in place that works on this.

Screaming Out Anger

Jennifer, I want to switch gears a little so we make sure we've got some time for Q&A for folks. But part of what they profiled, I believe, in that Guardian article, or at least whatever article it was that I read, you took a bunch of women out in public where you live and had them all scream.

That was actually what I was looking for. I've been saying for a year, "How can I go scream? I need to go scream. Where can I do this?"

There you were, like a beautiful beacon of hope, someone who'd done it, got a whole troupe of women to do it. And I went, "I need to meet this woman."

Jennifer talked about releasing it and how in conversation, over the last year, she's been able to change her relationship to anger, that's really what we're up to. But Jennifer, tell us how you ended up at taking a bunch of women together to scream. I'm curious.

J- I just thought "I've got to get this out." And I think "if I need to get it out, "other people need to get it out."

In one of those groups, the ones I was talking about, the quite informal friends-of-friends things. I had two of those and it was mainly discussion-based.

It was little prompts and splitting off into smaller units, and having a really good hash out of what anger was for us and what was making us angry, a bit like today.

But I just felt like, "No, it's not enough." It's great talking about it. Yes, amazing, we need to every day all the time. But our bodies have got to get it out.

We've got to get this packed down wellspring of rage out of our bodies. It's been sitting there too long and causing the havoc it's been causing.

I thought the easiest, freest thing: a scream. And it was magical. It was absolutely magical. We went to this place in Highgate Woods, which is in North London, where witches used to meet in covens, and it's very wooded and quite kind of Ye Olde England looking.

It was a really misty morning. And a man walking his dog afterwards said... Because we were all emerging, and he said, "Were you screaming? Were you women screaming?"

And we said, "Yes, we were, we were." And he said, "Oh, Because I wondered what it was, but I mean, I couldn't come and see you. Because you know, I've got my dog, and he'd have been scared."

I mean, he just said it all. This was so shortly after all the London Met horror, and someone had said, who was coming to do the scream, "Do you think the police will intervene or stop us if they hear us?" And I said, "Well, it's the first time "the London Met will have done anything "upon hearing a woman scream, "so bring it on."

H- Perfect, yeah.

J- I thought, "This will make the headlines."

H- Yeah. "Police finally show up when women scream," right?

J- Of course, they didn't.

H- Of course not, no. Just the guy with his dog who went, "Right, I'm going to stay away from that mess."

J- Who was too frightened.

H- Frightened on behalf of his dog, right?

J- His dog was frightened, apparently.

H- His dog was, not him. Just the dog. Had to protect the dog.

J- The dog was completely un-frightened looking.

A Last Revolutionary Message About Women’s Anger

H- You've got a captive audience here, a bunch of smart, engaged, maybe enraged women. What's the revolutionary message you want to leave them with as the last that you say before we unleash them upon you for questions?

J- I think I want to say a few things, just very brief, just as little takeaways.

One, stop apologizing
Two, get back in the room
And three, get comfy with being uncomfortable

This is really what's helped me in terms of my day-to-day anger minimization toolkit. These are the little sort of behaviour... Facts of life and really ordinary behaviours that we find ourselves conforming to.

So, we apologize all the time, we leave the room when we're asked to, metaphorically, I'm talking, and we can't bear making other people feel uncomfortable. Those all conspire, essentially put together, I think to really contribute to our general anger levels.

If we can address those, I think already we're doing something quite significant to stem the flow a bit.

H- Mhmm, mhmm. Yeah, we've got a bunch of folks weighing in here in the chat, one that just caught my eye a second ago, "Women should not do emotional labour "for men anymore," right?

J- Oh, love that. Absolutely.

H- Love that. One of my aspirations in life... I don't always like what comes with this, I have to do my own work to come to terms with loving every consequence that shows up.

But my aspiration is to be an incredibly inconvenient woman. I want to be disliked; I want people to find me difficult to some extent.

In particular men who want me to do emotion emotional labour, I really want them to find me very hard to deal with, you know? And I think that it's an important thing for all of us to do too.

J- Good goal, good goal.

H- To be less... A little less easy, you know? Because part of function and part of the way we suppress ourselves and others suppress us is by us making things easy, right?

J- Yeah, agreed.

H- If folks want to find you or be part of "Women Are Mad," how do they do that?

J- If you're on Instagram, DM me @Jennifercoxpsychotherapist. The other route is Facebook because we've just set up there. Either do Insta DM or Facebook "Jennifer Cox," and I'll put you into the "Women are Mad" community.

H- Right, and folks, if you can't remember any of that, womenaremad.org, right?

J- Yeah, precisely. And then you can just contact me via the form.

H- Yeah, and all those things are linked. And Jennifer, what's your podcast called?

J- It's called "Women Are Mad," and we are currently recording the second series with some very exciting guests.

H- Oh, I'm very excited.