Permission to Feel your Anger

Last Wednesday night, I hosted a conversation about anger. It was powerful. As I opened the call, I asked participants to share what makes anger difficult for them. Here are a handful of their answers:

"I have a lot of shame about anger.”
— a participant, opening up the conversation

“I have great difficulty holding my own centre when presented with someone else’s anger. I want to dodge and avoid it in any way possible. (Mostly by fawning.)”
— a participant, naming her instinct to fawn

“How can I calm my anxiety immediately when someone yells? Anger is difficult because it scares me from my childhood.”
— a participant, naming where the fear comes from

“Expressing anger is so risky — it risks making others angry too.”
— a participant, on the fear of expressing anger

You can instantly see how complex anger is for so many of us. We have a history with anger and it’s not a good one. An abusive parent who we associated with anger. Environments that taught us to read the room in order to avoid becoming a target. Experiencing backlash when we do stand up for ourselves. 

It’s no wonder that when anger comes up in us, it rarely comes alone. It comes with shame. It comes with fear. It comes with anxiety. It comes with guilt and self-doubt. And the devastating thing is that despite the magnitude of the collective problem with anger, the dearth of truly helpful resources compounds and perpetuates the problem. 

Many of the readings, teachings, and resources that aim to help continue to inadvertently recommend bypassing and suppressing anger. If you read famous Buddhist writers about anger you find them offering recommendations such as “developing patience” as an approach to anger, or telling you “the roots of anger lie in ignorance.” And if you reach into the therapy space, you might often find articles that speak of anger as a “secondary emotion.” These messages can often be received by the reader as an instruction to look past the anger.

Between the collective bypassing and condemnation of anger, and the absence of healthy role models for anger, the result is usually a cycle of suppression and explosion, which one participant in the call named beautifully for herself:

“Every time I feel rageful, I feel absolutely justified in my anger — I’m convinced the other person is wrong. But the problem is, they aren’t always wrong, and my anger is over the top or inappropriate. Then I get mad that I’m having the overreaction. It’s a cycle.”
— a participant, naming her own anger spiral, unprompted

The rage is typically then invalidated because of the magnitude of the reaction. The person with the rage ends up needing to (rightfully) apologize for the overreaction, and the rage returns underground to continue to fester. But that rage needs to be heard as valid and important if there’s ever going to be resolution. If not, it’ll end up exploding inside the body in some form.

When it comes to anger and rage, people need three things. First, they need permission to feel it. Secondly, they need effective tools to work with their anger, because not having had role models or support, most lack the skills to express it effectively. And thirdly, they often need healing for the deeply wounded parts of themselves that do lie underneath the anger and rage.

Permission began to come to the group when I said to them that anger is not the problem. The problem is that we conflate anger with aggression. We see the aggressive behaviors of people and we hear, “that’s anger.” No. That’s aggression. That’s a behavior that you’re seeing. Anger is an emotion; an inner experience. 

“The very first thing you said about conflating anger with aggression was a revelation!!!”
— a participant, in an email following the talk

People individually and humanity as a collective need to see this distortion and give themselves permission to feel their anger, which is not the same as acting on it. You need to feel your anger first and truly understand it before you act on it. Anger that is not fully understood comes out as the aggressive behavior that you’ve got a problem with. Once you understand what it’s truly about –which requires some skill– you can take the appropriate, constructive action that your anger is trying to inform.

The tricky part is that even though I’m telling you to give yourself permission to feel your anger, I know that I’m leaving you far short of a complete answer. A part of you is likely saying, “And then what? What am I supposed to do with the anger I feel?”

Just know this: your anger is never wrong… it might just not be entirely about the thing you think you’re angry about. 

And if you’re ready to get support, you might want to join the Good Girl Reset: Four weeks, lots of support, community, deep healing and action-taking. It’s for overfunctioning women who have a hard time with anger and difficulty prioritizing their needs and feelings.

Come join us! 

Love, 

Morella