Dear friend,
It must be tough to be angry all the time — to take your resentment out on someone else. It must be tough to be unable to cry. It must be tough to always hold it all in.
And maybe you don’t even know you’re doing it. I get it. I didn’t either.
I didn’t think I could feel angry. I was frustrated. I was sad. I wasn’t angry …
“I know you’re angry at me. Why don’t you just admit it?” my mom would say to me.
“I swear I’m not!,” I insisted. And I believed it. I was completely convinced. But the problem with repressed anger is that it leaks out of you anyway. It is in your sarcasm, it’s in that snappy tone you sometimes get with people. It’s the fire in your chest that makes you want to scream. It spills out onto your loved ones and on strangers at the grocery store. It is in the way you curse at other drivers. It embarrasses you at work. It isn’t letting you sleep.
The anger is there. It is a normal feeling. It has a purpose too.
And it has to come out.
I never knew how to be angry. It isn’t something girls are taught — it isn’t something women are allowed to do. When it comes out, we get labeled “crazy” or some other insult meant to belittle us, gaslight us or, for the love of God, just keep us quiet.
“Why can’t you just be quiet?”
Be a good girl. Keep your head down. Don’t make waves. Go with the flow. Don’t have needs. Don’t have requests. Don’t expect anything. Be grateful.
(If you’ve seen “Barbie,” you may be thinking of America Ferrera’s monologue right now. If you haven’t seen the movie, you should, but the monologue is available the below link.)
This isn’t an easy way to live. And it isn’t just women who do it. Ignoring our emotions and our problems can be misinterpreted, especially by us. We think we aren’t ignoring them — we’re just really good at handling things. We’re just really good at being level headed. We’re just more practical than other people. We don’t just fly off the handle because we had a bad day … until we do!
It’s confusing because we don’t know we’re angry. We don’t know how to be angry.
Facebook reminded me about this post from two years ago:
That makes it four years now that anger and I have been friends! And I do see anger as my friend. It lets me know when my boundaries have been violated, when I’m not comfortable with how someone is treating me, when I need to try to change something in my life and when I might need to leave a situation. Expressing my anger, especially at first, was incredibly messy. I felt like I had no control over my tone, how loud I could be, the sentence structure of the words leaving my mouth, or my shaking hands. It wasn’t pretty and I wish I did better, but I also need to have compassion for myself: I was learning a new skill. I needed practice.
In just the last six months, I’ve gotten much better at being angry yet calm, which was concerning. I wondered if there was something else wrong with me. My anger can now be expressed without fear.
Before I didn’t know how others would react. I didn’t know how the anger would look. Now I know that most of the time it is reasonable and assertive. It can coexist with kindness and empathy. It wants me to better. It wants the world to be better.
According to the American Psychological Association:
“Anger is an emotion characterized by antagonism toward someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong. Anger can be a good thing. It can give you a way to express negative feelings, for example, or motivate you to find solutions to problems.”
When I initially researched how to deal with my anger, there were a lot of physical activities suggested to me, things like running or just working out. I found this incredibly unhelpful at the time. Then I started swimming in the pool at my apartment building and, holy cow, I was angry swimming! I was punching the water - sploosh, sploosh, sploosh. I swam until exhaustion. The water never punched back. Instead, it held me. It was a container for the stormy feelings inside me.
I’ve been able to rage dance too. That’s nice because, at some point, it just gets fun and silly. The dragon is calm. The angry energy can take a break and let joy drip out instead.
“Research overwhelmingly indicates that feeling angry increases optimism, creativity, effective performance—and research suggests that expressing anger can lead to more successful negotiations, in life or on the job,” according to this article published by The Greater Good Science Center: “The Right Way to Get Angry” by Robert Biswas-Diener and Todd Kashdan.
The authors note that “repressing anger can actually hurt you.” For example:
Dr. Ernest Harburg and his team at the University of Michigan School of Public Health spent several decades tracking the same adults in a longitudinal study of anger. They found that men and women who hid the anger they felt in response to an unjust attack subsequently found themselves more likely to get bronchitis and heart attacks, and were more likely to die earlier than peers who let their anger be known when other people were annoying.
Unexpressed anger can lead passive aggressiveness or make people think you are cynical and hostile (and maybe you are right now?), according to the APA.
“People who are constantly putting others down, criticizing everything, and making cynical comments haven’t learned how to constructively express their anger. Not surprisingly, they aren’t likely to have many successful relationships.The danger in this type of response is that if it isn’t allowed outward expression, your anger can turn inward—on yourself. Anger turned inward may cause hypertension, high blood pressure, or depression.”
Standing up for myself, even when it was messy, has helped me feel more confident and learn more about what my values are — and what I actually want in life. It wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t finally start to feel, accept and express that anger.
My mom was right. I was angry at her. I was angry at my whole family. It didn’t mean I hated them, it didn’t mean I didn’t want them in my life. It just meant that I had be angry, even if I only expressed it in therapy, at the pool, and in my notebook.
Anger doesn’t mean hate. It doesn’t mean vengeance. It doesn’t mean we’re bad.
A good friend loaned me her copy of “The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships’ by Harriet Lerner, which helped me realize all the ways I had been repressing my anger and how I could start to get in touch with it. (Disclosure: I am trying out Bookshop.org and joined their affiliate program. If you buy a book through the above link, I will earn a small commission.) Now I look back and think “Ohhhhhhh, that was anger” and it completely fascinates me. The human brain is amazing — how we can feel something and not know we feel it .. just wow!
OK, well, I hope this gives you some insight into how I began connecting with my repressed anger. If you don’t have this problem, amazing! If you have anything to recommend, I’m still learning and would love to hear your ideas: Leave a comment or send me a message.
And, if you would rather watch a Disney movie about repression, anger, and self-expression, I recommend Turning Red. (Angry but also Fluffy!)
Love,
Ria