There were many times when I would say to my best friend – straight faced and deadly serious – ‘I just don’t get angry. I just don’t feel it.’
I was absolutely convinced that I didn’t have an angry bone in my body. Teachers at school would comment on my “calmness” during playground fall outs. Likewise, work colleagues would pat me on the back saying I swim through stressful situations like a swan, graceful and unbothered. Clearly, they knew my feet were ferociously kicking beneath the water, even though I couldn’t see it for myself.
I would casually tell my best friend stories about people crossing my boundaries, being overly critical towards me, or acting in a hurtful way. Every single time, she would get angry on my behalf. And every single time, I would freeze.
I felt so uncomfortable around her expression of anger, that I would actually end up jumping in to defend the perpetrators. That’s how avoidant I was. And yet, on some deeply subconscious level, I must have known I was repressing my anger, or else I guess I wouldn’t have felt the need to tell her those events knowing how she would react about them. I wanted someone to be able to express that anger for me, without me having to feel it myself.
Fast forward many years, and I heard myself asking my own coach, ‘Is it possible for a human being to just not HAVE anger, to have never experienced it?’ As I heard myself ask this, I answered my own question.
No, it is not.
Human beings experience a full range of emotions, anger included. I then flashed back to all the times over the years I had googled ‘do I have repressed anger?’
…and here we are today. I’m writing this blog to share with you what I needed to find on those google searches…something that would make me feel seen, understood and not alone.
Through my own healing journey and undertaking my coaching & hypnotherapy training, I now have a much healthier relationship with anger. My anger is no longer repressed anger, it is healthily expressed anger. I have worked with many clients who have expressed similar sentiments—that anger doesn’t exist for them. Others acknowledge its presence, but being able to feel it in a way that is not overwhelming is new territory. I get it. It can feel far safer to repress and avoid feelings of anger when you have no example or understanding of how to express it in a way that feels accessible to your nervous system. This blog aims to explore what repressed anger is, how it might manifest in your life, how to know if you have it and how to release the anger that feels stuck in your system – how to let it go in a way that feels safe to you.
What is repressed anger?
In the language of psychology, Repression is the unconscious blocking of unpleasant emotions from your conscious mind. It is immediate, and the feelings become removed from your awareness before you have a chance to process them. It can also be known as dis-associative amnesia.
Ultimately, it is a defence mechanism that helps people to cope with a stimulus (in this case anger) that they believe can harm them.
In the language of Emma (which is considerably less academic), repression of an emotion is your brain simply putting things away as deeply as it can. It does this because her job is to help you to survive. If you don’t have the nervous system capacity or skills to deal with an emotion then your beautiful brain helps you out by sweeping it under the rug. Job done, quickly and quietly. Nothing to see here officer. All is fine, all is well.
Imagine a friend makes you a cottage pie. You hate cottage pie. Instead of dealing with it head on and saying ‘no thanks’ or binning it, you bury it in the bottom of your freezer. Gone for now, good enough, no harm done, you can say to your friend ‘It’s in my freezer, I’m looking forward to it!’.
But the time will come when the freezer is full, and you have to sort it out. By which point, it’s been squashed, and it looks even less appealing than before. You’re not only uncovering the cottage pie, you’re now faced with the guilt of not eating it, the fear of conflict when your friend asks and the worry of having to make up an elaborate lie about your freezer breaking.
So whilst it is a quick win for your brain to repress emotion, the reality is, the emotion will still be taking up space. The energy cost in the long run is high. Because subconsciously, you can’t forget about that cottage pie lurking! Just like anger, it’s still taking up space.
Okay, enough about cottage pie.
Is there a difference between repressed and suppressed anger?
The terms repression and suppression are often used interchangeably. Generally speaking, suppression tends to describe consciously (you are aware you are doing it) pushing anger aside, whereas repression refers to anger that has become largely unconscious. In everyday conversation, however, people often use both terms to describe anger that hasn’t been safely expressed.
For example, imagine biting your tongue and not losing your temper at that work colleague despite the fact they always miss the deadline, and have a horrible habit of chewing lunch too loudly. Instead, you choose to wait until later in the day and vent to a friend about the office gripes. Much like repression of anger, suppression is another way your brain is wired to keep you safe. You’ve picked a route that won’t create workplace conflict or get you fired.
On the other hand, repression just happens. It’s automatic and it makes a lot of sense that it can happen with ‘big’ emotions like anger…
What is anger?
First of all, it’s important to consider what anger is, and why it arises.
Anger is a perfectly healthy and normal human emotion.
Humans feel anger when there is a sense of unfairness and injustice. It rises when your boundary, spoken or unspoken, has been crossed and it leaves you feeling threatened, disrespected or powerless.
According to Dr. Tara Swart, anger is a survival emotion (along with fear, disgust, shame and sadness) which involves the release of cortisol (the stress hormone). It makes us feel something, often intensely, because it is a signal to us, from our bodies, that something isn’t how it should be in accordance with our world view.
We all grow up with role models for how to express ourselves in the world. More often than not, anger gets the raw end of the deal, which can have a huge impact on how we manage and express our emotions through life.
Why do some people have repressed anger?
There are many reasons for you to experience repressed anger:
- Family dynamics
All families have conflicts. Some express it in healthier ways than others. For some families, anger might be expressed through a difficult but calm conversation around household boundaries. For others, shouting, threats of violence or actual violence, may be the way it happens. As a child, your brain doesn’t have the ability to understand why a family member is acting in a certain way, but what you will understand is that you don’t like how the shouting or threats feel to you, even if they are not directed at you.
For many people, anger is linked to fear. You may have learned that when someone is angry, they shout, and, in turn, you feel unsafe. This is the pattern that becomes your conditioning. Of course, it’s a very valid fear, because this is what you have been shown to be true.
In turn, you learn to subconsciously repress your own anger deeply because the connection to anger as something frightening is very real. The mind will work to protect you by not accessing it. You won’t be doing this consciously, it will just be automatic, because your nervous system knows to freeze or fawn when anger is about.
As an adult, you continue this pattern – when there is a sniff of anger, whether external to you or arising within you, your body tells you to stay small and quiet and avoid it at all costs to remain safe.
- Upbringing:
In a similar vein to the above, what you see and what you experience growing up has enormous weight to the way you develop into adulthood. Perhaps you grew up witnessing your parent(s) or caregiver(s) repressing their own anger. Maybe you saw them consistently not expressing anger about things that may have deserved it.
What if you are from a home that generally avoids any disagreement and are much more likely to suck things up and say, ‘no worries, that’s no problem’, even when the neighbour’s car has blocked your driveway for the 5th consecutive morning. You are going to do the same thing as an adult, because it’s what you have learnt from those who raised you.
Maybe you have witnessed how it is ‘best’ to remain quiet instead of expressing your truth – perhaps one parent treated the other unfairly and a boundary was crossed, but anger was never expressed, instead a ‘keep calm and carry on’ attitude was adopted.
Or perhaps as a child you told your parents that something bad happened to you. Instead of being defended or supported when treated unfairly, you got ignored and were shown that when you’re treated unfairly, don’t say anything. So many people were taught to avoid conflict and keep the peace at all costs.
- Social Conditioning and Fear of Consequences:
Maybe you were praised for being the easy-going one. The peacemaker. The mature one. Perhaps every time you expressed frustration, you were met with disapproval, silence or shame. Eventually, your nervous system stopped asking whether anger was justified. It simply learned that anger wasn’t safe.
Many societies and cultures teach that expressing anger is inappropriate or unacceptable. Individuals who grow up in such environments may learn to suppress or repress their anger to conform to societal norms.
- Cultural or Gender Norms:
Cultural and gender norms can also play a role. For certain genders, there may be stereotypes people conform to. In many cultures, it is far more acceptable for boys to be outwardly angry and ‘boys will be boys’, whereas angry girls are likely to be labelled ‘hysterical’.
All you need to do is go and watch a local football match, to understand how acceptable it is for men to stand and scream, shout, swear and become physically violent, with no-one really batting an eye-lid. It’s hard to imagine similar scenes unfolding amongst a group of women, who are far more likely to be taught to be ‘nice’ and ‘sweet’ and ‘polite’.
For some women, simply witnessing that level of shouting, aggression or unpredictability is enough for their nervous system to go into protection mode. If anger has never felt safe to be around, it makes sense that expressing your own anger might not feel safe either.
- The burden of being the ‘good’ person
Sometimes anger becomes repressed because we’ve built our identity around being kind, understanding and endlessly compassionate. We become so practised at seeing things from everyone else’s perspective that we stop asking how we feel. We explain away hurtful behaviour. We minimise our own pain. We become the person who always says, “They’re probably just having a bad day.”
What does repressed anger actually look like?
The explosive release
Have you ever been driving along in your car, music on, and just let out an almighty scream from the depth of your being? The kind of scream that makes your throat sore and makes you think ‘oh my god, where did that come from?’. The scream that you will never tell anyone about because you think it’ll make you look strange or unhinged, so you keep it to yourself?
Sometimes repressed anger looks like wanting to bite people’s heads off for seemingly small things, because the bigger things haven’t been acknowledged and it’s all bubbling away beneath the surface. But you’re well trained at biting your tongue and keeping quiet.
The invisible way
But it isn’t always explosive – sometimes it can look like apologising to someone when they’ve hurt you, and feeling that tightness in your throat. That feeling of swallowing down your truth and the heat rising in your chest, but go no further than that.
Perhaps it looks like blaming yourself, making yourself wrong, or saying you need to somehow fix yourself, because you’re crying about things you feel like you shouldn’t be crying about. There is so much emotion that it’s flowing out in other ways and you apologise and deem it to be a problem you will clean up and tidy away as soon as possible.
Maybe it shows up when you get home from spending time with people who consistently cross your boundaries. You notice you feel completely wiped out, despite doing nothing physically demanding. Like you have to go and take a nap or have a bath from the exhaustion of keeping your truth hidden. Instead of thinking, “They’ve crossed a boundary,” you find yourself wondering what’s wrong with you for having such a big reaction.
And sometimes, it looks like nothing at all. Just a quiet sense that something has been sitting beneath the surface for a long time. After all, you probably wouldn’t have made it this far into the blog if something hadn’t resonated.
Whatever way it shows up, just know that it makes sense. Of course this is how repressed anger shows up for you, because anger is an emotion that so many women feel uneasy with because of all the reasons mentioned above.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with you.
There is simply a part of you that learned that anger wasn’t safe.
Healing your relationship with anger is about starting to get to know, to make space for a part of you that has been pushed down for so long, and to acknowledge what it has been doing to keep you safe.
What is the impact of repressing anger?
Repressing anger (and of any emotions really!) could lead to lots of unpleasant symptoms, both mentally and physically.
The word emotion comes from the Latin ’emotere‘, which translates to ‘energy in motion’ – ‘e-motion’. Emotions are stored in your body as energy.
Imagine the effort that goes towards pushing down an emotion. It’s like trying to hold a beach ball underwater for a long period of time – eventually, it will come to the surface in one way or another.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it!), our bodies are smart and they will find an outlet for it. But instead of it being expressed in a healthy way, it may come out as some other symptom.
Of course, the below listed physical, mental and behavioural symptoms have many possible causes – I am not suggesting the only reason for them is repressed anger. However, long-term emotional repression may contribute to, or exist alongside, experiences such as:
- greater anxiety
- psychological distress
- stress
- depression
- a noisy or overactive mind
- feelings of constant worry
There are also physical symptoms that are associated with repression;
- high blood pressure
- skin conditions
- fatigue
- headache
- dizziness
- pain
- autoimmune disease
- unexplainable nausea
Not expressing your emotions, anger or otherwise, can also contribute significantly to different unhelpful and unhealthy behaviours, as a way to cope with feelings, such as;
- Disordered eating behaviours; controlling food, feeling out of control with food, over eating, under-eating, going long periods without food.
- Eating Disorders; Binge Eating Disorder (BED), Anorexia, Bulimia, Orthorexia, Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID)
- Using alcohol regularly, an over-reliance on alcohol to relax or ‘numb’
- Using drugs as a coping mechanism
- Obsessive compulsive behaviours e.g. checking, cleaning, constantly seeking approval or validation
- “Lashing out” or shouting at people when you’re not expecting to
- Overthinking, overanalysing, procrastinating or generally feeling trapped in your busy mind
It all makes sense, your beautiful body and mind are doing their best to keep you safe. If anger isn’t something you are comfortable with, which so many of us aren’t (and with good reason too!), your brain pushes it down. In time, it will need to find a way out. If it cannot be expressed in a healthy way, then your body decides to let you know another way that something isn’t feeling great within. So it becomes expressed physically, mentally, or through other behaviours.
It’s at this point, if we can find enough self compassion, that we can acknowledge and be grateful for the innate wisdom of our bodies – that it is asking us, as loudly as it can, to pay attention and start dealing with what is beneath the surface. She is asking us to become curious about our truth. To begin listening to the whispers within ourselves that we’ve bypassed, through no fault of our own.
Researchers and clinicians have long explored the relationship between chronic emotional stress, nervous system dysregulation and physical health. Dr. Gabor Maté, for example, has written extensively about the potential impact of long-term emotional repression on the body. While no illness can be reduced to a single cause, many people find it helpful to consider the role that chronic stress and emotional suppression may play in their overall wellbeing.
Similarly, in her incredible book, “Women are Angry”, psychotherapist Jennifer Cox, notes how “Women are twice as likely as men to suffer depression, three times more likely to experience migraine, and four times more likely to be diagnosed with autoimmune disease.”
When we spend so much energy pushing difficult emotions away, we often become less able to fully experience the lighter ones too. It can become harder to feel joy, excitement, playfulness or spontaneity. We don’t selectively numb emotions – we often end up dulling our emotional world more broadly.
How to begin releasing repressed anger?
Acknowledging that you may be carrying some repressed anger, can feel overwhelming. It can actually feel a bit nauseating, frightening. Like you’ve found a box you didn’t really even know was there, and not only that, part of you wants to take the lid off and the other part of you wants to put a padlock on it forever. So where do you start with how to release repressed anger?
If that resonates with you, please know this:
It isn’t bad to feel anger.
It isn’t bad to express anger.
And you are not bad for feeling it.
It’s okay to feel whatever you feel around anger.
It’s perfectly okay for you to begin exploring it and expressing it, in ways that feel safe to you.
Your time, your pace, your way.
All humans have anger and will experience it at some point – it is a normal emotion to have.
Depending on how it all feels to you, will help guide you on what you may like to do next.
If that’s nothing – not today, tomorrow, the next day, month, year – that’s okay. It’s important to know that if it all feels too much of something, you’re allowed to honour that feeling. That, in and of itself, can be a beautiful part of the journey. Beginning to listen to and honour your feelings. To give yourself permission to follow your own truth.
Others may experience curiosity and want to delve a little deeper into what a different relationship with anger could look like. If this is the case, here’s a few things you might think about when getting to know anger for yourself:
- Journaling on your relationship with anger growing up – consider how disagreements or conflicts were handled in your home? How did anger tend to be expressed, if at all, by parents or caregivers?
- Identifying the feeling in your body: Intentionally taking 10 minutes to close your eyes and do a body scan – checking in with what sensations are present in your body e.g. clamped jaw, tense shoulders, tight chest – get comfortable with the discomfort your body is signalling to you – listen to her. This is a practice and something that can become easier over time. But simply sitting down to do it, even if you feel like you ‘get nowhere’ with it, will be a sign to yourself that you’d like to listen inwards. You can show up for yourself like this a few days in a row. When we make space for ourselves, there is always something to learn.
When you feel ready to start expressing your anger, here are a few suggestions…
Find a safe space and start exploring healthy ways to express your anger, these might look like:
- Having a “rage” – give your anger somewhere safe to go – throw something (safely of course), shout, stamp your feet.
- Spin, spin, spin, dance, dance, dance – find novel and different ways to move your body.
- Write it out, as a poem, in a journal, in a letter, in whichever way it comes. You don’t have to keep it.
- Speak to someone, a friend, coach, therapist, say it out loud to someone you trust, let them help you to validate it – your anger is okay and welcome.
- Crack on some loud music and have a wail/sing/cry/ make whatever noise wants to come – let yourself get primal.
In the beginning, it might feel never ending. Like you’ve started something that might feel like you wish you hadn’t. However, the goal isn’t to force anger out. It’s to help your nervous system discover that anger can exist without you becoming unsafe. From personal experience, I can share that on the other side, there is so much more available to you. More joy, more freedom, more of what you want in your life.
Embracing anger for emotional liberation
As I reflect on my own journey and the experiences shared with me by my beautiful clients, it’s evident that repressed anger is not a total enigma – some crazy impossible puzzle to understand. It actually all makes so much sense – how it gets there in the first place and how it decides to stay. First and foremost, our brains and bodies are working overtime to keep us feeling safe, in the way that they best know how to.
The key is in standing back and observing this emotion as a part of us that we would like to start getting to know and eventually build a different and healthier relationship with. We do this through a compassionate lens, acknowledging that just like everyone else, we are a human being, having a human experience. And sometimes, that can feel hard. Really hard.
For years, I denied the existence of anger within myself, only to realise that it was simply buried beneath layers of conditioning and fear. Through introspection, education, and making space for all my parts, I’ve built a much happier relationship with anger. One that serves me and supports me. I now view anger as helpful – it tells me when a line has been crossed and in turn, it now trusts me to speak up and say something about it.
Acknowledging and accepting anger as a normal human emotion is the first step towards healing. It’s okay to feel anger, and it’s okay to express it in healthy ways. Journaling, movement, creative expression, or seeking support from trusted individuals are all valuable tools for processing and releasing pent-up emotions.
As adults, we are responsible for stewarding our anger, from a place of self-care, and letting it know it can exist with us – repressing emotions only serves to harm our mental and physical health in the long run.
Those days need to be gone. Embrace your anger, explore it, and let it guide you towards a path of healing and self-discovery. The aim isn’t to become someone who never feels angry. It’s to become someone who no longer has to be afraid of their own anger.
If this article resonates with you and you are ready to talk about being the fullest, most authentic, expression of yourself, book in for a free discovery call.
