The Healing Fire Within: Understanding and Embracing Healthy Anger After Trauma
Male with tight jaw and face. Is this true anger?
When we have experienced trauma, many emotions become scary and difficult to navigate. Identifying and allowing ourselves to experience and be with emotions is crucial in trauma healing. One of the most misunderstood and stigmatized emotions is anger.
What is anger?
Most of us have an idea of what anger is. We might think of the person yelling at the barista, or pictures of people screaming at others. Or, we may think of the time we were cut in line or called a name by someone. Many people have come to associate anger with an outburst that is loud, intimidating, and aggressive. For this reason, anger is often seen as a “negative” emotion and many people have been encouraged to “let it go”. Epictetus, a Greek Stoic philosopher stated, “Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.” This negative view of anger has carried into our present times. Most of us know, almost innately, that when we feel anger, it should be pushed down immediately, least we be seen as rude and impolite or violent.
Still, anger is more accepted in some populations than others. Boys, for example, are more often encouraged to express their anger using their fists, while girls are encouraged to keep it down or talk it out. Studies have found that anger in men is more often aggressive and men feel more powerful when expressing anger; while women tend to feel less powerful when feeling anger, keep it to themselves, and feel angrier, longer. In studies on race and anger, it has been found that when Black Americans and women of any race express their anger, they are viewed as less influential and more negatively than their angry white male counter parts.
Anger, like many emotions, has been both stigmatized and glorified in ways that has often not been helpful in understanding it’s true purpose in our lives.
What anger tells us
Anger is an emotion. Like all emotions, they have a profoundly important purpose in our lives. Emotions are simply sensations in our bodies that we assign a narrative to- causing them to become feelings. This is an important distinction. Emotions are as imperative to our survival as seeing, hearing, or sensing hot and cold. In his book, When the Body Says No, Dr. Gabor Mate discusses the true purpose of anger: letting us know when we are about to experience real or perceived loss or when we perceive that our boundaries have been crossed.
If we didn’t have anger, we would have little way of understanding our environment and what we are reacting to. We would be forced to act in one way or another: either by complying, shutting down, fighting, or fleeing. Sound familiar? These are our bodies natural fear responses and they arise without our conscious awareness when we sense an imminent threat to our emotional or physical safety. Anger gives us the ability to communicate our boundaries, leaving room for peace and for the other person to back off, before we have to engage our fear responses.
He goes on to describe what true anger feels like in the body. Many of us have experienced the sensation of our shoulders back, head high, our voice lowering into almost an intimidating growl while we calmly but dominantly enforce our boundaries. “I said, get in the car now” to our children or “that’s enough” when our teasing partner goes too far. This experience is powerful and energetic, but also not usually anxiety provoking. If we offer a consequence to their behavior, we are confident that we can follow through. But, if this is true anger, then what is that other thing we experience when our face and bodies tense, our voice gets higher and louder, and we are no longer in total control of our behaviors?
This is anger that Dr. Mate would call “unhealthy anger” or a “rage state” and, it looks a lot like fear to me. This form of anger is often hyper focused on gaining power at any cost through hostility and dominance. Studies have shown how both the repression of anger and the hyper expression of unregulated anger can lead to health issues and premature death.
Anger and trauma
The experience of trauma, especially at an early age, can often cause us to either reject and suppress (push down) anger or use anger as a way to gain power, the power we didn’t get to have when we were the victims of other’s rages. Gaining power after being stripped of it is an understandable want. However, this can cause us to lash out at innocent people in our lives, often destroying the relationships we desperately need. On the other hand, suppressing our anger often only leads to increased feelings of resentment, causing a deepening divide between you and the person you didn’t want to have issues with in the first place. Whether we run from anger or succumb to rage outbursts, at its core is a fear of true anger, a fear of accepting our wounds and true needs, and a fear of returning to a place of powerlessness that our trauma caused us to feel.
Learning to honor and release our anger is one of the most important things we can do in our journey of trauma healing. True anger can help us to feel safe in our bodies and encourage us to stand up for ourselves. It can deepen our relationship to ourself and to others.
If you struggle with accepting and understanding your anger and find that it is impacting your relationships, therapy can help. While learning coping skills is an essential part of managing the debilitating effect of trauma, what we most often need is a safe place to truly process and resolve the trauma that has been holding us hostage in our own lives.
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