The healing power of anger
Who had permission to get angry in your house when you were growing up?
Was it you, your mother or father, or someone else? Was anger accepted as a normal, natural human emotion? Or was it judged as being a negative and unsafe emotion?
It may be that only the women in your family were allowed to get angry, or only the men. There simply wasn’t room for anyone else ‘to express their feelings of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility’ – (Webster’s definition of anger).
If you felt it wasn’t safe to express your anger, you held it inside of you.
Maybe there was a lot of unconscious anger being thrown around already, and everyone else was expected to stuff theirs. Children who get angry are often viewed as being bad or disobedient, and are punished for being out of control.
If you grew up with this kind of energy, your natural ability to use anger constructively without judging yourself, may have become tainted. You may have learned to fear your own natural anger. Chances are that if you had no permission to get angry when you were young, you didn’t have any space either.
If someone else couldn’t have you getting angry, your natural range of emotions was controlled. A judgment was placed in your space about anger. You learned to avoid ‘making’ someone else angry. People sometimes tell lies in order to avoid an angry response. The fear of anger makes us into liars.
When anger is used unconsciously, and thrown at anyone who happens to be in the way, it isn’t constructive or healing. It can actually be punishing for those on the receiving end, who may have done nothing to cause the anger. If someone is always angry, running on anger, that may just be their style. But if they misdirect it into your space, or at others, this is when it becomes a negative energy.
Repressed anger can lead to depression.
When your feelings haven’t been acknowledged by others as being important, you may need to get angry to move that invalidation out of your way. If you’re being honest with yourself about what you’re expressing, and it still isn’t heard, anger can help you to get stuck energy moving again.
If you repress your true natural anger for long enough, it will come out in other ways, whether in your body’s health, your emotional health, or your energy levels.
If you want to stop stuffing your own anger, learn to be honest with yourself about how you are feeling. If you’ve been trying to fit into the small amount of space others have decided you’re allowed to have, anger is a natural response. Like a volcano, once you release that energy, you can cool down and create something new, something more true for you.
This takes work, it’s deep self healing work. As you learn to give yourself the space to feel your own true emotions, you can release the shame, guilt, and fear of feeling what you feel. It’s not always easy but it is always worth doing.
©Kris Cahill
Image: 'The Sky' ©Lisa Runnels - PublicDomainPictures.net
