Anger is given a bad rap in society but is an important emotion to allow. Why? Because if you don’t allow yourself to feel anger, how can you release it? How can you understand your anger and manage it in a healthy way? We were not given emotions deny feeling them.
Emotions are energy in motion (e-motion). They are a moving energy that we feel and has to be expressed to be released. It is not just the emotions that make us feel good, like joy and happiness. ALL emotions exist and all emotions are felt. To only express and release the ones that feel good creates a build-up of toxic energy within our body that can make us sick. It is that straightforward. Feel it and release it or suppress what you feel and make yourself physically ill.
The difficulty lies in the conditioning we have around emotions such as anger. Society tells us anger is a bad thing, a negative emotion that must never be expressed. To do so makes you a bad person. So, to fit in and be accepted we deny ourselves the expression of emotions that society tells us are bad. Trouble is that doesn’t get rid of our anger. It pushes it down and allows it to fester. We create a wound within us that we don’t attend to by expressing it. We don’t nurture our wound with understanding, and we don’t cleanse it with loving awareness. We just bury it and allow the wound to fester.
We feel our anger, even when we suppress it, but we bypass taking action and responsibility for it. “Anger is bad so even though I feel it I must not let it out. I must hold it in and get on with life.”
Yet when we feel joy, we shout from the rooftops. We express it in our actions and words freely and for all the world to see. “Look at me, I am happy, celebrate with me for I am good”.
What we feel we must give ourselves permission to express. When we give permission, we allow understanding to come. Why am I angry? What is causing my anger? How do I feel when I am angry? How do I feel when I allow my anger to come out? How does my anger like to express itself?
Anger is no different to joy in that our expression of it needs to be healthy. We live among other people, and we have to take personal responsibility for how our emotions impact others and ourselves. We cannot walk into a room full of people and behave however we want. We must consider others.
However, there’s a discrepancy in our society that comes from conditioning, which says there are good and bad emotions and only good emotions are welcome. If I walked into a meeting and interrupted expressing my joy, it would be tolerated better than if I walked in and let out my anger.
Anger is painted as a bad emotion that must not be expressed.
This morning, I was greeted with anger projected at me. It was 5am and another person’s anger was directed my way. It wasn’t about me. It was their anger and their issue, but I was on the receiving end. This is an example of anger being freely expressed (good), but it was projectile vomited onto me (bad). It caused anger to be triggered in me.
I’ve witnessed firsthand the damage anger can do to people. I lived with Domestic Violence for many years, and I experienced anger from my mother in my childhood. Anger was a frightening thing for me because of my lived experiences. As a result, I didn’t allow myself to feel anger very often, and when I did it scared me.
I scared myself because I didn’t know how to handle my anger. Feeling the anger of others meant I didn’t like anger and didn’t want to feel it within me. I didn’t want to be like ‘them’. So, I suppressed it and allowed my anger wound to fester. From my anger grew resentment, frustration, confusion and distrust. Suppression didn’t eliminate the feeling of my anger, it multiplied, and I could feel all the other emotions it brought with it. I held on to my refusal to feel anger for so long that the wound within me made me physically sick with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis markers, brain fog and much more.
When I felt my anger stirring this morning, I removed myself from the situation. I didn’t engage in an angry debate with the other person. Anger fighting anger isn’t a healthy expression of emotion. I didn’t try and fix the anger of the other person. I didn’t make them wrong for their anger. I didn’t make their struggle mine. I honoured the anger within me and went to my safe place and allowed myself to feel it. My expression of it came through my artwork.
Drawing is how I always start my day. It drops me into a deep meditative state of calm contemplation and freedom of expression.
At first it was chaotic and felt heavy and the page looked like a jumbled mess of black lines that amounted to nothing. I almost scrapped it, but I persisted. I followed my inner guidance to keep expressing without judging what appeared on the paper. In doing that I began to understand I was expressing my anger on the page. My awareness shifted to what I was noticing within myself as I expressed anger with my brush. I felt chaotic within myself, and the page looked chaotic. I felt heavy, and the page of black looked heavy. I went to colour it and was only drawn to use one colour. I realised that how anger felt to me was monotone. So, I continued only to use one colour. With each brush stroke my understanding of how I felt anger deepened. I continued and listened to what I saw and felt as I created.
Having an outlet to express anger, and other ‘negative’ emotions is critical. As I write this I am no longer filled with anger. My body is no longer tense and hurting. My day will not continue with the anger it started with. I didn’t hurt myself or anyone else by allowing myself to feel my anger. I didn’t suppress it. I gave myself permission to express what I felt, and I gained deep understanding how my anger feels. I discovered how I can safely express anger. I didn’t make myself wrong, or the person whose anger triggered mine. I didn’t allow a wound to be created because I suppressed my emotions.
Anger, and ALL emotions, need to be allowed to be expressed. Yes, it must be done healthily and safely so it doesn’t derail your life or impact others. But it does need to be expressed. Anything we feel needs to be expressed so we don’t carry it around inside and allow it to create wounds within us.
Living in a society that conditions us to believe we must not express negative emotions can make this challenging. Allowing negative emotions to be suppressed will also cause challenges. Is it not better to find healthy ways of addressing these challenges than to ignore them and allow them to fester?
