The Spectrum of Anger™ with Sandra Lee

Anger gets a bad reputation… but what if it’s actually one of the most honest signals your body has?  There’s a whole range of emotion we’ve been taught to push down—and anger sits right at the center of it.  

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Sandra Lee, who introduces us to a powerful new way of understanding emotion through The Spectrum of Anger™.  With over 30 years of experience—and a background as a Caltech-trained scientist—Sandra shares how high-performing women can stop holding themselves back, quiet that relentless inner critic, and start taking clear, confident action.  

This conversation opens the door to seeing anger not as something to suppress… but as something to understand, work with, and even trust.  So let’s call it in! “Call IT in With Dar!” 

Transcript

Anger gets a bad reputation… but what if it’s actually one of the most honest signals your body has?  There’s a whole range of emotion we’ve been taught to push down—and anger sits right at the center of it.  In today’s episode, I’m joined by Sandra Lee, who introduces us to a powerful new way of understanding emotion through The 

Spectrum of Anger™.  With over 30 years of experience—and a background as a Caltech-trained scientist—Sandra shares how high-performing women can stop holding themselves back, quiet that relentless inner critic, and start taking clear, confident action.  This conversation opens the door to seeing anger not as something to suppress… but as something to understand, work with, and even trust.  So let’s call it in! “Call IT in With Dar!” 

Speaker Dar  

Sandra, welcome in, Sandra. I'm so excited to have you talk with us today about such an important issue, and that is anger. But before we get started, will you please tell the audience a little bit about yourself and how you got interested in this topic. 

Speaker Sandra 

Thank you, Darla. How I got interested in this topic is having anger be an issue for me. Personally, I get angry frequently, big anger, a little anger. And I used to be angry for weeks at a time, and I used to really give myself a hard time about that. What is wrong with me? Nobody else does this. And so I judged myself, super, judged myself, and I was listening to a teleseminar series. This was before zoom existed, I think, and I met the person who was to become my human design teacher, Karen Parker, and I learned from her that anger is part of my blueprint. I am supposed to be angry. This is according to my human design chart, just based on where the planets were. And she said, there's nothing wrong with anger, you're supposed to be angry. Anger is important and natural for us to be able to experience. The problem is when we get stuck in anger, when it gets blown up, when we're not able to express anger, and it becomes suppressed. That's when it becomes the anger that we all possibly grew up with and had become a problem, people who are explosive, people who are violent, people who injure, people who throw things. That's anger when it is no longer really healthy, that's blowing out anger all over the place. When we are able to fully experience it, express it, communicate about it, and get our needs met, it doesn't get stuck, and so it wouldn't ever become a problem if we allow it to serve its genuine, real purpose. So if we didn't feel anger, nothing would ever change, because we need that anger to have us be able to say, Whoa, there is something wrong here. What do I need to do? Does that make sense? 

Speaker Dar  

Absolutely, and anger having a general real purpose is what I'd like to talk about next. And I just want to add that I have studied human design somewhat as well, and I think it's really interesting that you found out in your chart that this is what you are meant to do and not to like, blame yourself or feel guilty about it. So let's talk about the spectrum of anger and the genuine, real purpose of anger. 

Speaker Sandra  

So last year, I created this framework I call the spectrum of anger, because I now consider myself an expert on this topic of anger, having had this whole experience of childhood and becoming an adult and realizing that anger was an issue for me, and then healing through it and realizing that it really does serve a purpose. So last year, looking at all of the crazy things going on in the world, you know, there's a lot of violence and a lot of fear and manipulation and power and control, and these things, in my opinion, would not be happening if everyone had the experience of being able to feel their feelings, express them and get their needs met. But that's not what happens, because we all stuff our emotions because it's not safe in our childhood to express anger or rage or guilt or shame or whatever the emotions are, they get all twisted up when we. Are young, and then we are in our adult lives, pretending to be adults, when really we are being run by our decisions and our behaviors are being regulated by all these things that happened long ago, and when they get stuck is when they become a problem. So I created the spectrum of anger, where I look at it that all of the uncomfortable emotions are on the spectrum, everything from worry, are people going to like me? I don't look very good in this dress. You know, my hair looks awful to, you know, actual anger, rage and guilt, and I don't know, and anxiety, all of those uncomfortable emotions. I call them on the spectrum of anger. So when we are able to fully experience this full range of emotions and again, communicate about them and get our needs met, associated with them, then we are much more emotionally resilient, able to handle whatever it is life deals us, because it's harder to knock us off balance. We're able to be ourselves, express ourselves, and communicate. So imagine a world where that was true with everyone, how different life would be.  So I'm on a mission to reframe our experience of anger, 

Speaker Dar 

Interesting and what sticks in my mind is, yes, we don't. We all want to be emotionally resilient and don't we all have needs that we want to have met. So let's move to some concrete examples, perhaps some client examples where you keep your clients confidential, or some of your own stories about where they land on the spectrum of anger and how this helps. 

Speaker Sandra 

Well, so I talked about how I used to be explosive, like in my first marriage, you know, we had screaming fights, and that was the period during which sometimes I really would be angry for weeks at a time. And thinking about this experience of, you know, allowing it to build up and pretending, you know, everything is okay, when really everybody's just walking on eggshells and feeling it build and build and build and, you know, trying to avoid being the person who says the thing that has it all blow up. That's what the experience of anger is when it's in that stuck, imbalanced place, and getting myself out of that marriage, and learning how to deal with my emotions, and learning about human design all these things so that I no longer am in that place of judgment around it. And when I learned about this human design and anger being part of my blueprint, I went from having this really intense judgmental experience of myself associated with anger to almost instantaneously being at peace with it like it shocked me how quickly I made that shift, because I realized, oh, I have been making myself wrong for this, beating myself up for this for my whole life, when really it's not only natural and supposed to be here, it's a gift. It's part of my contribution to the world, allowing myself to have anger and communicate about it. Anger is actually an emotion that is higher in frequency than lower frequency emotions, because it's got this energy that gets action happening. There's movement in anger. So seeing it differently. Now what I do when I get angry, because I still get angry just as much if it doesn't get as big because I notice it. Oh, why am I angry? What do I need to do about it? I communicate, if I need to communicate, and otherwise I just let it go. Totally changed it so I went from having it be this big thing I judged about myself to. So very quickly becoming peaceful with it. 

Speaker Dar   

And what a beautiful example for actually any emotion we're feeling to identify it. Why am I feeling this way? And what do I need? What do I need to do about it?. 

Speaker Sandra 

And when I disallow emotions, why does that happen? It happens because when we are little children, when we're babies, we just naturally, completely self Express. We allow whatever it is we feel, whatever it is we need. We just like to express ourselves. And here's how I theorize that the suppression begins when we are babies, the very first time our mother says, hush, stop crying, the baby needs the mother's love and protection to survive. It's vital for survival. So when the baby realizes that the mother needs the baby to stop crying. The only way the baby has to guarantee that they continue to get love is to suppress the cry. And the only way the baby has to do that is to physically restrain the expression, using their muscles, they tighten the breastbone, the bone in the front of the chest. I see it as a massage therapist, I see it being pressed down in people's bodies all the time. So that's how the suppression begins from that very first event, and the truth is, the mother didn't do anything wrong and the baby didn't do anything wrong. This is a normal daily event that initiates this whole pattern of suppression that really every human does this, I think, because it's just part of being human. But that's where it begins. And so throughout life, any time we are led to believe because of how someone responds to us, that there's something quote, unquote wrong with how we feel or how we're expressing ourselves, we get into this pattern of continually suppressing our emotions. And when I tell myself it's not okay that I express this, I then make it a conclusion that it's also not okay for me to even feel it so we learn to suppress not just anger, but all of the emotions that feel uncomfortable, 

Speaker Dar

Absolutely that is so interesting, that early physical suppression and then we just continue, I mean, I'm resonating with this. We just continue to suppress any of the emotions that we kind of labeled as bad emotions. And I just had an interesting conversation on a podcast about no emotions being bad emotions, and that fits right with what we're talking about today. I commented on your post about that. 

Speaker Sandra 

Oh, that's right, you did, yes, you did on LinkedIn. That's right. There are no bad emotions. If I get stuck in it, that's what causes the issue. But if I am able to allow it to flow, then everything is going to be okay. And you know, I'm a massage therapist and energy healer type person, and I see in the body and in the energy field, where energy gets stuck. So when we suppress these emotions, we are physically restraining our muscles, and then it creates an energetic block in the body. So think about it. You know, the energy of the throat chakra, the energy of self expression, if I am holding that in, then the energy of my throat gets stuck. And over time, when energy gets stuck in the body, what happens? We give out, develop pain or sin. Symptoms. So over the course of my life, all these emotions that I suppress then become in the body, it becomes tension and pain and other symptoms. 

Speaker Dar 

Absolutely, do you have a short activity that you could lead our audience through to make them even more aware of the spectrum of pain, of anger. Excuse me, I kind of use that interchangeably, the spectrum of anger, sure. 

Speaker Sandra 

So if you have been listening to this podcast, you might have noticed, oh, I do that. Oh, I experienced that. So pull to mind right now one of those instances that you recall yourself having experienced and then think of that situation. It could be something that just happened recently, it could be something that happened long ago, but imagine yourself in that situation now, and pay attention to what you feel in your body. I just talked about how this suppression of emotion creates an energetic block in your body. So you might find that there's places in your body where you have muscle tension that you are holding associated with this instance of suppression of emotion. So with that awareness,  you can perhaps have an intention, oh, I'm suppressing here. I'm holding here, and I can feel how tight this area of my body is. So see if you can just allow that area to relax. Set that intention for yourself. 

Speaker Sandra  

What did you notice? Darla, 

Speaker Dar  

I noticed that that awareness helps it just kind of melt away, helps it relax. Yeah, awareness is everything when it comes to an activity like that, isn't it? 

Speaker Sandra  

Yes. So as a practitioner of neuro linguistic programming now, this has become even more heightened to me than it was before, because in neuro linguistic programming, one of the things that at least in the method that I follow with it, we are helping people identify the emotions they feel associated with circumstances. And it amazes me how often, when we are doing the coaching work and the neuro linguistic programming that I do when I ask people, What emotion do you feel? They don't know..They don't have an answer.   I mean, all they have is, like happy, sad, angry, fear, nothing more nuanced, really, than that. And I think that this happens because we develop very early on this suppression of emotions. Because if we are suppressing the experience of negative emotions, guess what, we wind up suppressing everything. I told you about the challenges I had in my first marriage. We used to have, you know, like screaming fights and this whole build up blow build up blow cycle was happening, and I was always suppressing, holding on, afraid of starting a fight, and I wound up wound up like deadening all of my emotions, not just the problematic ones. So when we are not allowed to feel these challenging emotions, we wind up putting a blanket on all of them and the richness of life really suffers. 

Speaker Dar 

Yes, I so agree with that, that once you stifle or stuff one emotion. Emotion that you've made to be labeled as bad, then even the good emotions are a little bit tempered and and not as brilliant or fun as they used to be, 

Speaker Sandra   

Well, and you know, thinking about contrast, right? We need contrast to be able to experience the highs, we also need to have the lows, because if we don't have the lows, there's nothing to compare with so by suppressing, yeah, by suppressing the lows, we also, like cap, put a lid on our highs. 

Speaker Dar   

Could you talk a little bit next about how people can work with you, and I believe you might have a free gift here for our audience as well. 

Speaker Sandra   

Yes, the free gift is the body symptoms decoder, and it gives you a document where you get to look, oh, I have this symptom. I have this pain. What does it say on this little chart here about what emotions might be part of that, what experiences might be suppressed there. And so it's kind of an interesting way to start to look at symptoms. In my experience with people with symptoms, we mostly just try to make them go away. We don't mind them for information. My interpretation, as a practitioner for a long time of symptoms, is there? Your body and your being is trying to get your attention. Any symptom, you can say, is giving you a message. Are you paying attention to that message so you can get the message? Because when you get the message, then your body doesn't need to have the symptom anymore. So the body symptoms decoder gives you, you know, basic little bit of information about how you can start looking at symptoms from the perspective of, Oh, what is it I might be suppressing here. And then if somebody would like to actually talk with me and possibly do some work with this, then I look forward to talking to people and having a complimentary conversation. I call them intentions to realities, action plan calls so we identify something that you have going on, something that you want, and see how I might be able to support you in accomplishing that  

Speaker Dar  

Beautiful body symptom decoder that sounds so exciting and purposeful to go through that and then an action plan call That sounds wonderful to me before we sign off. Is there anything else that you're feeling that you want to leave the audience with, or that you really want them to know today before we leave? 

Speaker Sandra 

I have two things actually. One is, if this topic is really interesting to you and you have things that you would like to contribute to the conversation, I am having a reframing anger summit in October 2026, and so there will be information associated with this podcast about how to connect with me for that and express your interest, because I am looking for speakers. And then the other thing is just to highlight however it is you feel it's good, if there's positive experiences, then celebrate that. If there's challenging experiences, there's information there for you, but it's all good, beautiful. 

Speaker Dar 

Well, I'm certainly celebrating having you on this podcast today, and the great information that you've given us and your vulnerability with your own story is really appreciated. Thank you for being here. 

Speaker Sandra 

 it's been wonderful. Darla, thank you 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai