Why Naming Your Anger Can Be The Start Of Real Healing

We challenge the myth that anger is a failure and show how it can be sacred, clarifying energy—especially in grief. We share personal loss, cultural conditioning, and practical ways to metabolize anger into boundaries, strength, and self-trust.

• anger as authenticity and information, not pathology
• grief and the body’s signals after loss
• the cost of suppressing anger on health
• women’s conditioning to be “nice” and quiet
• therapy and somatic tools to move anger safely
• anger as sacred energy for justice and boundaries
• turning anger into clarity, strength, and self-respect
• practical steps to name pain and act with grounding

Journal about it, ask yourself, post on one of my social medias, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, even threads, um, and just you know, talk about what you're feeling

Transcript

Opening And Framing Anger

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Hello, it's Dr. Donna, and welcome to another episode of my podcast, Soul Talk and Psychic Advice. Today's episode is one that feels deeply personal to me. It's also deeply necessary for me to discuss and honestly long overdue. Today we're going to talk about anger, not rage, not violence, not destruction, but anger as a gift. And I know when I first started talking about this, it was right after my son died, so 18 years ago, and I kept on saying anger was so important to my grief. And I know in society we've equated anger with rage and violence and negativity, especially if you're in a spiritual community, you know, there's a lot of bypassing on feelings, and people don't want to feel angry because they feel like they're wrong or they're failing or they're negative or they're not spiritual enough. And really, to me, anger is so important to acknowledge. I often call anger the bodyguardness of sadness because what I've noticed when I've observed people or work with people who are angry, they're really sad. They're sad because they've been let down, they've been hurt, they've been ignored, they haven't been seen, they've been abused, they've been neglected. Something happened to make them angry. People just aren't born angry, are wake up angry. It comes from somewhere, usually it comes from a place of sadness. So I call anger the bodyguard of sadness. But today we're going to talk about anger in even a bigger range. So I see anger as truth. You have to be a really authentic person to admit that you're angry. Because a lot of people won't admit to that. They're like, I'm not angry, I'm not angry. And then they suppress it and they become resentful and they get autoimmune diseases, and you know, they break out in rashes and y you know, all these things because we're taught, and you know, for every one minute of of anger, your immune system drops for 24 hours. I you know, I remember reading that somewhere. And so people are like, I don't want to be angry because that's failing. And I'm like, no, it's not failing. And you know, I never really looked at anger as a whole until after my son died, and I'm working with clients and observing it. And so anger is also clarity. And anger is a sacred emotional force, very sacred when honored, and can free us instead of consuming us. When we don't acknowledge our anger, we can't heal, we can't grow, we can't evolve. Actually, you're gonna stay stuck, you're gonna bypass. And I want to say this clearly right from the beginning. Anger is not the opposite of healing. Suppressed hang anger is the opposite of healing, but anger itself is not the opposite of healing. If anything, anger is a part of healing. Now, I want to talk about my story first, and this whole podcast is not about my story, just like five minutes of it will be about my story, but I want to bring it up because I think it's important because it shows the direction that got me here to this new awakening about anger. After I lost my son Brandon, my world was shattered in ways language still struggles to hold. People don't really discuss grief, and I didn't have words, and you know, I didn't know anybody else who lost a kid, and y you know, we weren't using the internet that much like we're using it now, and so I couldn't find groups and I couldn't find all the right counseling, and it took some time to to get my resources together. And the grief came in waves, shock, sorrow, despair, disbelief, because he had a successful brain surgery, and for him to die yeah, you know, eight days after the surgery was just something else. But there was another emotion that showed up quietly at first, and then more insistently, anger. I was angry at the unfairness of it all, I was mad at the world. Um, angry at a world that kept moving while mine stopped. You know, I remember the day after planning my son's funeral, I had to go to work and because I had a practice and so and I couldn't call in sick, and I still needed money because so much money was being consumed by the time that I wasn't working and being with my son and all the expenses, right? So I put on a nice dress and put on a smile, and nobody knew what was going on. My I didn't tell my clients at the time, and I just realized how we dissociate, how we disconnect to function in the world, and that made me even more angry because I just wanted to scream, I lost my son, can the world stop? But we know the world can't stop every time one of us have a crisis or the world would never move, right? Um, but I was very angry because I had to keep going. And I was just angry. I was very confused by what God wanted from me because I have my son at such a young age, and then he has taken away, and I thought, well, what was the point of you giving him to me? You know, and I was angry at the systems, you know, that failed us. I was just mad at all the work I did to raise him, it just went down the toilet. And everything that I became because of my son just felt like it went down the toilet. It was just awful. And I was mad at people who didn't understand and who would say weird things to me. I was just angry. You know, I I'm gonna say this phrase because you know I'm very direct when I talk. I wanted to beat a motherfucker with another one. I was just raging. And if you know me, a lot of people see me as soft or sweet. You know, they don't see that side of me, and when I do get angry is such a rare occasion, but I was really in the anger, and I felt so unseen and not heard, and people wanted to avoid me or avoid discussing Brandon because they didn't know how it makes me feel, and I told them, I said, You're the one who's uncomfortable, not me. You're projecting. So there's just a lot of anger. I was mad, and I knew I had to stay to myself so that I didn't take it out on people who didn't deserve that. And I didn't want to talk to many people because they were saying weird stuff, so I didn't want to bother. So the anger was about loving someone so much and having them taken away. And no matter what I did, I couldn't save him. The best doctors at Stanford, number two, brain surgeon, you know, nothing could save him. And you know, like many women and especially grieving mothers, you know, I try to push that anger away and keep on moving ahead. And then of course I'm in a spiritual community, and we were still at a point in the spiritual community where there's a lot of bypassing going on, right? So yeah, you know, I couldn't really share what I was going through with people because some people are like, Well, you're spiritual, it shouldn't bother you. I said, Are you kidding? So I really had a hard time. And I know as a woman we're not told to be comfortable with being angry, you know, we're told that's not feminine, that's masculine. And, you know, I had to really get real with myself and that people weren't gonna understand me. So I thought, does this make me bitter? Does this make me unspiritual? Does this make me unsafe? You know? And I just swallowed that. And you know what happened? My body began to carry what my voice was not allowed to express tension, exhaustion, headaches, emotional numbness, fibroids, which led eventually to a hysterectomy. It wasn't until I allowed myself to feel my anger without judging it, without fixing it, without suppressing it, that something profound happened. I felt free, I felt authentic, I felt honest, and you know, it caused people to step away from me. I was just too raw and too real for some people, and and that's okay. And the anger didn't harden me, it opened me up, it unlocked me, it it freed me in a way that I needed to be freed. And I from that point on knew that anger was very important, and the way that we look at anger in the world has to be changed. Because once I got honest with that and I realized under all this anger, sadness, and defeat, I felt defeated. The freedom came. So if you can ask yourself why are you angry, instead of trying to push it away, you really peel off the layers to what the problem is. So anger to me is being authentic. Anger is authenticity, anger is not pathology, anger is information because you get to find out why are you angry, what's hurting you? You know, a lot of us have suppressed traumas, and so that anger comes up to say something's wrong. It's a red button, right? Emergency red button. But it's not a negative thing, it's the gift, it's the gift that can unlock you and set you free. So anger is the body saying, Something matters here. Something crossed a boundary, something was unjust, something hurt deeply. That's what anger in the body says. Anger is authenticity. It's a part of you that refuses to gaslight yourself. It's the part of you that says what I experienced was real. Because you gaslight yourself when you pretend like you're not angry or you're not hurting and you're spiritual and you'll be fine and God will carry you. You know, and that's being not authentic, right? And so what I experienced was real. For grieving parents, anger often arises because love had nowhere else to go. We don't get angry because we're broken, we get angry because we loved fully, because we were invalidated, because something happened that was unjust. And here's the truth that most people will never tell you. Anger often shows up when sadness alone is not enough to hold the magnitude of the loss, of the grief, of the hurt, of the betrayal, of the trauma, of the abuse, the neglect. And how society teaches us to fear anger is something else. And that's what it does. You know, we're taught, you know, especially from a very young age for women, we are taught that anger is dangerous. And if you're angry, you're out of control, right? You've gone too far, you've gone past the red line. And as little girls, we're told to be nice, don't make waves, calm down. You know, that's not ladylike, right? You gotta act like a lady. It's definitely groomed within us from a young age. The boys won't like us, right? You can't get a good boy or a good man if you're angry, you're just gonna look nasty and bitter and ugly and old. Um, or taught to walk around eggshells around our own emotions. And I remember throughout the years when I look back, how many times I came across women like in school or working with them, and they just seem so uptight, so wound up. And I realized they're suppressing and they're taking time bomb, and that's why they were just so awful and mean and nasty, because they were invalidated. So how can they validate someone else? And so as women, y you know, from the time we're little girls and we become women, we don't rage, we don't allow for it, we don't scream, you know, we don't you know, you don't want to hit the wall and dance you, but we don't hit the wall, we don't hit the punching bag. We just smile and let it go, let it roll off our back until we get autoimmune disease, until the world crumbles, right? But we're not really taught how to deal with anger, because we're taught it's masculine. And we learn quickly that sadness is acceptable, but anger is not. So if you're sad, yeah, you're a girl, it's okay to be sad, but if you're angry, oh no. And so a crying woman is emotional, an angry woman is too much, and so we're constantly being judged as women. So we turn our anger inward. We shame ourselves, so we learn shame. We learn to be our own worst critic, we learn to try to be perfectionists, you know, and we spiritualize it away. You just meditate it away, you know, you go to a retreat and do yoga, and you know, I love all those things, but not to get rid of anger, you know. But yeah, there's a lot of shame if you feel anger as a woman, and we bypass it with gratitude. You know, you're angry because you're not grateful enough, you're not thankful enough, you know, something's wrong with you if you're angry. You can't be mad at why you're angry. You just are judged for being angry. But people don't ask why. So as women, we're often invalidated. We're told to hold our place. And I know when I became more free with anger, a lot of women just couldn't stand to be around me, and I lost some friends. And I told them, I said, I gotta do this life as authentic as possible, and even and this is even before my son died. Just me being myself made other women uncomfortable. And then after my son died, it really amped things up. And yeah, I lost some people. And you know, we're constantly taught to reframe our anger before we even feel it. You know the phrase you gotta feel it to heal it? Well, we're never allowed that freedom as women to feel all of our emotions. You know, we're told we must be that time of the month. Hormones are in balance, odd flows in town, right? We're always told something negative about our feelings, our emotions, and we're always told to keep it together and manage everybody else's emotions, but we're not allowed to deal with ours. And that's why women are fixers and healers and saviors, and you know, they're the ones in the family that's keeping it all together that everyone goes to for the most part. Sometimes men are, but women often are. And so we're told to push down our anger, but here's the cost unfilled anger never disappears, it doesn't disappear. It becomes depression, anxiety, autoimmune issues, chronic pain, people pleasing, emotional shutdown, and burnout. And anger is not the problem. Silencing the anger is the problem because anger is an authentic emotion and it needs to be seen, heard, and validated. And you know, a person's life and health depends on it. Because often when people peel off the layers, right, in in therapy they say, I didn't know I had suppressed anger because we were just taught to bury it right away. And so that's the problem. Now let's talk about therapy. I was on Instagram and you know, because everything going on in the world right now, y you know, there's women saying, you know, women haven't been allowed to be angry and you know they're suppressing their anger and their rage and you know, therapy is making us suppress our anger. And I thought, nope, wait a minute. Yes, we're allowed to be angry and full of rage. But constructively, right? Not in a self-destructive way. It's a way to self-inquire. You want to journal about it, you want to understand yourself. But therapy does not suppress anger. I was surprised by that, and that's why I said now's the time for me to discuss what I've learned about anger. Because that isn't what therapy's trying to do. It isn't trying to suppress your anger. And let me say something important, especially for those of you who have been in therapy for years and feel stuck. Um you know, it's good therapy is not designed to suppress anger. It's designed to help anger move through the body safely. And so that's what the therapist is facilitating for you. Healthy anger does not mean screaming at people. Like I don't let people scream at me and I know not to scream at people. It does not mean lashing out, it does not mean destruction. Healthy anger means naming what was wrong, feeling the sensation in the body. That's the somatic work, right? Releasing it through breath, movement, voice are boundaries. Allowing it to inform you, not control you are your life choices. When anger is metabolized, it becomes strength, self-respect, clarity, self-trust. When anger is suppressed, it becomes shame, collapse, emotional numbness, and self-abandonment. You know, I believe a lot of shame comes from suppressed anger. You know, you're not allowed to be who you are or feel what you're feeling. So let's talk about why women especially need to reclaim anger. I think men get a little bit more freedom on this, but women don't. We absorb, right? And women we overgive. We stay quiet to keep the peace. You know? We apologize when we shouldn't. But peace that requires self-betrayal is not peace. It's emotional captivity. It really is. And anger is often the first emotion that tells a woman I can't keep doing this. Anger is the beginning of boundaries. Anger is a nervous system saying, I need safety too. When women are allowed to feel anger in healthy ways, they don't become dangerous. They become grounded. And I think that you know, what I was seeing on, you know, Instagram, they're like, Well, if we feel our rage, we'd be powerful, we'd be dangerous. But no, we actually be more grounded and rooted, and that will scare people because you're feeling comfortable being yourself, you're not lashing out, you're saying I'm angry and I don't like this, and you're coming from a grounded, healthy place, and you can't argue with someone who's grounded and feels secure within what they're thinking and feeling. So anger for women could be this powerful freedom. And you could come across with this light and this powerful energy and still be angry. Remember, anger is not about violence. Violence is a whole different animal. Anger is sacred energy. In many ancient traditions, anger was seen as a life force. Yes. It was energy meant to restore balance, to protect the vulnerable, to signal injustice, to catalyze change. And I believe in the times that we're living in, we all need to be a little bit angry and speak up about any injustices that we've seen, whether it's sexual abuse or child abuse or y you know, trafficking or y you know, racial tension. I and I don't mean to get political, but I am getting a little bit political, so I guess I do mean it. You know, whatever your anger about, if you're angry, if you see injustice in your relationships, right, you stand up for yourself. If you feel like your loved ones, right? Or at work or anywhere, anywhere with social issues. Yeah, that's what anger is about, is sacred energy. And anger becomes destructive only when it is ignored or shamed. When honored anger becomes discernment. You get to discern. Because you're being authentic about what you think and what you feel. So you have more clarity. So for me, allowing anger after losing my son did not pull me away from love. It brought me closer to it. Because anger said this mattered, he mattered, I mattered. Me being his mom mattered. You know, him being my son, it mattered. You know, he mattered. And so anger is freedom. And I could really talk forever about it. And I remember when I first started discussing it, you know, I was surprised how many people on my Facebook page they they're like, it's okay to be angry. And I'm like, heck yeah. I said, F yes, fuck yes. You know, and they're just like, oh, and you could just feel this collective exhale. Like they felt seen and heard. And so I was leading the way. And I said, Why can't you be angry? You were wronged. You felt wronged about something. You feel like something was unfair and unjust. You you want to be angry. You want to be seen and be heard and validated. It's all what you do with that anger. And I have people say to me, Whoa, that really freed me. So hopefully this little bite-sized podcast will free you to get real about your feelings. You know, to feel the range of things because under that anger is sadness, hurt, betrayal, you know, loss, pain, something that needs to be healed, right? It's saying, Yeah, I need you to address this, and I'm gonna have you stay angry until you face this. You don't push that away, you don't meditate that away. You meditate to get grounded about it, to understand it, but not to bury it. So I'm gonna close this out. If anger is rising in you right now, if it has been knocking quietly or pounding loudly at you, I want you to hear this. You're not failing at healing, you're entering healing. Anger is not asking you to explode. It's not about exploding, you know, it's not. It's about asking you to listen to yourself, to hear yourself, to get more tuned in with what you need. You don't go, I'm angry, I don't need to acknowledge that. No, you need to acknowledge it because it's if it's at the point of anger, it's like you've already ignored it and it's screaming at you. It's like pay attention before it's too late. Before you get sick, you get anxiety, you get depressed. Pay attention before those things happen. So anger is also asking you to breathe, to be present, to name what you're feeling, what you see, to name your pain, to feel your pain, to stop abandoning yourself. Healing does not require you to be calm all the time. That's not authentic. Healing requires you to be honest. And sometimes honesty sounds like anger. And that's the truth. So I want to thank you for listening to this podcast and you know, journal about it, ask yourself, post on one of my social medias, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, even threads, um, and just you know, talk about what you're feeling. Free yourself. If you're in my grief group or my burnout healer group, you know, discuss it there. Anger is so important. Because if you commit to being angry, you can get to the place of healing. So I want to thank you for listening and have a great day.