Man (Un)Caved

(Un)caged: Repressed Anger The Silent Killer in Modern Masculinity

• Shane Coyle • Season 3 • Episode 6

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Repressed anger is the root of many masculine issues, creating a pressure cooker that eventually explodes in harmful ways despite men's denial of their emotional state.

• Men have been conditioned to hide emotions through phrases like "suck it up" and "man up"
• Repressed anger destroys relationships by creating emotional distance and disconnection
• When we repress anger, we also shut down our ability to feel other positive emotions
• Anger is a secondary emotion covering feelings of betrayal, humiliation, and invalidation
• Step one for healing: acknowledge and own your anger instead of denying it
• Express anger constructively through exercise, journaling, therapy or men's groups
• Forgiveness is crucial - it's not about others but freeing yourself from victim consciousness
• Anger exists on a spectrum from death-instinctual (destructive) to life-instinctual (constructive)
• The same energy behind anger can unite people for positive change or destroy lives
• Transformation happens when we allow ourselves to feel the full spectrum of emotions

Men, we need to come out of hiding.

If you liked this episode and you're ready to confront and process your repressed anger instead of letting it wreck your life from the inside out, then it's time to join us.

The Gathering is my online men's group where we talk about the stuff most guys are afraid to admit — anger, shame, relationships, self-sabotage — and actually do something about it. This is where you stop pretending and start showing up for yourself, your relationships, and the man you know you're meant to be.

Ready to get real? Sign up now at https://www.manuncaved.com/the-gathering — and let’s start breaking the cycle together.


Need support? Our free recovery services and weekly support groups are here to help both individuals and families affected by addiction and mental health challenges. You don’t have to do this alone. Schedule a free, confidential call today and start the healing process for everyone involved.

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Speaker 1:

All right, gentlemen, grab your mocktail, kick back and let's get into it. Welcome to another episode of man Uncaved, the only podcast that gets straight to the point and doesn't make you feel like crap about it. Today, we're going to talk about repressed anger and its impact on masculinity. So, guys, buckle up. This one is going to sting a little bit, but I'm hoping in a good way, like a slap to the face from reality that makes you say, oh shit, I've been doing this all wrong. Now, if you're one of those guys who thinks anger is a bad word, like, oh, I don't get angry, I'm just passionate Newsflash gentlemen, you're probably in denial and, quite frankly, you're doing it wrong. So let's get started with the classic.

Speaker 1:

How many of you and yes, I am looking at you, mr, I'm fine have convinced yourself that anger is for those other people? You know, those ones who slam doors, punch walls and rage, quit video games like a bunch of amateur adolescent kids? You, oh no, you're calm, collected and completely zen until one of those most trivial things send you into a rage spiral. And here's the kicker Anger isn't bad, it's the repressed anger. That's the problem. That shit gets you, guys. I'm telling you that shit gets you. I talk about that repressed anger all day long in my groups, in my private coaching sessions. You'll have guys talking about a situation and they posture up, their tonality becomes aggressive. And when you ask them that question, are you angry? No, I'm good, straight up denial. And it's that denial of that repressed anger that is the problem with a lot of men. It's that repressed anger. It's like a unopened bottle of soda in the kitchen cupboard and at first it's just sitting there, right, no big deal, but over time it starts to build pressure. Then one day you open it and boom, everything explodes. And if you're lucky, the only thing that's ruined is your self-esteem and maybe your relationship with that person you just snapped at over a wrong pizza topping. So let's talk about the origins of that beautiful mess.

Speaker 1:

Why are we so damn bad at handling our anger? Men for generations have been taught that showing anger is a sign of weakness. And think about it. Growing up, were you ever told to suck it up, man up or don't cry? Like a little girl, if you had a rough day or got upset, the response was be a man. Well, guess what that's basically telling you? Hide your feelings, pretend they don't exist. So here we are, years later, suppressing our anger so deep inside that we've forgotten how to express it healthily. Instead, it leaks out in all sorts of fucked up ways of charming ways, passive, aggressive ways, workaholism, emotional withdrawal or, my personal favorite, blowing up at the slightest inconvenience. And we still wear this toxic, stoic man armor like it's cool. Well, spoiler alert, it's not. It's actually suffocating.

Speaker 1:

All right time to dig into the real impact of the suppressed anger. Let's talk about relationships. Gentlemen, let me ask you do you have a tendency to clench your jaw whenever something bothers you? Or maybe you just don't talk about it and instead let your partner guess what's wrong? Oh yeah, that's healthy Newsflash. Repressed anger ruins relationships. You know that. Look, your partner gives you when she says what's wrong, and you reply nothing. That's the moment you should probably fess up to your unresolved anger, but instead you bottle it up, keep it hidden and let it fester, and over time, all that repressed anger becomes a time bomb, ticking away until you explode over something completely trivial, like her not putting the laundry in the dryer the right way.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we've all been there and, honestly, I've been there too. I was so unaware of how much anger I had bottled up one from my childhood experience. There's societal, environmental things, and I just continued to push it away. Because I also had to recognize and I heard a lot of stories of my father was a very angry man and what he did with his anger is he acted out on it. He would act out in compulsive, with drinking, behaving in fidelities, raging all over the place, getting in fights. So I learned very fast well, I don't want to be that and we also think about it from an environmental lens. We always see these angry men in movies sometimes, or we see it in our news, these men who are acting out violently on somebody or, unfortunately, a group of people. So this is something I had to definitely in my own understanding, in my own healing journey, really get a deeper understanding of what was driving a lot of my behaviors. Most of us have probably heard that anger is a secondary emotion and I believe it is because under anger, when you start to understand what is under anger is sometimes betrayal, humiliation, invalidation but also get more specific in understanding what we are actually experiencing so that we can get clear and communicate from that perspective.

Speaker 1:

Repressed anger doesn't just hurt your partner, it hurts you, it actually builds walls, it creates emotional distance. It leaves you feeling disconnected and isolated. We all know that loneliness is the root of just about every unhealthy behavior you can think of, from binging on junk food to you guessed it porn addiction. Now you might be asking all right, great, so I'm fucking angry. So what? Well, first let me tell you why it matters.

Speaker 1:

When we repress anger, we also repress our ability to feel other emotions too. You can't selectively shut off your anger and keep your happiness and peace. It doesn't work like that. You can't turn the emotional faucet to off for the ugly stuff and leave it on for the good stuff. So guess what? You end up emotionally numb, disconnected, on autopilot, going through the motions but never really feeling anything, including joy, passion or satisfaction.

Speaker 1:

Oh, and all the while, the anger. It's still bubbling underneath the surface, just waiting to cause a meltdown, the moment someone cuts you off in traffic. Cuts you off in traffic, all right. So now you're sitting there thinking all right, cool, but how do I actually fix this? But here's the idea One let's just acknowledge our own anger. You're angry. Own that shit. Don't pretend it's not there. Recognize it, even if it feels uncomfortable as hell. It's like popping that zit. It hurts for a minute, but it's way better than letting it fester under the surface.

Speaker 1:

Two express it constructively. You don't have to go all raging bull on the world. Find healthy outlets Exercise, journaling, therapy. A men's support group could be a great one where we talk about all of this stuff as men to see one we're not alone and we gain insights from each other to see how we can move this repressed, suppressed energy in healthy ways. But the key here is to express it, don't bottle it up. Three start owning our emotions. Stop playing the victim. Your anger doesn't control you. You control your response. Reclaim that power. Stop letting it control your life. Four forgiving and moving forward.

Speaker 1:

If your anger stems from something you've been holding on to for too long family issues, betrayal, hurt feelings it's time to forgive. Now this can be really challenging, and I even can say challenging in for myself, because that pain that I had gone through growing up it's hard to forgive. Those ones that have hurt do growing up. It's hard to forgive those ones that have hurt. However, I can't continue to keep holding on to it because I will continue to live in a victim consciousness from this repressed anger, and I can do that for 10, 20, 30 years and I'll never be free because I have to forgive. It's not about them, it's for myself, because for you, the holding on to this anger really only hurts ourselves. So let it go, trust me, your future self will thank you.

Speaker 1:

You know it's not only within the family system that we have learned to repress this anger. You know it's so interesting because I have a 12 year old son and you know we always used to watch all these Pixar movies. So that movie Inside Out, you know, there's this scene at the dinner table and anger wants to have a moment to explore himself. But there's this really deep undercurrent of trying to keep him in check. And this is where, especially when joy or the others step in to avoid conflict, even within that scene, there's a message of repress the anger. Well, you can have the anger just knowing how to express it in a healthy way. If we have learned from long in childhood to repress it, it stays undeveloped, it doesn't know how to express itself, it doesn't know how to be assertive and use it in a healthy way to put boundaries, to protect ourself, to self-advocate. So here is actually the bottom line man, stop bottling your anger. It is a pressure cooker and the sooner or later it's going to explode.

Speaker 1:

I see this again all over the place in relationships. I see this passive, aggressive. I see this aggressive behavior pattern. I see compulsive behavior patterns known as addiction, drinking, using behaving to release this anger that is just bottled up inside and it is just self-destructive for ourself, for our loved ones and relationships, for our kids, for humanity. We just keep doing the same thing.

Speaker 1:

I once heard I believe it was Voltar, it was. History doesn't repeat itself. I believe it was Voltar, it was. History doesn't repeat itself. Man does. It is time to change and have a paradigm shift. Let the anger move.

Speaker 1:

You know I work with a lot of clients and one of them we're doing a lot of deep diving into some inner child narratives and beliefs around growing up, being neglected and abandoned, and he'd call me. He says I'm really angry. You know, I want, I don't want to be, and I'm like this is good, this means things are finally moving. This is what we need to happen. You know, transformation is really allowing ourselves to feel the full spectrum of emotions.

Speaker 1:

We have been so disconnected from our anger Either one. We were told we weren't allowed to be. Anger showed we weren't allowed to be anger, or we observed people in our lives that had anger with no boundaries. There were just shameless ways of expressing their anger against us, other parents, against each other, and so we just learned how to abandon that part of ourself. But we're learning how to love all parts of ourself. We don't just get to pick and choose the parts we love and discount the others. We have to learn to love all parts. All parts are welcome. So, guys, we do not have to stay in this cycle. Start feeling your feelings, embrace your anger and then channel it into something productive.

Speaker 1:

It is the same energy, you know, recently I've been doing a lot of research on my own part looking at the polarities of anger, because I truly believe that anger is a misunderstood emotion and it has a great propensity to act out. So, on one side of your anger, you have this idea of death extinctual, this thanatos, where it wants to destroy life, including our own life and others. And on the polar opposite side, you have this life-extinctual side, this eros, that brings life together, and we've seen this through the history books, where the same energy, the same anger, has used to bring people together the civil rights movement, the decolonization of England from India with Gandhi. That same anger, that same energy that existed but was more life-extinctual. Let's bring it together, of course, on the polar opposite side, we've seen where anger, and repressed anger, has destroyed life the Holocaust, genocide, religious prosecution. This is also the capacity of anger. So they have the polar opposite sides death instinctual and life instinctual. So it is the same energy and I'm more on a home front with my own case studies around anger.

Speaker 1:

When I work in my coaching and I work on my private practice and my groups, I see the repression of this anger and it has the capacity and this is where I truly believe that suicidal ideations come in play, where they want to destroy life, including their own, because of this repressed anger. All right, everybody. That is today's episode of man Uncaved. We talked about the toxicity of repressed anger and how that affects us as men and masculinity. It affects our relationships to others, it affects our relationships to ourself and we become distant and isolated and abandoning our own self when we don't allow those parts to be validated, to be heard, to be seen Again. Men, we need to come out of hiding.