Women's Relationship with Anger: From Suppression to Self-Trust

Anger isn't the problem. Suppressing it is.

For generations, women have been taught that anger is dangerous, inappropriate, or something to feel guilty about. The result isn't less anger. It's more resentment, self-doubt, anxiety, and disconnection from ourselves.

In this episode I unpack the surprising history behind women's relationship with anger, why so many of us learned to suppress it, and what that suppression is actually costing us emotionally, physically, and in our relationship with ourselves.

Here's what we cover:

• Why women often struggle to feel safe expressing anger
• The hidden cost of pushing anger down
• How suppressed anger impacts confidence, boundaries, and self-trust
• A simple somatic process for moving anger through the body safely
• How anger can become a compass for change rather than something to fear

Anger isn't a flaw. It's information.

And when you learn how to work with it instead of against it, it becomes one of the most powerful tools for creating change in your life.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Let's face it, you can have a life that looks successful and still feel like you're caring way too much. The pressure, the overthinking, the constant weight of holding it all together. This is Live Lighter. I'm Jessica Berg, and this show is for women who are done living like that. Each week, we'll be breaking down what's actually keeping you stuck in that pressure and how to start letting it go so that your life doesn't just look good, it actually feels good. Hello and welcome back to the Live Lighter Podcast. I am your host, Jessica Berg, and today we are going to go somewhere that I feel extremely passionate about because not only is it something that I have navigated and faced and worked through myself, but it is also the most common thing that I come across with every single woman that I support in a one-on-one capacity. And that is our relationship with anger. It is anger that we were taught is not safe to feel. It is anger that we were taught that is bad. Anger then gets to be stuck and sitting inside of us for years, sometimes decades. And it's anger that we've never felt safe to express. And today we are going to talk about it directly and honestly, without making it pretty, letting it be what it really is. Powerful, raw, and sometimes uncomfortable. Because here's the thing I want you to truly just hold deep in your heart from the beginning of this episode. Anger is not the problem. Seeing anger as a problem, that's the problem. Anger is not a problem. It's our discomfort with anger that's the problem. It's the story that we have with anger that's the problem. It's the relationship that we have built over the years of what we've been taught that is the problem. And by the end of today, my hope is that you walk away with a completely different understanding of what anger actually is, where your complicated relationship with it came from, and what it genuinely is costing you to keep pushing it down, to suppress it, to avoid it. And then we are going to talk about what to do with it instead, how to light that fire and light the path in front of you versus burning the entire village down. So as this is something that kept coming up in my client calls, it's something that I navigated myself and I just see time and time and time again, is women's relationship with anger is one of shame and guilt and something that we need to avoid. And it got me thinking like, okay, there has to have been an extensive amount of study and research around this. And yes, there has. And so, in preparation for this podcast episode, I started doing a ton of digging and just gathering as much information as I could about the origin of this and why is this so embedded in our belief systems and our culture as a whole. And one of the things I came across was that back in ancient Greece, there was, and you can Google this, like this is this is fact-checked. Back in ancient Greece, there was a diagnosis that doctors had for women who expressed strong emotion, whether it be anger, passion, grief, rage, any feeling that was considered to be too big or too intense. And they called it hysteria. And it was only women that experienced this. And the medical explanation, the actual accepted scientific explanation at the time was that the uterus was wandering around inside a woman's body and making her act irrationally. I know. It's freaking crazy. Literally, that there was women walking around with this wandering uterus. That was the diagnosis that these women who had these big emotions got from the doctors. And this wasn't just this fringe idea that a couple of weird guys came up with. This was mainstream medicine for centuries. Women who got angry, women who expressed big feelings, who pushed back. They were not seen as having a legitimate emotional response. They were seen as sick. They were seen as unstable, out of control, in need of medical treatment. There must be something wrong with them. Now, treatments for this were just as strange as the idea itself. There was aromatic therapies, induced sneezing. Even sex and marriage were prescribed to coax the uterus back into place because it needed the penis. Yes, but the messaging stays exactly the same. Women's anger gets called hysterical, irrational, unprofessional, unattractive, too much. The word hysterical itself, which we still use today, comes directly from the Greek word uterus. And here's the part that when I read this, I mean, my mind was blown. I was born in 1982. All right, so I'll be 44 years old in August. And what I learned is that hysteria, as it was defined back hundreds and hundreds of centuries ago, it was not removed from the official medical diagnostic manual until 1980. 1980. I was born in 1982 and a wandering uterus, and women having these big emotions must be tied to hysteria. That is crazy. So what got created over generations through medicine, through culture, through religion, through every single message that was out there was that women were rewarded for being agreeable and composed and undemanding. That was the embedded belief. A woman who expressed anger was out of control. And a woman who lost control cannot be trusted, cannot be taken seriously, and cannot be respected. So what we learned, what we adapted to, what we got very good at was pushing our anger down, avoiding it at all cost. I just wanted to land on how far back this relationship, this belief that anger is bad as it relates to women, for us to feel it, for us to express it, and for us to honor it. It is something that goes back centuries. So if you are a woman in today's day and age who has a really hard time letting herself feel angry without guilt or expressing anger in the moment, in a controlled manner, without feeling levels of fear or like she's out of control, then I want you to know that all of those feelings are absolutely warranted based on history, based on what we have been taught and what our culture has encouraged us to believe. But here's what happens when we tend to hide it. So I want to shift the conversation a little bit to what happens with anger, this pressure cooker when women or anyone, but I'm talking about women today, when we tend to push our anger down, because suppressed anger is does not disappear. No emotion that is numbed or avoided disappears. It just gets stuck in the body and percolates, right? And so anger, when we suppress it, it just gets pushed down and it becomes this pressure cooker. And I heard something at a retreat one time, and it was actually from the woman who was my mentor for inner child work, not Perry. She said that anger can either feed a village or it can burn it down. And the differentiator is this anger that is felt, expressed, and processed, that's what's going to feed a village. That's what's going to create the change in which you want to seek in your life. That's what's going to light up a clear path on where you want to go. Anger that is suppressed and pushed down, it eventually explodes like a volcano. And that's what burns the village down. That's what actually ends up firing at all cylinders, everywhere, at anyone, and can cause more harm. So now I want to talk about the cost of this, the cost of suppressing anger. There's an emotional cost, there's a physical cost, and there's an identity cause. Now, the emotional cost is something that's been researched for decades. And psychologists have actually observed that frequent suppression of anger actually transforms into depression, anxiety, and chronic self-doubt. So instead of directing the anger outward at what actually crossed the line and pissed us off, we turn it in on ourselves. And then that becomes self-blame, self-criticism, that inner voice that tells you that you are too sensitive, way too demanding, too much, or the beloved not enough. So there's this emotional cost of doubting ourselves, of not listening to our needs and not trusting our own emotions. There's also the physical cost. And there has been an extensive amount of studies on how horrible suppressed anger is on the body. There's a number of books. There's one of the books that I came across was When the Body Says No. And the doctor who wrote that book is Dr. Kabor Mate. He's a physician, and he was calling out how the studies have shown that suppressed anger actually weakens the body's immune system and its own ability to defend itself. So you're literally physically harming yourself by suppressing the anger. And so here's some other stats that I want to share with you. In 2022 from the University of Pittsburgh, they did a study and they found that women who suppress their anger are 70% more likely to develop a condition linked to a higher risk of heart attack. 70 freaking percent. So chronic anger suppression correlates and links to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, stress-related illness, depression, and anxiety. All right. So these are some physical costs that you're getting from suppressing your anger. And the third cost that I'm going to touch on today is identity cost. And this very well could be the deepest cost of them all. Because when we suppress anger, we do not just suppress a feeling, we are suppressing our compass. Because anger is one of the most direct signals we have from our own inner knowing. It tells us when something matters, when a boundary has been crossed, when we have been treated in a way that does not honor who we are. Every single time we silence that signal, every time we tell ourselves just to let it go, just move on, just keep the peace, we move a little further away from ourselves, from our own inner knowing. From the woman, we actually are underneath all the conditioning. So let's reframe this completely. Anger is not bad. I want you to say that again with me. Anger is not bad. Anger is not dangerous. It does not mean that something is wrong with you if you feel anger. It is not something to feel guilty about feeling. When you feel anger, it is not your signal that this is something you should not be feeling. It is not proof that you are too much or out of control or that you're difficult. Anger is information. Anger is an emotion. And all emotions are valid. Emotions are energy emotion. It is your body's intelligence communicating something important to you. Anger might be telling you that a boundary was crossed. Anger might be telling you that something you value is being threatened. Anger might be telling you that your inner knowing is trying to get your attention. And when we allow ourselves to feel it, to express it, to move it through, anger becomes one of the most generative forces available to us. It opens doors to clarity, to action, aligned action, to boundaries that actually hold up, to growth that never would have happened had we kept the feeling buried. Anger gets to be the torch that lights the path to the change that we want to see within ourselves and within our life. When anger is felt, when anger is processed, it can feed a village. When it's suppressed, it can burn the village down. But the anger was never the problem. Suppressing it is the problem. Believing that anger is the problem is the problem. So if you are someone who has historically had a really tough relationship with anger, you feel incredibly uncomfortable and unjustified to feel it or express it. I want to give you a couple of steps to help you start to harbor a more safe relationship with anger. And that's really what it's about. It's not a more positive relationship with anger. It's not a more loving relationship with anger. It's a safe relationship with anger. It's the knowledge and the realization that you are safe to feel angry. You get to be angry. And you get to feel safe in that. So the first thing to do is to honor it without analyzing it. So when you feel anger rising up in you, just name it. I am angry. I'm angry. I right now, in this moment, am angry. Not going into your head and saying, am I justified for being angry? Did that action that they just do deserve for me to be angry? Is this an appropriate response? Is this a big enough deal? Am I gonna piss people off by being angry? None of that. Get all that out the door. You are just honoring what you are feeling. You are being an observer of your emotions. I am angry. That's all it is. Just acknowledging it. No analyzing, just acknowledging. I am angry. And here's why this matters because the moment we start justifying and negotiating our right to feel something, we are already starting to suppress it immediately. We are already putting conditions on our own emotional experience. And an emotion does not need to earn its place. It does not need to pass a test before you are allowed to feel it. An emotion is happening because it is an energy in motion moving through your body. That's all. So when anger shows up, start with awareness. Just located in the body. Where do you feel it? Is it heat in your chest? Is it tightness in your jaw? A clenching in your stomach? Is your swirling? Is it your throat that's feeling like it's closing off? Just start to bring your awareness to where is this anger in my body? So we're getting out of our heads and staying in our body, letting the emotion be in our body. Step two is you are going to express it somatically without directing it at anyone. So once you have located it in your body, you get to move it through. And for me, it's screaming at the top of my lungs. For other people, it's punching pillows. My son loves to scream into a pillow and it's very, very effective. So find your way that your body wants to express that emotion. It could be one of the things that I've heard people do before, which sounds silly, but very effective. You know, those pool noodles, those long pool noodles, take that and just whack the hell out of the floor, a bed, a chair with it. Very effective. So the first thing you're gonna do is have the awareness without analyzing it, without justifying it, without having judgment. The second thing you're gonna do is just let it move through your body. Put a timer on for 90 seconds. And the third step is to act from a clear place, not a charged one. So once you have moved through the somatic expression, you get to check in with yourself. Am I still charged up? And that doesn't mean that you don't feel the anger in you. Like anger isn't something that you have to process and then poof, it's gone. That's just another way of suppressing it. You're just allowing yourself to just get some of the big stuff, the explosions out, right? In a safe space. So then when you go and you have to go act on it, you're doing it in a less charged place, a more clear place, a more grounded and stable place. And that's gonna change not only your effectiveness of expressing your anger, but it's also going to start to reshape the relationship that you have with it. You are going to start to teach your system, yourself, that you are safe to feel anger, that you are safe to express anger. Now, I want to be honest about something before we close because this is not something where it's like one and done. This is something that takes practice over time. And this is, like I said earlier, centuries of conditioning, of generations where we have been taught as women that anger is not safe. So, yeah, the learning and the relearning gets to take a little bit of time, but it's bit by bit where you get to acknowledge and allow yourself to feel safe with this emotion because it truly does get to become a beacon. It gets to become a place of clarity, of power, of aligned action. And it's not to say that there aren't going to be moments where you explode, because there will be. You're a human being. We all get to have human moments. What we drastically want to reduce is the amount of times we are having to swallow the anger, the amount of times that we are pushing it down and not letting it be something that we get to feel. So the goal is not to become a person who never feels anger imperfectly. That is that is not the goal ever. There's no such thing in the human experience. The goal is to become someone who has a relationship with it rather than a war with it, rather than ignoring it. And every time you pause and name it instead of swallowing it, every time you go to the car and scream your cute little head off instead of going to the person and firing off at all cylinders, every time you let your body express what your mind has been told not to feel, you are building that relationship. You're cultivating that safety that you get to have with anger. One moment, one action at a time. So hopefully, after listening to this podcast episode, you have a better understanding of not only the origin of where your relationship with anger came from, but also the opportunity that you have to reshape what that relationship looks like, to know that you don't have to justify feeling it or feel ashamed of feeling it, that it actually gets to be a compass for you. And the more you build a safe relationship with your anger, the more you build a safe relationship with yourself. And that is where everything changes. So thank you so much for being here today. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with a woman in your life who needs to hear it. Like, share, get the word out there. And until next time, be well. All right, so that's today's podcast. Thank you for listening. If you would like to learn more about the services that I provide to women, you can check out my website at Jessbergcoaching.com. That's J E S S B E R D C O A C H I N G dot com. Until next time, be well.