Season One-Episode Seven: Healing Anger Quietly | The Emotions I Learned to Hide

There is a kind of anger that doesn’t scream.
 It softens. It explains. It stays quiet.

In this episode, I explore the anger I didn’t know how to hold, how one childhood moment shaped the way I learned to be careful with my emotions, and how that pattern followed me into adulthood.

This is not a story about being silenced, but about what we quietly decide our feelings mean.

If you’ve ever been the calm one, the understanding one, the one who holds everything together… this episode is for you.

Transcript

Elizabeth 0:08

Anger doesn't always sound loud. Sometimes it sounds like a rhythm, a steady, quiet, pounding inside you, like something just beneath the surface, not asking to be heard. Just waiting. It doesn't interrupt, it doesn't take over. It stays in time with everything else you're trying to be. And if you listen closely, you can feel it. And the pause before you respond and the breath you take before you soften your tone in the moment you choose calm instead of what's actually there, because some emotions. Don't disappear. They just learn how to move quietly and over time you don't release them. You learn how to carry them. You learn how to stay steady, how to stay composed, how to stay in control, even when something inside you is asking to be felt. You hear it, but you don't let anyone else feel it. So you quiet it, you soften it, you hold it. I'm Kristin Elizabeth, and this is Wonderland Rewritten. Welcome, welcome back, or welcome in. This is a space where we gently step out of the roles we learn to play and into the truth of who we are. Becoming a space where we don't rush healing, we understand it, and today we're stepping into something tender. Not the anger that explodes, but the anger that gets held. There are stories we tell out loud and stories we learn to live quietly. The ones we soften, the ones we explain, and the ones we reshape just enough to make them easier for others to hold. But what happens when the story you've been telling isn't the one that actually needs to be heard? And if you were here with me in the last episode, you heard me talk about Overexplaining. How I learned to soften my words, to ease the room, to make sure everything made sense. But what I didn't fully understand then was that my explaining was often covering something deeper because before I could explain my emotions, I had already decided they weren't safe to fully feel. Before we go further, I wanna say this clearly. I wasn't raised in a home where I wasn't allowed to feel my parents loved me. They listened, they cared. This isn't a story about being silenced. It's a story about what I made things mean. There's a kind of anger that doesn't scream. It smiles, it nods. It explains, and if you've ever carried that kind of anger, you know how heavy it becomes. I remember a moment from when I was very young. I was upset with my younger brother. I don't remember why anymore. Just the feeling. That tightness, that frustration that feels too big for such a small body. We were walking into the house and I was ahead of him and instead of holding the door, I let it go, the door shut behind me, and then a scream. Not just crying, not just surprise, a sound that stopped everything. He had fallen hit the patio and suddenly everything around me got loud voices, movement, urgency, but inside me, everything went quiet. I remember standing there not moving, not speaking, just feeling something I didn't understand yet. Not just fear, but the weight of realizing something inside me had reached someone else. In that moment, something shifted. It wasn't just that he got hurt, it was what I made that moment mean. I didn't think that was a mistake. I thought, what if my feelings hurt people? Not because anyone told me that, but because I cared. There were voices, concern, panic, and I remember standing there. Not just scared of what happened, but carrying something. I didn't know how to process that little girl standing by the door. She wasn't shamed, but she felt ashamed. Not because anyone placed that on her, but because someone she loved got hurt. And in trying to make sense of that, she made her feelings the problem. So instead of learning how to hold her anger. She learned how to hide it, and that didn't stop there. I became really good at holding everyone else's emotions. I could sit with frustration, with disappointment, with tension. I knew exactly what to do. Soften, reassure, explain, but when it came to my own anger. I treated it like something dangerous, so I gave others permission to feel while quietly denying it to myself, and I didn't see that then. But that changes you. I thought I was keeping the peace, but I was losing my voice the anger didn't disappear. It stored itself. But there was one time I didn't store it. I was a teenager. There was a boy at school with a nasally voice that carried down the hallway. He had heard something from one of my friends. Information passed along like currency, and he used it against me. Every day. Every single day. A holler, a joke, a reminder. The teacher never stopped it, never intervened, never said that's enough. So the anger built, quiet, coiled, waiting until one day. I snapped. I picked up my textbook and slammed it against his head. The sound echoed, the hallway went still. He was shocked and immediately so was I. I remember thinking, I'm gonna be in trouble. But I wasn't, no detention, no punishment. The teacher who never stopped the taunting allowed my anger to land, and what I remember most is not relief. It was guilt. I felt awful. I looked at him and wondered if he was hurt. The anger evaporated. All that remained was shame. I didn't feel powerful. I felt wrong, and in that moment I learned something dangerous. If anger comes out, you become the problem. So I made a decision, it stays inside. Years later, in my first marriage, the fire returned. Criticism layered over exhaustion, correction, disguised as guidance control, wrapped in concern, every breath in certain rooms. Made my chest tighten. I over explained. I apologized. I tried to be better, but one day I yelled back. Not soft, not measured loud. The anger that had been swallowed for years finally erupted. And what did it create? Not resolution, not clarity. Chaos. Raise voices. Name calling. And then the most devastating moment of all my sweet, innocent daughter started repeating us. She laughed like she was learning, like this was normal. That sound shattered me because the fire wasn't just burning between adults, it was shaping her, and I knew I cannot let her grow up believing that this is what love sounds like. So once again, I swallowed it better to burn inside than burn the house down at work. Anger took a different form. It didn't explode. It became fight or flight meetings where I wasn't heard. Decisions questioned repeatedly. Ideas acknowledged only after someone else repeated them. I smiled. I stayed professional, but inside my nervous system was on fire, heart racing, head throbbing, jaw clinched so tightly. I woke up at night grinding my teeth. Anger moved into my body because I refused to let it move into the room. It showed up as tension. As exhaustion, as emotional rollercoasters, no one else could see the real victim of suppressed anger is the one carrying it, and I carried it everywhere. Here's what no one teaches. Little girls. Anger isn't cruelty. It's clarity. It's the body saying this isn't okay, but when no one models how to hold anger safely, you either explode or you bury it alive. And I did both. The girl with the textbook ran out of containment. The woman yelling ran outta silence, and the rest of the time I swallowed flames. I wasn't unstable, I was unheard. I wasn't dramatic. I was dismissed. I wasn't volatile. I was exhausted from protecting everyone else's comfort at the expense of my own truth. The anger I wasn't allowed to feel never disappeared. It just waited and my body paid the price. Now I'm learning something different. Anger express cleanly is not destruction. It's boundary. It's protection, it's fire contained in a lantern instead of a wildfire or a buried ember. And maybe if someone had stepped in when that boy taunted me, maybe if someone had said, you don't have to carry this alone. Maybe if I had known that anger doesn't make me dangerous, I wouldn't have feared it so much. And before I close today, I wanna say something not to you. But to myself this week, my anger didn't get loud. It didn't slam doors or raise its voice. It turned inward. It sounded like pressure, like tightness in my chest, like the quiet voice that said, you should have done more. You're falling behind. You don't need rest. Because this weekend I stepped away. I broke my rhythm. I chose to pause and instead of letting that be enough, I punished myself for it. Not with words anyone else could hear, the kind that turned into anxiety, into urgency, into this constant feeling that you're already behind and I had to sit with that, not to fix it, not to explain it, but to recognize it for what it was, anger, just not the kind I was taught to look for. Because sometimes anger doesn't come out, it turns in. It becomes pressure, perfection, control the inability to let yourself rest without earning it first. And today I'm choosing something different. I'm choosing not to make rest something I have to justify. I'm choosing not to let my own voice be the one that tears me down. I'm choosing to meet myself with the same grace I've spent my whole life giving away because I am not behind. I am human. And maybe if your anger has been turning inward too, this is your reminder. You don't have to carry it like that anymore. So I'll leave you with this. Where did you learn that anger makes you the problem? What fire are you still holding in your jaw? In your chest, in your silence, and what would happen if you stopped fearing your anger and started listening to it. This is Wonderland rewritten, and I am learning that the fire I swallowed was never meant to destroy me. It was meant to protect me. and if this episode resonated with you, stay with me because in the next episode, we're gonna step into what it looks like to experience loss without losing yourself, to feel deeply, without being taken under by it. Until then, take a moment today to notice what you're feeling without trying to fix it. Just notice, because sometimes that's where the healing begins. Thank you for joining me today, just a few hours later than I normally post my episode. Join me next week for the next episode of Wonderland Rewritten. Until then.