Episode 8: The Many Faces of Anger

Anger is one of the most misunderstood emotions we carry. In this episode we explore all of its sides.

Contact me: vevian@vozmediano.com

Transcript

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Welcome back to Breaking the Cycle, the podcast about unpacking your roots and rewriting your story. I'm Vivian, your host, and I'm so glad you're here. Today we are talking about the most misunderstood, most judged, and maybe the most necessary emotion of all. And that's anger. Let's get into it. Let's start somewhere that might surprise you. Anger is not the problem. Anger is actually one of the most important and most protective emotions you have. Healthy anger is the part of you that knows when something is wrong. It is the internal signal that says, this is not okay. This crossed the line. I deserve to be treated better than this. It is the emotion that gives you the energy to say no, to set a boundary, to walk away from something that is harming you, to stand up for yourself when someone treats you or makes you feel smaller. Without access to healthy anger, you cannot protect yourself. You cannot know where you end and someone else begins. You become permeable, endlessly accommodating, unable to recognize when you are being mistreated because the very emotion designed to alert you to that mistreatment has been shut down. Think about that for a moment. The people who struggle the most with boundaries, the chronic people pleasers, the ones who stay too long in relationships that hurt them, the ones who cannot say no are almost always people who are taught early and thoroughly that their anger was not allowed, not acceptable, not safe to express. So they lost access to the very emotion that would have told them, enough, this is not okay. Healthy anger is not aggression, it is not cruelty, it is information, very important information. It is the body's way of saying something here needs to change. For some people, anger is their identity, a way of moving through the world, a protective layer that kept everything threatening at a safe distance. These are the people who lead with edge, with hardness, with a sharpness that keeps others from getting too close. The woman in the workplace who's known as the office bitch, the person in the family who's always ready for a fight. The partner who goes on the offense before anyone has a chance to hurt them first. And underneath that armor, almost without expectation, is someone for whom softer emotions never felt safe. Sadness felt like weakness. Vulnerability felt like an invitation to be hurt. Fear felt like something to be hidden at all cost. But anger, anger felt like it was a powerful emotion to have, almost as protection. As if I portray this emotion, no one can hurt me. Like some form of control in a life where so much felt out of control. So anger became their go-to emotion, the language for everything, for hurt, for fear, for longing, for grief, because it was the only emotion that felt safe enough to show. And that armor made sense. It protected someone who needed protecting. But armor that you never take off stops being protection and starts being a prison. And the relationships, the intimacy, the genuine connection that every human being needs, those cannot get through the armor, no matter how much a part of you wants them to. Now I want to speak to the other side of this, because for every person who leads with anger, there is someone who has shut it down completely, who cannot access her anger at all, for whom the very feeling of anger rising in their body triggers immediate fear. And almost always that person grew up in a household where someone else's anger was super scary. My personal experience is I grew up with a father who used to drink and would beat my mom and say horrible things. And for me, anger was a very, very scary emotion to have. And just the thought of getting angry myself would scare me. And when you grow up with a parent whose rage was unpredictable, like mine was, whose anger meant violence or humiliation, or an atmosphere so thick that tension that you learned to disappear, to appease, to become invisible just to stay safe. This was my story. This is when your nervous system makes a very logical decision. Because your own anger might escalate things, might trigger them, might make everything worse. So you learn to swallow it before it even surfaces, to smile when you're furious, to say you're fine when you actually aren't, to absorb mistreatment with a kind of eerie calm that looks like maturity, but it's actually terror wearing a very convincing disguise. These are the people who say, I actually don't get angry, and they mean it. Not because they have nothing to be angry about, but because the pathway to their own anger was closed off so early and so completely that they genuinely cannot feel it anymore. And losing access to your anger is extremely scary because all of that unexpressed anger, all of that legitimate, valid, protective anger goes somewhere. It turns inward, it turns into that critical inner voice, that self-blame, the inability to ask for what you need. You might even not know what you need, your boundaries when you're saying no, this is not okay. Get out of my space. Here is a thing I've witnessed over and over and over in my work. A lot of people who are chronically angry are using anger as a armor, as a way of protecting themselves. Because anger can look like a very strong emotion. It's a representation of saying, you can't fuck with me. You are not allowed to get deep with me. If you cross my line, I'm just gonna get more angry at you. But a lot of times, what I've witnessed in my work, that the people who are chronically angry, actually, I'm gonna say all the time, are actually the saddest people you will ever meet. Anger is not your enemy. It never was. It is one of the most important and honest emotions that you have. It tells you when something is wrong. It tries to protect you, it speaks up when everything else has gone quiet. The question is not how do I get rid of it? The question is, what is it trying to tell me and whether you are finally ready to listen, not just in anger, but to everything underneath it? Before I let you go, I want to leave you with two questions to sit with this week. The first one is, where in your body are you feeling the most anger? Check in with your body and see what that anger actually feels like. Does it feel like fire in your stomach? Does it feel like tension in your shoulders? Does it feel like stiffness in your legs? Does it feel like heat in your hands? What does that actually feel like in this very moment in your body as you're checking in? Don't judge it, don't critique it, just check in with your body and see what that feels like. The second question If that part of your body that's expressing itself could speak, what would it say? What is the first thing that that part of your body is saying? Don't get logistical about it. What is the first thing that it's telling you? And maybe this is the third question. When was the first time you felt this way? I'm giving you these three questions. These are the questions that I ask my clients as we go through stages of internal family systems. It allows you to connect with your body in this very moment, in a way that talk therapy does not allow you to get to, because our body is constantly talking to us, it's constantly giving us messages. And it's up to us to decide whether we want to listen or if we don't. Now, I also want to say that you could feel numb to this experience, and that is also a message. Because if you're somebody who has been protecting yourself from feeling anger, the body is actually going to block you from sensing where you're feeling that anger. And that is okay too. This is also just acknowledging how your body is responding as you're trying to connect with it. So this is a space of not being judgmental with yourself, not critiquing yourself, not thinking you're doing this wrong. This space is not a place for shame, is not a place for criticizing yourself. It is just a space and a place to be curious. If you enjoyed this podcast or podcast episode, or any of my episodes, I would love for you to leave me a five-star review. It helps more people to see this podcast and it also inspires me to create more episodes for you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I will see you again next week.