Anger

Anger is often described as a difficult emotion for women. It’s an emotion associated with aggression.

I am actually a fan of the emotion myself, I think the role of anger is to alert us when we’ve been wronged.  The experience of anger alerts us when something doesn’t align with what we want to our lives to be like, almost like a little red flag asking us to look.

To be clear right from the beginning, I’m talking here about the emotion of anger, not about abuse, violence or righteous exercise of aggression. I’m talking about the hot rage in the belly of women whove been hurt, that has never seen the light of day.

Anger is an emotion that will feed on itself or motivate itself, so engagement with it should be mindful, aware and observant. Anger however isn’t bad, or I don’t think so. It is an emotion on the spectrum right alongside happy sad and all the rest.
When women express anger, I embrace the opportunity for women to freely experience this emotion. I often refer to anger as a top layer emotion, with something else underlying it, perhaps shame sadness grief. So making room to experience and process anger, can give us a path into the underlying experiences.

It can be useful to provide expression for anger, although this must be contained safely. There are a number of exercises that may be useful in the expression of anger, some of them should be done within the safety container of a therapeutic relationship, some of them can be done on your own.

I dont believe Anger should be suppressed, and I believe that suppressed anger can resurface as sorts of sadness and perhaps even depression.
The primary principles when working with anger are that you and others must be safe, and we must suspend judgement for that anger.

So what exercises might be helpful with anger?
In my work, one of the most useful exercises that I use, for the type of experiences that women bring into the work that I do, is the Anger Letter.

Women that I see are often experiencing anger in response to the way that they have been treated by a person in their life, or the outcomes in their life due to the behavior of the person that they have known.

An anger letter is a simple format that allows the expression of emotion and all of the thoughts generated by the mind in response to the emotion to be released without judgement.

To write a letter you will need blank paper and a pen. When writing an anger letter we use “free writing”, this means that we don’t reread it, we don’t edit it, we don’t consider our spelling and grammar, we simply allow the pen to write on the paper with whatever comes.

I always encourage women to destroy the anger letter without reading it. This is for two reasons, the first being destroying the letter makes the process safe, there is no worry that someone will read what has been written and the safety container will be broken. The second reason is as I said earlier, anger is an emotion that will feed on itself when reflected and reviewed, and so rereading and anger letter is likely to reignite the experience of the emotion.

The format of an anger letter is as follows;
Dear…..

All I ever wanted from you was…

All I ever got was…

How I feel about this is…

And then closing the letter with a paragraph in your owns words that acknowledges that the behavior and treatment of you by that person is their responsibility to hold and not yours.

Then the letter is destroyed.

Some people do this simply by tearing it up and shredding it. Some people prefer more of a ceremony and ritual around the release of the anger letter which can include burning it or perhaps putting it in water.

An activity as quiet as writing sometimes doesn’t meet the needs of the bodily response to anger. Some people find it more helpful to move their bodies such as with vigorous physical activity, brisk walk including moving your arms, going for a run or use of a punching bag provides more opportunity to express the bubbling up emotions. Such movement is good. If you’re somewhere in the middle, don’t be afraid to write your anger letter with a fat red crayon in really big writing. use your arms and shoulders to write too.

If your anger feels too great to manage on your own you should definitely engage the services of a therapist you trust to provide a loving presence while you engage in this activity. Your therapist will also have some other ideas for the release and process of Anger, don’t be afraid to ask them.

In anycase Anger is not bad, it is simply a flag that we should turn our attention to with gentleness, observation and attention to safety of ourselves and others.

Gentle with You

A