The Gift of Anger
How Exploring My Repressed Emotions Transformed Fear into Strength
Even though emotions have substantial evolutionary benefits--they tell us whether we're safe, help us communicate, and make better decisions--not everyone has equal access to their emotions. We learn to suppress our feelings from very early on, and it works differently for different people. These unconscious coping mechanisms are useful in the sense that they allow us to detach from stimuli that could have otherwise overwhelmed our immature nervous systems, or they help us stay connected to our carers. Unfortunately, suppressing emotions tends to stop being necessary as we get older, but the mechanisms we learned stay with us, often becoming maladaptive. I first read about this in Gabor Mate's "When the Body Says No", a book I wholeheartedly recommend. Here, I want to talk about emotional suppression in general, and about my journey of learning to express anger in particular.
Some people suppress all emotions in equal measure, which leads to the dampening of the whole emotional spectrum. If you think about the amplitude of one's emotional experience (max of the absolute value), suppression lowers this value causing the person to remain closer to the baseline all the time: the highs are lower, and the lows are higher. While not terrible — life is ok — this might make you feel less alive, less inspired; life is just less vivid, kind of like watching a movie on a low-contrast screen. Incidentally, this is a bit similar to how some antidepressants work, particularly SSRIs. If you take them because you feel very sad or anxious, the intensity of these emotions will go down allowing you to resume normal function, but so will positive emotions like joy, excitement, contentment, or love. I think SSRIs can be extremely helpful but they also mask issues that are best dealt with directly. I know they did for me: I was exhausted after working for a conference deadline (NeurIPS 2018) and I just started my internship at Deepmind. What I needed was a break from work and a change of environment, not adding a potent chemical to my diet. My point is: make sure you receive a comprehensive diagnosis from a specialist instead of just trusting a GP after a 15-minute consultation.
Other people learn to suppress emotions selectively. They might have no problem with feeling joy or sadness, but they might never feel anger. I guess I'm somewhere in between. For the longest time, I experienced next to no emotions other than anxiety, and occasionally mild excitement. But anger... I was so detached from it that I used to wonder why people argue; road rage was a complete mystery to me and, when someone got angry at me, I would just politely listen and engage in a discussion -- a reaction that often infuriated the other person. It's not like anger was completely absent from my life, though. I used to like violent movies, so watching violence, and occasionally I would have this fantasy of punching someone in the street. Sometimes I would even see myself doing that in my mind's eye: there could be an old lady passing me and I would just have this vision of smashing her face in. Carl Jung would describe this as one's shadow: a part of your personality that you have no conscious access to and which often manifests in your life in harmful ways. Integrating your shadow starts by noticing what it is that you repress, e.g., by noticing what is it that you find particularly repulsive or triggering in other people, and then looking for that in yourself. If you want to explore this further, here's a great intro to shadow work by Heidi Priebe.
Of course, I had no idea about shadow work, and I thought anger is pointless and just not my thing. Until..., one day, I got enraged: I wanted to destroy every bus stop I passed on my way home; As before in my visions, I wanted to punch an old lady I met on the way, but this time I was real furious and I had an urge to actually do it. I was fuming, and no wonder: my precious bike which I owned for 10 years, which I cycled thousands of kilometers on, which I've taken on adventures, fixed countless times, and spent my pocket money on upgrading, got stolen. It survived all of 14 days in Oxford where I had just moved. Waking up the next day I was like whoa, that was fucking wild. I've never felt like that before. It was frightening, but also so cool, these unlimited swaths of energy passing through me. But then it was gone, and I've been cut off from my anger once more. In fact, it was so deeply suppressed that even after I unlocked most of my emotional range, I had next to no access to anger -- I'm still learning to work with it.
These days I get angry fairly often, and I love the feeling, which is contrary to most peoples' experience of anger. Once I went to a workshop on non-violent communication (NVC, a technique developed by Marshal Rosenberg, I totally recommend the book). One of the sections was devoted to "transforming anger", and I remember raising my hand and saying that hey, not all anger is bad, that it's actually good for us. Everyone in the room, including the teacher, just stared at me blankly. Anger can be destructive and divisive -- just think of the currently raging wars -- particularly when you repress it, it has no way out, or if it's caused by deeply-rooted trauma rather than an acute experience. But healthy anger is really important for our wellbeing. I first encountered the notion of healthy anger in Gabor Mate's work and his description matched my experience: when I feel anger, I relax, become more confident, and more energetic. My usually tight jaw softens and shifts down a little, shoulders pull back, knees bend slightly, and breath gets slower, deeper. Also, my hands loosen up — but in a quiet-before-the-storm manner: I'm ready to pounce at a moment's notice if I so choose. But I'm also ready to raise my voice, to say whatever needs to be said to protect my boundaries, to make sure that I'm safe both physically and psychologically. I'm not afraid. It feels like a superpower.
In fact, Mate describes anger as a boundary-setting mechanism protecting individuals from harm and allowing them to preserve their integrity. Lack of a healthy anger response might be a direct cause of depression, and emotional suppression in general is associated with an increased risk of autoimmune disease and cancer. So learning to express anger might not only increase your life satisfaction by letting you get and stay closer to your true self, but it might also extend your life.
Only re-learning to express anger is not that easy. Even now, most of the time when I experience anger, it's after the fact. I'm often still afraid or otherwise unable to get angry in the moment when the situation requires it. Instead, I might get sad — sad for my inner child, for failing to protect his boundaries. Often I don't even know why I get sad, and I realize it only later, when I'm at home, often feeling low or quite shaken by whatever happened. That's when the anger comes in. I start fuming, my fingers might claw or my hands ball into fists, my face might assume an angry beast-like expression, and I might hiss or growl. It might last a few minutes; sometimes it's followed by a short, cathartic cry, and then it's gone. While that might sound weird to you, for me it happens every few days, and I think it's awesome. Yes, I'd prefer to be able to feel anger in the moment and to express it, to protect myself by acting on it, but in the absence of that, I'm grateful to my body for being able to process these emotions, these tensions, instead of have them affect me for days or weeks on end, which used to be the case.
So how do you practice healthy anger? For me, it starts with looking for discomfort and fear in myself. Am I uncomfortable in a particular situation? Can I change it? Do I choose not to? Why? Is it because I'm afraid? If so, I know my boundary is violated, and I know that anger would be a healthy response but I'm suppressing it because I'm afraid of the consequences -- often of potential rejection. Being vulnerable, bringing up the discomfort, and talking about it, helps. It not only protects your boundaries, meaning that you do not abandon yourself in that situation, but it also shows you that it's ok to express your boundaries and to protect them. It might wake up anger in you, and next time it might be a little easier to speak up: because you might actually feel that surge of energy that anger brings.
But first of all: stay safe. A few days ago, as I was cycling through the streets of London, a car honked, sped up past me, inches from my elbow. I got scared at first and then angry. I started mumbling some expletives but fairly quickly I raised my voice and shouted a few things into the distance. Interesting, I thought, smiling at the jolt of energy that was flowing through my body. As a matter of practice, I thought, I'll try to express my anger if I manage to catch up with the car at the next lights. Well, I did: I raised my voice at the lady behind the wheel. Before I knew it, a huge guy jumped out from the other side of the car and got into my face, threatening to rip my head off. I quickly became submissive and tried to de-escalate the conflict. Physical aggression is not something I was going for. While healthy anger is awesome, I might have overdone it at the moment and almost paid a price for it. However, as dangerous as it might have been, I left the situation feeling amused, happy to be able to stand up for myself, and I felt that my inner child was happy. Well done, I thought. Just make sure to stay safe.
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I want to talk a bit about developing and deploying unconscious coping mechanisms--because that's what emotion suppression is. In the above, I talk about how people "learn" to suppress their emotions. This makes it sound as if it is a voluntary, conscious action as if that person makes a conscious decision to not feel a certain way. I'm mentioning this because it's something I didn't understand at first and I felt a lot of shame as a result. If I read, say, that a narcissist is prone to manipulating people, I used to have this mental image where the said narcissist thinks about it, decides he should engage in manipulation, and so makes a conscious decision to manipulate. It's the same with emotional eating when you're not supposed to and a ton of other unconscious mechanisms that rule us. They're completely unconscious; there is no conscious decision involved; on the contrary, the affected person might consciously know what's happening (eating, or manipulating someone), hate the fact that they're doing it, and yet be unable to change their behavior. I suppose it's a bit different with emotional suppression, because by definition we're not aware of the thing we're suppressing, but it's still not a choice to do that. Any language that suggests agency on the part of the affected individual is misleading at best. I'm explaining this because I felt a lot of shame when I was unable to stop eating while struggling with a binge eating disorder; I was also deeply troubled when it turned out that I was acting in an anxiously attached manner in my last serious relationship. But I've never decided to do these things! I would scream internally. Well, that's the point. It's good to be mindful of that when consuming popular psychology such as this essay.