Make Your Anger Your Best Friend: Learning to Work with Your Most Misunderstood Emotion

Written By Emily O'Neal

We’re at a moment in time where the world feels extremely chaotic and uncertain. We’re watching immigration enforcement escalate into violence. I’m sure you’ve all seen the videos of American citizens being murdered in the streets by ICE. We know people (including children) are being detained without due process. And just as we’re trying to process all this, the Epstein files get released, and we’re confronted all over again with how power protects predators while survivors wait decades for even the smallest acknowledgment of harm. The news cycle brings fresh outrages daily.

And that’s just the collective stuff. Closer to home, you’re navigating that difficult relationship where you can never quite say what you mean. The workplace where your ideas get credited to someone else. The family dynamics where you’re expected to keep the peace no matter what it costs you. The constant pressure to keep it together when everything feels like it’s falling apart.

If you’re feeling angry right now, let me say this clearly: your anger is not only valid, but also necessary. It’s the alarm bell telling you that something is deeply wrong and needs your attention.

But here’s what I see in my practice over and over: people who don’t even know they’re angry. They come to me with migraines, digestive issues, chronic exhaustion, or this pervasive sense of numbness. They describe feeling depressed or anxious but would never use the word “angry” to describe themselves. When I gently ask, “Is there any anger here?” they look genuinely confused. “Angry? No, I don’t really get angry.”

Many of us weren’t taught to recognize anger, let alone process it or channel it toward change. We got conflicting messages: Don’t be angry—it’s unspiritual, unfeminine, uncivilized. Or the opposite: punch a pillow, scream into the void, let it all out. Neither approach actually helps us develop a mature relationship with one of our most powerful emotions.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve historically had a hard time cultivating a relationship with my anger. That said, once I did, everything changed. I realized anger was one of the most important emotions I could have, and once I stopped fearing it, I could use it as an agent for transformation and change. Anger has become one of my favorite tools for understanding myself, my needs, and what changes I need to make in my life.

Ask yourself, what if anger isn’t something to transcend or eliminate, but a vehicle for necessary change? What if the real spiritual work isn’t about becoming perpetually calm, but about learning to work skillfully with the fire of anger?

What Anger Actually Is (And Why It Matters)

Let me start with the basics, because understanding what’s happening in your body and brain can help you hold this emotion more gently.

At the neural level, anger involves your amygdala (that’s your threat-detection center, the part of your brain that’s constantly scanning for danger) and your ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is your emotional regulation hub. Think of anger as your nervous system’s alarm bell. It’s information. It tells you when boundaries have been crossed, when something matters deeply to you, or when a situation requires your attention.

Here’s what makes anger different from other difficult emotions: anger is fundamentally an approach emotion. Unlike fear, which makes you want to flee, anger mobilizes you to move toward the problem. When you feel angry, you want to DO something. You feel energy, power, momentum. This is precisely why anger becomes a vehicle for change, both personally and collectively.

Pema Chödrön writes that “feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back.” Your anger is showing you exactly where change needs to happen.

Your anger about what’s happening in the world right now? About survivors of abuse watching their abusers’ networks get protected? About being dismissed at work? About being taken for granted in your relationship? That anger is information. Hold that gently. It’s trying to tell you something important.

The Hidden Anger: Understanding Suppression and Repression

Let me define these terms clearly, because this distinction matters.

Repression is when anger gets pushed so far down that you genuinely don’t know it’s there. It’s unconscious. You’re not choosing to hide it—you’ve buried it so completely that you’ve lost access to it entirely. This is the client who tells me, “I never get angry. I just don’t really feel that emotion,” while their jaw is clenched tight enough to crack teeth.

Suppression is different. With suppression, you know you’re angry, you feel it, but you make a conscious choice not to express it. You smile through the meeting where your boss takes credit for your work. You say “it’s fine” when it’s absolutely not fine. You feel the anger, but you push it down deliberately.

Why do we do this?

Most of it comes from childhood. Maybe you had caregivers who rarely showed emotion or talked about feelings. Maybe you were shamed or punished for expressing anger. Maybe you were told your emotions were wrong, or that you were “too sensitive,” or that “nice girls don’t get angry.” Maybe expressing anger in your household meant someone got hurt, so you learned that anger equals danger.

I had a client once who literally could not access the word “angry” about anything. She’d describe situations that would make anyone furious like being sexually harassed at work, watching her mother belittle her in front of her kids, and she’d say, “I felt... uncomfortable. It was frustrating.” When I gently reflected to her, “That sounds like it might have made you angry,” she physically recoiled. “Oh no, I don’t get angry. Angry people are mean.”

That’s repression. The anger is there, but she can’t see it because somewhere along the way, she learned that anger made her unlovable.

For many women, there are additional layers. Research shows that when women express anger, they’re more likely to be labeled as “difficult,” “emotional,” or “hysterical.” We learn to camouflage our anger or redirect it inward, where it shows up as headaches, digestive issues, chronic pain.

For men, the pattern often flips. Expressing anger outwardly may be more socially acceptable, but the vulnerability or hurt feelings beneath that anger feel too threatening to acknowledge. So, anger becomes the only “acceptable” emotion while sadness, fear, or pain get buried underneath.

The common thread? We learn that anger threatens our connections, our safety, our belonging. So, we bury it. We become “nice.” We accommodate. We people-please.

And the anger goes underground.

What Happens to Buried Anger

Here’s the thing about repressed anger: it doesn’t disappear. It transforms. It shape-shifts. And the consequences ripple through every dimension of your life.

In Your Mind

Psychoanalysts have known for over a century that repressed anger, turned inward, becomes depression. The anger becomes self-directed. You start attacking yourself instead of addressing what’s actually wrong.

I see this constantly. Someone comes in feeling numb, exhausted, like they’re moving through life underwater. We start exploring, and underneath that flatness is a mountain of unfelt rage—at their family, at their job, at the ways they’ve had to shrink themselves to be acceptable.

The energy it takes to keep anger buried is enormous. People with deeply repressed anger often describe feeling chronically lethargic. Nothing excites them. They rarely feel angry, but they also rarely feel much of anything else. The anger has taken all their vital force and locked it away.

Sometimes repression creates paranoia. Rather than acknowledging their own hostile feelings, people project them outward. “Everyone is angry at me. People are judging me. The world feels dangerous.” When really, it’s their own unfelt anger that they’re encountering everywhere they look.

In Your Body

Dr. Gabor Maté writes that when emotions are repressed, “this inhibition disarms the body’s defenses against illness. Repression disorganizes and confuses our physiological defenses so that these defenses go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors.”

Your body keeps the score. The anger you don’t express gets expressed through your body instead. Anger will always find a way to communicate, and this communication can manifest in strange and interesting ways if we don’t build a relationship to this incredibly powerful emotion.

The research backs this up. Suppressing anger is linked to higher blood pressure, digestive issues like IBS, chronic pain syndromes, and compromised immune function. When anger becomes an ingrained pattern of repression, you experience prolonged exposure to high cortisol, which wreaks havoc on almost every system in your body.

I worked with a client who had debilitating migraines three times a week. We tried everything—diet, sleep hygiene, stress management. Finally, we started exploring what was happening right before the migraines hit. Every single time, it was after a situation where she couldn’t speak up. Her mother criticized her parenting—migraine. Her colleague undermined her in a meeting—migraine. Her partner dismissed her feelings—migraine.

Her body was expressing what her voice couldn’t.

In Your Relationships

Here’s where it gets painful. People transfer their original fear (usually the childhood fear of abandonment or punishment) onto everyone in their current life. All authority figures become people they’re deeply afraid of offending. Even with friends, peers, colleagues, random strangers, they dare not speak up when lines are crossed.

But anger doesn’t just disappear because you don’t express it directly. It leaks out in other ways.

Passive-aggressive comments. Resentment that builds until you suddenly cut someone off completely. Explosive reactions to minor triggers while the real source remains unaddressed. You snap at your partner for leaving dishes in the sink when you’re actually furious that your boss undermined you in the meeting. You become irritable with everyone around you when what you really can’t acknowledge is your rage about systemic injustice.

The anger finds a way out. It just goes to the wrong address and we damage the relationships that matter most while never actually addressing what we’re truly angry about.

The Myth of “Venting” (Or: Why Rage Rooms Don’t Work)

Okay, so if repression causes all these problems, we should just let it rip, right? Punch the pillow. Go to a rage room. Scream into the void. Get it all out.

Not so fast.

A 2024 meta-analysis of 154 studies involving over 10,000 participants found that arousal-increasing activities (hitting punching bags, going for an angry run, intense physical catharsis) were largely ineffective at reducing anger. In some cases, they increased it.

So that rage room you’ve been eyeing? It’s not doing what you think it’s doing. You’re essentially practicing getting more activated, teaching your nervous system that the appropriate response to anger is escalation.

What worked? Activities that decreased physiological arousal. Deep breathing. Meditation. Mindfulness. Progressive muscle relaxation. The researchers described it as “turning down the heat” rather than stoking the fire.

This doesn’t mean anger should be ignored or stuffed down. It means we need to learn how to be with anger in a way that allows us to access its wisdom without being consumed by its fire.

If punching pillows doesn’t work and repression creates illness, what does work?

The answer lies in fundamentally changing your relationship to anger. Not eliminating it. Not amplifying it. Transforming how you hold it.

Feel It Fully, But Lower the Arousal

Here’s the paradox at the heart of anger work: you must feel the emotion completely while simultaneously calming your nervous system.

Anger has power. It can blow the cork off your emotional volcano and release the turmoil below—the grief, the sadness, the helplessness. Those are all disempowering emotions. Anger is empowering. It contains energy for change.

The key is learning to harness that energy rather than being consumed by it.

The Practice: Mindfulness for Anger

Let me walk you through a practice. You can do this right now, or you can come back to it when anger arises.

Find a comfortable seat. Check in with your body. Feel where it makes contact with the chair or cushion. Notice your breath without trying to change it. Just observe. In, out. In, out.

Now, bring to mind a situation that angered you. Don’t go for your biggest rage—start with something moderately irritating.

Where in your body do you experience this anger? Really explore this. You may be tempted to push the feeling away. Instead, get curious. Investigate how it feels.

Is it in your chest? Your throat? Your jaw? Your belly?

Does it feel hot or cold? Tight or expansive? Does it pulse, or sit heavy and still?

Notice what sensations emerge. Does the anger increase or decrease in intensity as you watch it? Does it change or move?

Now practice bringing compassion to the anger. The feeling of anger is normal, part of being human. See if you can cradle your own anger like a mother cradling a newborn. What happens if you hold it in this way, with tenderness and care?

You might notice that when you stop fighting the anger, when you stop trying to make it go away, it begins to shift on its own. Not because you’re forcing it to change, but because you’re finally giving it the attention it’s been demanding.

Slowly bring your attention back to the breath. Stay with it for a while, letting your emotions settle into the spaciousness of your breath and awareness.

The Three Rs of Mindful Anger

When anger arises in daily life, you can use this simple framework:

  1. Recognize that anger is present (Name it: “Anger is here”)

  2. Realize it’s okay to feel this way (This is information, not a moral failing)

  3. Return to your breath (Three deep breaths: in for four, hold for four, out for six)

That longer exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system and begins to calm the anger response. You can do this anywhere—in the meeting, in the car, in the middle of a difficult conversation.

When we are angry, we tend to become the anger. The breath becomes quick, shallow, agitated. The mind and body disconnect. Returning to the breath brings you back to yourself.

Anger as a Vehicle for Change

When we stop repressing anger and start working with it consciously, something profound happens. The anger reveals what we value. It shows us where our boundaries need to be drawn or reinforced. It illuminates injustice that we might otherwise tolerate.

Let’s be clear: there’s a crucial difference between righteous anger and destructive rage.

Righteous anger fuels sustained action for justice. It drove the Civil Rights Movement, the labor movement, the suffragette movement, every major social transformation in human history. Righteous anger says, “This is not acceptable, and I will work to change it.”

Destructive rage burns hot and fast, leaving wreckage but creating no lasting change. It lashes out without purpose, harms indiscriminately, and ultimately exhausts itself.

The difference isn’t in the intensity of the feeling. It’s in our relationship to it and what we choose to do with its energy.

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: “We should not fight our anger, because anger is our self, a part of our self. Anger is of an organic nature, like love. We have to take good care of anger. And because it is an organic entity, it is possible to transform it into another organic entity. The garbage can be transformed back into compost, into lettuce, and into cucumber.”

Your anger isn’t garbage to throw away. It’s raw material for transformation.

Your Anger Practice: A Framework

When anger arises, try this:

Step 1: Notice immediately

  • Name it: “Anger is here”

  • Locate it in your body (Where do you feel it? Chest? Throat? Jaw? Belly?)

  • Rate its intensity on a 1-10 scale

Step 2: Create space

  • Take three deep breaths to begin lowering arousal (in for 4, hold for 4, out for 6)

  • Remind yourself: this is information, not an emergency

Step 3: Investigate

  • What boundary was crossed?

  • What value does this protect?

  • What is this anger trying to tell me?

Step 4: Process

  • Use mindfulness to hold the anger with compassion

  • Journal about what the anger is teaching you

  • Identify the specific change that needs to happen

Step 5: Choose your response

  • Separate the anger from the action (you can feel furious and still choose how you respond)

  • Communicate assertively, not aggressively

  • Focus on the behavior that needs to change, not attacking character

  • Be specific about what you need

  • Take action that aligns with your values

Let me give you a concrete example. You’re in a meeting, and your boss takes credit for your work. Again.

You notice anger arising—7/10 intensity, tight chest, clenched jaw. You take three deep breaths right there in the meeting. Later, you investigate: What boundary was crossed? My contributions deserve acknowledgment. What value does this protect? Professional integrity, self-worth. What needs to change? I need to document my work and speak up in the next meeting.

The anger hasn’t disappeared, but now it has direction. Now it can fuel change instead of just churning inside you or leaking out sideways at your partner later.

The Sacred Function of Anger

Your anger about what’s happening in the world right now—about ICE killing an American citizen in the street, about the Epstein files revealing how power protects predators while survivors wait decades for justice—that anger can fuel action. It can drive you to contact your representatives, to show up at community meetings, to support organizations doing the work. It can connect you with others who also refuse to accept this as normal.

Your anger at being dismissed, undermined, or taken for granted in your personal life? That anger can help you set boundaries you’ve been too afraid to set. It can give you the clarity to see what’s not working and the energy to change it.

The spiritual work isn’t transcending anger. It’s developing the capacity to:

  • Feel it completely without being consumed by it

  • Use it as information about what matters to you

  • Lower the physiological arousal so you can think clearly

  • Choose a response that creates the change you want to see

  • Transform rage into focused, strategic action

Pema Chödrön asks us to see difficulties as teachers: “If there is no teacher around to give us direct personal guidance on how to stop causing harm, never fear! Life itself will provide opportunities for learning... Without the inconsiderate neighbor, where will we find the chance to practice patience? Without the office bully, how could we ever get the chance to know the energy of anger so intimately that it loses its destructive power?”

When we become aware of our emotions, we learn why we feel the way we do. When we learn why we feel the way we do, our emotions become productive rather than destructive forces.

Anger usually appears when we fail to set healthy boundaries. If we don’t recognize what our anger is trying to tell us—the wisdom of our anger—it descends into violence, hatred, fear, and destruction. But when we learn to work with it skillfully, it becomes a compass pointing toward what needs to change.

The Fire Metaphor

Think of anger as fire.

Unattended, it burns your house down.

Suppressed, it smolders in the walls until everything collapses.

But tended skillfully—contained, directed, honored for its heat and light—it can forge tools, warm communities, and illuminate what was hidden in darkness.

The fire itself isn’t the problem. The question is: have you learned to work with it?

Your anger is not a spiritual failing. It’s a teacher, a protector, and sometimes, a revolutionary.

Right now, in this moment of collective difficulty, your anger matters. The anger you feel watching the news, the anger at systems that harm vulnerable people, the anger at being silenced or dismissed in your own life—all of it is valid. All of it contains information. All of it can be transformed into energy for meaningful change.

The question is: are you listening to what your anger is trying to tell you?

And more importantly, are you willing to let it move you toward necessary change?

I’ve created a worksheet to help you explore your relationship to anger. It gives you step by step processes to assess and address you anger in practical, tangible ways. Check it out HERE.

If your anger feels uncontrollable, leads to violence, or stems from unprocessed trauma, please work with a licensed therapist trained in anger management or trauma-focused approaches. There’s no shame in seeking professional support for working with difficult emotions.

Sources and Further Reading

On Anger Neuroscience and Physiology:

On Emotion Regulation and Anger:

On “Venting” and Arousal-Based Anger Management:

On Mindfulness and Anger:

Books by Buddhist Teachers:

  • Thich Nhat Hanh. (2001). Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames. New York: Riverhead Books.

  • Chödrön, P. (2001). The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

  • Chödrön, P. (2000). When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Additional Books:

  • Maté, G. (2008). When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection. Hoboken: Wiley.

Emily O'Neal
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