Do Women Bury Their Anger?
Anger can dominate us. It takes hold, leading our actions and at times, making us much more reactive than we normally are.
After reading a recent article, I decided to look up the definition in the Collins Dictionary:
“Anger is the strong emotion that you feel when you think that someone has behaved in an unfair, cruel or unacceptable way.”
That seems a fair description. But the one thing missing is how we respond to anger.
Told To Suppress
The article I was reading attempted to answer some of that, at least from a female perspective. Written by Stephan Fowler for the Counselling Directory, it posed whether women are taught throughout their lives to suppress their anger.
Examining the stages of a woman’s life, Stephan suggests that from early childhood, girls are encouraged not to rock the boat, even if they feel an injustice. As a female grows to adulthood and beyond, they are faced with a similar message, such as being judged more harshly in the workplace than their male counterparts for being aggressive.
Within relationships, “anger can be framed as irrational or hormonal”, which is amplified even more for mothers, who are labelled unstable and the root of the problem for their child.
Stephan goes on to explore how suppressing anger comes with a cost, encouraging negativity and destroying any feeling of self-worth.
But crucially, the article then talks about how anger can serve a purpose, giving you a voice and how finding a space for your anger can be beneficial.
Channelling Anger
Author Kia Abdullah discovered exactly that. Growing up in a Bangladeshi household led by strict conservatism, her parents’ attempts to protect her and her sisters were too much. An arranged marriage at 24 years old proved to be one of the final straws.
After therapy proved to be ineffective due to her cultural differences, she accepted that anger was a partner in her life that she would need to accept.
All that changed when she visited a boxing ring during research for her novel, and she found herself in the ring with a trainer. The more she boxed, the more she found herself channelling her anger and controlling it, rather than the other way around. Before long, she was a regular. Not because she wanted to box competitively, despite her skill, but because of how it improved her wellbeing.
https://www.counselling-directory.org.uk/
Anger In Therapy
Many women I’ve worked with often seem to have a quite unhealthy and negative relationship with anger. They connect it with confrontation and even violence, and understandably avoid acknowledging it in themselves and often actively push it away. But of course, we know it doesn’t actually disappear. There are many reasons for this as Stephan Fowler discusses in his article.
My view is that anger is just an emotion, like many other emotions, but it’s what you do with it and how you react to it in yourself that makes such a difference. In my counselling work I’ve seen how, by helping a woman to raise her awareness of its presence in herself it can be a catalyst to positive changes in her relationship with self and often others. It becomes a type of new freedom, enabling her to live a more authentic life.
Therapy can be a space to explore anger. To identify where it comes from and the impact it has on your other emotions and actions. A counsellor is trained to be non-judgemental, a key focus when examining an emotion as dictating as anger.
As Stephan explains at the end of the Counselling Directory article, anger isn’t about becoming someone you’re not, but instead about becoming yourself.
Sources: The Counselling Directory and The Guardian
