Anger
I was told that the fire inside was burning me alive.
I prayed, I chanted, I cried, I bowed, I practiced forgiveness.
“Please, be tamed,” I begged.
“No,” the fire answered, unfazed.
“Until you stand up and learn who you truly are.”
When I was working at a mental health clinic serving victims of domestic violence, I encountered some of the nicest clients. They were all so polite and soft-spoken. In the therapy room, they would cry, sigh, panic, and sometimes lose their breath. We would pause, breathe, and calm down—only to go through the cycle again. At the end of each session, they would look into my eyes and smile, saying, "Thank you." But as each session passed, I couldn’t help but wonder: where did their anger go? I could see they were too scared to voice their needs to their abusers, too disillusioned with the police system, and too exhausted to fight through the justice system. I saw a lot of helplessness, fear, and frustration—but I rarely sensed any outward aggression toward the overwhelming injustices they had endured. I began to wonder how many of them had become so helpless that they had swallowed their rage and aggression, much like I once did.
For the longest time, I didn’t know how to be angry. I would feel a burning sensation in my stomach and chest, but the fire that tried to rise up would always hit a block around my throat. Tears would well up, and that fire would retreat back into my body. It wasn’t until that suppressed fire manifested as an autoimmune disease and chronic GERD that I began my journey to understand it more. I learned that this fire had another name: healthy life force energy, and the tears had a name too: learned helplessness.
When I first learned to channel my rage in a healthy way, I saw erupted lava transform into rich soil, and giant flower petals bloom from that warm ground. In that moment, I saw Lady Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes—goddess of both destruction and creation. She is untamed, beautiful, and powerful. It was through her energy that I realized I had created my own predicament and that I had the power within me to create a life that is true to who I am. The rage inside was urging me to stand up for my authentic values so I could be more fully myself.
As women raised in this industrial society, we are conditioned to be "nice," sweet, and docile. To survive, we learned to suppress our raw emotions and behave in ways that others deem acceptable. Don't cry, and you'll get a star sticker. Don't act out, and I'll buy you an ice cream after this. We learned to suppress the untamed, instinctual, and primal aspects of the feminine inside of us, and to lie to ourselves that it's okay. Only later in our lives did our pain and diseases begin to teach us to embody the full range of human emotions — to be unafraid to express our feelings wholeheartedly and without shame.
Not all of my clients at that clinic confronted their anger, but one clearly did. Week after week, as we worked through layers of her rage, her depressive symptoms began to lessen, and she became more vibrant. She found a better job, moved into a new apartment, and filed for divorce. “It’s the feeling of freedom,” she told me. “I feel like myself again.”
