It's Ok to Be Angry. How (and Why!) to Let Yourself Feel Your Anger
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🎙 🎧 Prefer to listen to the podcast version of this article? You’re in luck! You can either press ‘play’ on the episode below, or queue up this episode up in your podcast player of choice by searching for the show, Let’s Talk it Through. Enjoy!
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I’ve been a lifelong personality assessment enthusiast (you too?) but for a long time, as much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t really connect with the Enneagram.
In hindsight, I can see it was mainly because I kept getting mistyped as a Type 1 using the free assessment, which always felt close but also not quite right.
But then when I first started working with a coach a few years ago, and in one of our first coaching calls my coach asked, “mmmm, are you an Enneagram 9, by chance?” and she encouraged me to take the paid version of the assessment for more accurate results.
Turns out, I’m a Type 9 through and through.
Of course, once I figured that out, I immediately got lost down the Enneagram rabbit hole—which I learned about this idea of triads.
Basically, the Enneagram consists of 9 different types and there are three triads, with three types in each triad. Each triad uses a different decision-making mechanism, and struggles with a particular dominant emotion. As an Enneagram 9, I fall within the Gut Triad, meaning the dominant emotion I’m likely to experience and struggle with is anger.
And when I read that, I thought... anger? Really?
That confusion, as it turns out, is part of the reason I struggle with anger. I’m going to read you an excerpt from a site called “enneagramgift.com” to help explain this:
Enneagram type nines are often called “the peacemakers” because they can work with opposing people to hear and understand each side of the story to resolve the conflict. This role can be difficult and even mentally exhausting… [they] can feel anger if they do not express their needs in fear of loss and separation. The negativity they face can become so overwhelming and unbearable that they have a rageful meltdown as it builds up.
Whether or not you’re an Enneagram 9, you might relate to this phenomenon of being so focused on trying to dodge or resolve conflict that you never really slow down to remember it’s ok to feel angry.
And when we don’t take time to feel that anger, not only does it not just magically go away or cease to exist, it means those emotions quietly build over time. And eventually, either reach a breaking point where they boil over, or we might shut down completely— but in either scenario it takes a real toll both on our own mental and emotional health AND on our relationships.
This is why it’s crucial that instead of bypassing those feelings and letting them quietly build up inside us like a pressure cooker, we learn how to stay with them and fully feel them instead.
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Why It Might NOT Feel Like It’s Ok to Be Angry (aka, Why You Might Resist Feeling Your Feelings)
It makes a TON of sense that up until now, you've likely been putting a lot of effort into managing and containing your big, unpleasant feelings over the years—because most of us have received all kinds of messaging our entire lives about our feelings.
We've heard and internalized so many different messages, including things like:
feelings are either "good" or "bad"
the way to show ‘maturity’ is to stifle or hide (or maybe even not have) big emotions
feelings are a thing you should be able to control or choose at all times
it's your job to tame those feelings — especially the "big, bad" ones, like anger, sadness, disappointment, grief, and frustration.
And that last one about control is directly related to so many of the oppressive power structures we live within—systems like patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism that strongly emphasize hierarchy and having power OVER things and people.
So no wonder we've been trying to master or control our feelings all these years. We see that kind of thinking modeled around us all the time!
The goal here is to start to move away from trying to exercise power over our feelings, and instead explore what it might be like to partner and work with them from a more collaborative, side-by-side sort of approach.
This is about releasing the need to control your emotions, and instead seeing them as sources of helpful information, as necessary medicine, allies, teachers, and companions through all your lived experience, and then experiencing them fully without judgment.
Shifting your relationships with your feelings in this way can also help mitigate the time you spend spiraling in fear and stories about what it ‘means about you’ when you can’t control your emotions the way we might want to. And for many of us (myself included!) this can be a big paradigm shift.
But the truth is, our feelings aren't for fixing and they aren't for managing— even the painful ones.
And in fact, we make our pain worse when we try to struggle against or overpower what we feel. When we do that, we're not only struggling against the inevitable, but we're also missing an opportunity to receive valuable information and medicine.
I want to credit a wonderful teacher, Varvara Erochina who did a beautiful job of sharing a lot of this context, plus a variation of the framework I'm about to walk you through inside her free workshop, Feelings 101, which is a precursor to her paid program How to Feel. I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things about it.
In Varvara's words: "Let pain be pain, without creating more suffering."
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The Old Way of Dealing With Big Feelings Like Anger When They Arise
So in the old system, which is the way most of us are used to doing things: when we start to feel a "bad" or uncomfortable feeling, we often do two things:
we judge it as "bad", and then
we try to fix it.
That 'fixing' might look like pushing the feeling away, stuffing it down, holding it in keeping it secret, talking ourselves out of it, distancing ourselves from it, distracting ourselves, trying to cheer ourselves up, etc. — all to try to make it go away.
Going back to Varvara and her work for a second, she describes three common "escape routes" we often use to avoid being with our feelings, by helping us avoid pain and discomfort:
Avoidance » when we run away from the feeling, or brush it under the rug
Projection » when we shift our focus onto external things; might look like blaming, self-criticism, and/or perfectionism, and is usually characterized by harshness
Spiraling » when we retreat into our head and get overtaken by the feeling; we might repeat the stories in our minds that trigger the feeling all over again, which can create a sense that "this is going to last forever!"
If one or a few of these sound familiar, that's entirely ok! These are just things to be aware of, and an opportunity to notice which one(s) you tend to lean on.
Remember the analogy of the winter coat you developed in childhood? Now that you're an adult and your circumstances and resources have changed, you can start to acknowledge some of the harm or discomfort that same coat is causing you now in the conditions of adulthood — and, you can start to explore some options for safely removing it.
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How to Start Safely Feeling Your Feelings: A 3-Part Framework
So if the idea is to move away from trying to control or escape your feelings, what does that actually look like in practice?
We're about to look at some skills and practices that'll support you in staying with your feelings, feeling them more fully without falling into judgment or old stories about them, and moving through them consciously—with less fear or shame or resistance.
So let’s break this down into a three-part formula you can regularly come back to and lean on for support, which is based on my personal interpretation and experience using the framework introduced by Varavara Erochina of Be With in her Feelings 101 workshop.
Those three elements are:
Safety
Patience
Curiosity
01 » Find a Sense of Safety
In many ways, I think the fact that we feel 'unsafe' to feel our big feelings is what causes us to want to control and overpower them.
But knowing how and when to escape that mode where our HEAD (and all those stories about feelings being shameful, or too scary to feel, or not allowed at all!) is fighting against our HEART and the things we feel, we can start to see our feelings as part of ourselves.
And if our feelings are just a part of who we are, there's nothing to fight. We can feel safe to just have our emotional experience, even when it's uncomfortable.
Now, HOW to release that 'head vs. heart mindset and find that feeling of safety is a really big (and valid) question — especially when you don't have experience relating to your feelings in this way. It can feel really scary to face our feelings and fully experience them without any of that armor.
There's a practice you can use to help you soften, and make the rest of the process of staying with you emotions feel less overwhelming. It's a somatic practice called resourcing, and its job is to help you find and create a feeling of safety in your body, which will allow you to soften.
Specifically, you'll do this by finding pleasant or neutral sensations in your body and/or your environment to help anchor you somewhere that feels safe to hang out, so that you feel safe to be with your feelings.
Here's how resourcing works:
When you notice a big feeling that's causing your mind to spiral or start kicking up stories and stress, bring your attention back into your body. The focus here is on sloooowing down.
Once you feel present, find somewhere in your body that you can focus on where you notice a pleasant — or even just a neutral! — sensation. This might be the way the chair is holding you, the soft texture of your clothes against your skin, or a neutral feeling in your toes—anything that feels neutral, and separate from that emotional charge. Spend some time focusing on that neutral sensation, and finding a sense of comfort, security, or safety in that.
And if this feels hard, experiment with creating pleasant sensations for yourself! You might experiment with using things like soft blankets, your favorite tea, soothing music, pillow forts, and/or solitude to create feelings of safety and comfort in your environment.
Allow your heart to open and connect to the emotion you're feeling. Try naming the emotion in your mind, and notice the physical sensations it creates. You might notice anger that feels like tightening in your chest, or sadness that feels like a lump in your throat. Focus on dropping your awareness into your physical body, noticing those sensations from a neutral place, and staying with them.
Allow the pleasant or neutral sensation to help anchor you, and orient you toward the presented. Staying focused on the physical sensations you feel can help prevent you from retreating back into old stories in your head.
And if hanging out with the feeling sounds stressful and never-ending, I have good news! This takes us right into the second step of this three-part process of staying with your feelings, which is all about patience.
02 » Be Patient, and Stay with the Feeling for 90 Seconds
There is some very interesting research from a Harvard trained scientist, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, which shows that a feeling lasts for just 90 seconds.
In other words, if you can wait it out and develop the tools to hang with those big feelings for a minute and a half, that feeling will fade. It will change, it will evolve, or it will release.
Now if you're thinking, "Ok wait, I've definitely had feelings that last more than a minute and a half," you'll find this next point interesting.
Dr. Taylor says that if you have anger that lasts for more than a minute and a half, it's because you're replaying a story in your mind. And every time you replay the story, you re-trigger the circuit and the response—you'll keep reliving that feeling again over and over on a loop.
If that's happened to you too, know that that's normal! And, there are things that you can do that can help you break up those repeating thought loops, and find a more productive way through the feelings. In addition to the resourcing exercise we just talked about, you can also use things like slow, deep breathing to calm and soothe your nervous system, and keep you out of your head where those stories get re-triggered.
Whatever you need to do to create those feelings of calm, safety, and awareness in your body without getting pulled back up into your mind, the goal here is to stay with the feeling and ride it out for 90 seconds without re-triggering the story, or the thought loop.
03 » Get Curious About What’s Really Going On
Gentle curiosity will help you get underneath some of those old stories that get kicked up around your big feelings, and release their charge.
When you notice those old tapes of stories and judgments starting to play in your mind when a big feeling shows up, take that as your cue to pause and interrupt that judgment with some gentle curiosity. Again, those first two steps — softening into feelings of safety, and finding the patience to ride out the storm — will support you here!
If you start to notice something like anger, and you’re tempted to turn that into a story about yourself (or about the other person(s) involved!), try bringing your awareness back into your body and starting to gently explore some questions like like:
What's the feeling going on underneath all this?
What stories am I telling myself right now about my feelings? How true are they?
What might a different story or belief sound like?
How might this feeling be serving me?
What could it be trying to show me, or tell me in this moment?
As you use these questions repeatedly over time, you'll start to get used to welcoming the opportunity to see your triggers as your friendly teachers, and to start flexing that curiosity muscle around what they might be trying to tell you. Not to mention, some of those old stories will start to lose their charge, and their power.
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It can be really challenging to interrupt old habits of how you're used to responding to big feelings in the moment — whether that's with judgment, or stories, or just the drive to try to 'overcome' them. It's something I'm still working on, and it's a constant exercise in patience, self-compassion, and re-committing to the practice.
Repetition is key to creating these new patterns and helping them stick, neurologically. Just remember to be gentle on yourself in the process, too.
