Anger Is Meant to Be Felt and Moved, Not Managed and Controlled

Back when I used to work as an engineer, I thought emotions were something to be managed. By staying calm and collected in managing my emotions, I could stay intellectual and logical during discussions — and I built a very successful career out of it.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that approach toward life came with heavy costs.

Managing my emotions — in reality, suppressing them — meant that I missed out on the spice of life.

I remember sitting in a circle of coaches during a coach training course many years ago. We were processing our own emotions as a way of learning how to help clients process theirs.

"I can't remember the last time I cried. I don't even know if I can cry anymore," I shared with the group of 20+ coaches.

I felt similarly distant in my relationship with anger — I could count the number of times I remembered getting angry in my life with the fingers of my hand. That wasn't very many for what ought to be a core emotion.

Neither sadness nor anger were modeled by my parents growing up — and for good reason.

Their generation focused more on survival. When basic goods like rice and meat are being rationed, you don't really have the luxury to dabble in the intricacies of feelings, vulnerability, and intimacy that we have today.

And so I've had to learn the art of healthy emotional expression elsewhere — through leadership programs, coaching, relationships, plant medicine, and more.

The life I lived back then — without fluid access to core emotions like sadness and anger — meant that I missed out on a key part of what it meant to be alive.

Tears whether from grief or joy or something else are precious all the same — when I cry, I can feel the aliveness of my heart. When anger or rage awakens inside me, I can feel the powerful fire fill my body. And when I feel through the anger, there's always one or more emotions hiding underneath.

Emotions also create clarity. And so not having fluid access to anger, in particular, meant that decisions were harder to make back then. In deciding to leave my first marriage, for example, I spent several months agonizing back and forth, journaling on the pros and cons of the decision.

In those months, my ex-wife and I would spend upwards of three hours per day talking in circles about our emotions. I would cycle from the conviction that I deserved more in life, to the guilt that leaving would mean I wasn’t appreciating what I had, to the helplessness of not knowing how to proceed — all in the course of a single conversation.

Now, as I've come into so much deeper connection with my body and my emotions, I recognize what made the decision hard: I tried to make the decision from my head, rather from the feelings in my heart and my body.

Underneath the stew of conflicting emotions was an anger at how my life circumstances no longer aligned with what I wanted. Anger, had I let it, could have spearheaded the change I both wanted and needed.

Withholding Feelings Creates Emotional Distance

Perhaps the biggest toll the emotional constriction had on me was that it blocked deeper intimacy in my partnership.

For a long time, I felt afraid in that relationship to express my anger and sadness about our non-existent sex life or my desires to have more emotional connection outside the relationship or how trapped I truly felt.

But withholding my truth hurt our intimacy even more — until the emotional distance felt too far to bridge anymore.

My experience aligns with Dr. John Gottman's research, After studying thousands of couples over the past four decades, he writes in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, that the emotional distance that comes from avoiding conflict is one of the biggest contributors to divorce:

"Only 40 percent of the time do couples divorce because they are having frequent, devastating fights. More often marriages end because, to avoid constant skirmishes, husband and wife distance themselves so much that their friendship and sense of connection are lost."

We withhold the truth because we're avoiding a certain type of reaction — guilt, anger, sadness, pain, etc. — from our partner, because their reaction makes us feel uncomfortable. The problem is that withholding feelings blocks connection.

That's why in my current partnership,

Candace Sauve

and I share a strong commitment to do what Gay and Katie Hendricks call "telling the microscopic truth."

"The microscopic truth is when you speak the truth about your internal experience as you are currently perceiving it," rather than trying to please your partner by withholding it, they write in Conscious Loving.

And so whenever we experience something that pulls us away from presence and connection — particularly if we’re worried what the other person might think — that’s a pointer for us to take a breath and share the microscopic truth. That might involve revealing a feeling of attraction toward a close friend, a resentment at a broken agreement, a disappointment about a sexual experience, a fear of being left behind, or a hurt from a defensive comment.

Telling the microscopic truth isn’t always easy, but it clears the stuck emotions and inevitably brings us into deeper connection.

Move Through the Stuck Emotion to Come Back Into Connection

Early in my relationship with Candace, when I was still in the early stages of learning to express anger, I'd simmer internally for hours about small things she did that bothered me — moving my things, dirtying my favorite sweatshirt, or even mixing my different granola bags together.

My body would literally stiffen when I felt annoyed. I'd feel tension in my rib cage and feel my body freeze to hold it together. My nervous system's capacity to hold anger back then was very low, making it very uncomfortable.

In that state, it was hard to be present with myself or my partner.

Other emotions were similar. Whenever I avoided feeling an emotion — disappointment, guilt, sadness — my body physically braced itself so I wouldn’t have to feel it, and I would feel disconnected from myself and from those around me.

Connection only got restored if I felt through the stuck emotion, and so I've been in the deep practice of learning how to effectively move through emotions to come back into connection.

Anger is a particularly tricky one to move through because of its volatility and the social conditioning that often shames the release of anger. That leads us to often hold it together — our bodies literally tensing — in an attempt to not leak it out.

I've learned emotional release tools to healthily move anger out of my body — like going into the bedroom and pounding or screaming into a pillow or letting my inner child throw a tantrum. Sometimes a fight would send me into 40 minutes of anger release in a room by myself. It felt extreme, but I also felt compassion for myself as I knew I was clearing up a decades-long backlog of unexpressed anger inside my body.

More recently, we've even started doing a partner reassurance practice afterwards to retrain my nervous system that I'm loved in my anger — because ultimately, underneath that anger is a desire for deeper connection.

The upside of all this? After moving through the stuck emotion, I'd feel my body soften and un-restrict with clarity afterwards. Sometimes, I'd discover a felt sense of needing to stand up for myself in my life or determination to take action. Other times, I'd find a boundary that I hadn't expressed.

Anger — or any other emotion really — isn't meant to be managed or contained. It's meant to be felt, expressed, and moved through the system of our body and our relationships — moving in energetic waves similar to the ripples a stone generates when dropped into water.

The faster we can move the energy of an emotion through the body and through the relationship, the sooner we return to a state of homeostasis and find the clarity that lies on the other side.

The journey might be rich with intense emotions, but I feel a deeper level of connection and love with myself and my partner than I ever imagined possible when I was trying to control what I felt. And that's well worth any ups and downs that might show up.

Thank you to Sarah Stadler, Kirsten Corbett, and T.J. Olwig for reading early drafts of this post.