Rage: What Happens When Anger Has Nowhere to Go

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Why You Experience Rage and How to Make it REAL

Rage doesn’t just magically or mysteriously come from nowhere (even though it might seem to just explode into your life from time-to-time):

Maybe it can look like it ‘just appears’ to an outside observer and so one second somebody is relatively calm but then the next they’re shouting, slamming doors, sending texts they immediately regret, or exploding over something that – on the surface, at least – seems totally out of proportion but rage is rarely about the thing that happened five minutes ago and almost always about something that’s been carried for a LOT longer.

What’s usually going on is that the “thing that happened five minutes ago” was simply the final straw because rage is the tip of a kind of emotional iceberg which means that beneath the surface there can be months, years, or even decades of unexpressed anger, frustration, hurt, disappointment, shame, grief, fear, and unmet needs in general.

As a general rule, emotions are “e-motion, energy in motion” but when emotional energy has nowhere to go then, eventually, it’s destined to explode.

The solution isn’t to become a person who never gets angry – quite the opposite, in fact:

It’s to start developing a relationship with yourself that’s so REAL that anger can do the job it was designed to do before having an opportunity to turn into rage in the first place.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your rage will explode if you don't learn to unleash in a real way.

Anger Is the Dignity Emotion

We’ve spoken about anger a few times on this site because the truth is that anger has a bad reputation that it doesn’t entirely deserve and reclaiming it can help you live your REAL life:

Anger is the ‘Dignity Emotion’ which means that it’s a healthy protective energy that tells us something matters, sets and maintains our boundaries, and protects the things we care about and the people we love. It can also tell us when something isn’t ‘right’ and give us the energy to DO something about it.

Healthy anger is the part of us that reminds us to show up and take real action and there’s nothing unhealthy about that at all – in fact, when we have a REAL relationship with ourselves and our emotions, we generally have no massive difficulty expressing anger when we need to because we VALUE OURSELVES.

For example:

If somebody crosses a boundary then we can say “no”.
If something isn’t working then we can do something about it.
If we disagree with somebody then we can tell them.
If something needs to change then we make changes.
Etc. etc. etc.

In other words, anger allows us to be aggressive in the healthy sense of the word of being passionate, assertive, driven, purposeful and willing to move towards what matters.

This kind of ‘aggression’ isn’t violence but vitality and the ability to actually step up, show up, and participate in our own lives.

When Anger Gets Sent Into Exile

Many of us have developed an unhealthy relationship with our own anger because it was shamed or conditioned out of us when they were children (this is particularly common for men based on what I’ve seen by coaching people).

One of the reasons that this often happens is because so many family units operate according to a kind of “No Talk” and/or “No Feel” rule which means that expressing the truth about what’s really going on or what’s really being felt is somehow a threat to the stability and ‘peace’ of the family as a whole and so it’s best if everybody just keeps their ‘stuff’ to themselves.

You might have experienced many of the symptoms of these ‘rules’ yourself when you were growing up:

Don’t rock the boat.
Don’t make a scene.
Don’t upset your mother.
Don’t answer back.
Don’t make your father angry.
Don’t cause problems.
Don’t be difficult.
Don’t express what you really think.
Don’t express what you really feel.

And then, of course (perhaps most importantly):

Don’t be angry!

The problem with “No Talk” and “No Feel” is that emotions don’t just magically disappear because we’re not allowed to express them – instead, they just go underground and start to build up as internal pressure that is eventually going to find a less direct way of being expressed until it eventually EXPLODES anyway.

Anger is especially vulnerable to being send into ‘exile’ like this because uncontrolled anger can obviously cause problems and so it’s encouraged to be hidden more commonly than almost any other emotion (despite every emotion serving us in some way and existing for a valid reason when we allow ourselves to feel it and move through it).

If we keep denying and suppressing our anger because we’re ashamed of it or it feels unsafe and unwanted, then we eventually end up sending it into the Shadow Self and hiding behind a self-image (ego) where anger simply isn’t a ‘part’ of who we really are (when it actually always is because all human beings need anger as the ‘Dignity Emotion’ like we discussed above).

The unconscious messages that we pick up in order to disown our anger are things like this:

“If I’m angry then I’m not okay“.
“If I show my anger then people won’t love me anymore”.
“If I stand up for myself then I’ll be rejected“
“If I say what I really think then I’ll be exiled.”

When we internalise these messages then we become split and divided against ourselves and so the ‘inside’ often doesn’t match the ‘outside’ which is why we end up smiling when we want to scream, saying “it’s fine” when it clearly isn’t, agreeing when we actually disagree, tolerating things we don’t want to tolerate, and then wondering why we’re so angry all the time (even though we hardly admit it to ourselves or the world around us).

Healthy Families Don’t Fear Anger

A healthy family system doesn’t require everybody to be happy all the time because that’s not REAL and emotional health is ultimately about working with and accepting REALITY.

(Trying to be ‘happy’ all the time is just emotional suppression).

Believe it or not, in a functional family system, people are actually allowed to be angry:

This doesn’t mean that everybody gets to scream at everybody else whenever they feel like, that boundaries disappear, or that aggression becomes an excuse for violence or abuse – just that somebody can be pissed off and everybody still knows that they’re going to be still accepted as a valued member of the family unit.

When a child grows up knowing that they can express their anger without something ‘bad’ happening then they internalise a set of assumptions that help them to develop a healthy relationship with their anger (and other emotions, tbh):

I can experience anger without it meaning I’m a ‘bad’ person.
I can express anger without losing love, acceptance, or basic levels of respect.
I can set a boundary without being abandoned or cast into exile.
I can disagree and still belong to the group as a whole.
Etc. etc. etc.

That creates a fundamentally different relationship with anger and makes us more coherent as a whole because, instead of sending our anger into exile, we learn to actually listen to it and use it so we can grow REAL.

Anger, Rage, & The Emotional Iceberg

Another important thing to understand when it comes to grasping and dealing with our rage in a healthy way is that anger is often a secondary emotion and not always a primary one (i.e. it’s a reaction to another emotion and not the core thing driving us in the moment):

Imagine an iceberg where everything you can see above the water is an expression of the energy that constitutes the rage – it’s unmissable, very obvious, loud, dramatic, and can be seen by everybody.

Beneath the water, though, is everything that has been accumulating over time and been unexpressed (despite emotion being “e-motion, energy in motion” if we just go with it):

Maybe it’s sadness.
Maybe it’s disappointment.
Maybe it’s hurt.
Maybe it’s embarrassment.
Maybe it’s jealousy.
Maybe it’s grief.
Maybe it’s fear.
Maybe it’s loneliness.
Maybe it’s rejection.
Maybe it’s shame.

The point to remember is that anger is often protecting something more primary and this gives us one of the most useful questions we can ask when we’re trying to understand our own rage:

“What is my anger protecting?” – not “Why am I such an angry person?” or “What’s wrong with me?” but “What is underneath this?”

This is really important because once we identify what the anger is protecting then we actually have something we can work with – for example:

If you’re raging because somebody criticised you then perhaps the primary emotion is embarrassment.
If you’re raging because somebody left you then perhaps grief is lurking beneath the surface.
If you’re furious because your partner isn’t listening then perhaps deep down there’s hurt or loneliness.
If you’re furious because somebody succeeded where you haven’t then perhaps you’re really dealing with disappointment or jealousy.
Etc. Etc. Etc.

When you start to understand rage like this then you can see that it’s often your body telling you to start paying attention.

If you want to move forward then your job is to listen.

Why Shame So Often Sits Underneath Rage

One of the deepest emotions that can most commonly ends up exploding into into rage is SHAME:.

In the way that we’re using here, shame is the fundamental belief that “I am not good enough as I am” which has the effect of making us feel unworthy at the level of our ‘beingness’ itself.

Shame doesn’t just make us feel ‘bad’ about ourselves – it makes us feel and believe as though there is something inherently ‘wrong’ with who we ARE.

In order to compensate for this, we end up creating a fake version of ourselves that we think will be ‘acceptable’ in the eyes of the world (this fake version is the Ego).

To uphold the illusion, the ‘parts’ of ourselves that don’t fit the ‘approved’ version (ego) get pushed into the Shadow Self.

These exiled ‘parts’ may be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but they’re always REAL:

Our anger.
Our sexuality.
Our ambition.
Our vulnerability.
Our opinions.
Our needs.
Our desires.
Our boundaries.
Our individuality.
[You name it].

Basically, anything that we’ve been conditioned to believe is “too much”, “wrong”, “selfish”, “weak”, “aggressive” or unacceptable in some other way gets sent into hiding.

This is why a helpful way to look at shame is to see it as a fundamental disconnection from TRUTH because it asks us to abandon ourselves by choosing judgement (ego) over acceptance (realness).

This disconnection creates an internal split and causes us to live in the Void:

One part of us is trying desperately to be ‘acceptable’ and to hide whilst ‘part’ is screaming to be revealed – eventually, the pressure this causes becomes an explosion and rage is inevitable.

When the World and Your Own Shadow Both Feel Threatening

There’s another piece of the ‘rage puzzle’ that’s worth understanding here and it’s nervous-system dysregulation:

When our nervous system is chronically dysregulated then we can no longer feel safe (which we usually are) and our sense of ‘threat’ becomes exaggerated.

This leads to us seeing ‘internal’ and ‘external’ threats all over the place and so a criticism can feel like a physical attack, a disagreement like rejection, and a minor inconvenience like the final insult that pushes us over the edge.

Dysregulation literally affects the way we perceive ourselves, the world, and reality itself and makes us turn up the volume on the ego (which is really just a ‘survival’ mechanism anyway).

We might be able to manage this for a while and keep functioning, working, smiling through gritted teeth, and telling ourselves that everything is ‘fine’ but we’re basically walking around with the emotional equivalent of a building full of faulty fire alarms so, eventually, something is bound to set the whole system off.

On top of that, unresolved shame makes things even more complicated because if have an unintegrated Shadow Self then we’re not only threatened by the external world but by our own internal world too.

In other words, anything that pokes the shadow can wake up the ‘parts’ of ourselves we’ve spent years trying not to feel and so, suddenly, we’re not just responding to what somebody said but also to everything that what they said represents or ‘means’.

When you have this cocktail of ingredients getting mixed up then the emotional charge isn’t coming from just one moment or trigger but from the accumulated pressure of an entire internal system which is why we explode in RAGE.

If you’re a man who wants to go deeper into shadow work then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men can take you deeper into integration and meeting your real goals.

From Explosion to Unleashing

So having explored the mechanics of rage like this then what can we actually do about it?

Well, the simplest answer is that we don’t try to become less alive and to suppress whatever we’re feeling beneath the tip of the ‘ice berg’ even more but to unleash instead of explode.

The goal here is to transmute our anger into purposeful energy and to achieve this we can use a simple three-stage process:

REGULATE → INTEGRATE → ACCELERATE

1. REGULATE

The absolute first step is to take a policy of “regulation first” and to regulate the nervous system:

This is because – before we can understand ourselves, the world, and reality clearly – we need enough internal safety to actually experience what we’re feeling without being overwhelmed by it.

This means learning how to recognise the physical signs of nervous system activation (however they show up for you):

Tightness in the chest.
Clenched jaw.
Rapid breathing.
Tension in the shoulders.
Heat.
Restlessness.
The urge to attack, defend, escape or shut down.
Etc. etc. etc.

The place you want to take yourself to is an increased window of tolerance for what causes you to feel dysregulated and so you need to train yourself to notice these signs without immediately acting.

Instead, you want to create space for and within yourself:

Walk.
Breathe slowly through your nose.
Move your body.
Go outside.
Give yourself time.

The objective isn’t to suppress the anger (or anything else for that matter) but to create a big enough space to pause and then choose what to do with it.

2. INTEGRATE

Once you’re more regulated, it’s time to become more curious about what’s underneath the anger by asking yourself some probing questions:

What happened?
What am I actually feeling?
What does this remind me of from the past?
What am I protecting?
What primary emotion is underneath the anger?

Perhaps most importantly:

What truth about myself have I been afraid to acknowledge?

This is where Shadow work becomes practical because you’re no longer either resisting or trying to solve the ‘problem’ of your rage (which is really a symptom and not a problem, anyway) but you’re bringing the exiled parts back into relationship with the whole.

You might discover that your rage is protecting a wounded sense of dignity, sadness, fear, disappointment, shame – or whatever else the case may be – and when those emotions are acknowledged rather than exiled, the pressure starts to reduce and you can put yourself back in touch with your realness.

3. ACCELERATE

Finally, you’re ready to turn the energy towards something and this is where you start taking real action:

What do you actually want?
What needs to change?
What boundary needs to be set and maintained?
What conversation needs to happen?
What project have you been avoiding?
What truth needs to be spoken?
What kind of life are you trying to create?

Your anger contains energy that you can use to build a future that’s REAL (you don’t have to waste all of it fighting ghosts from the past).

This is what it means to Accelerate:

Create a vision and take real action towards it so that you can return to truth and realness rather than remaining caught up in the unreality of the Void.

Regulate, Integrate, and learn to pause so you can choose Acceleration over rage.

The Final Word: Your Rage Is Trying to Tell You Something

Rage isn’t necessarily evidence that you’re ‘broken’ but there’s a high chance that it serves as evidence that you’ve been disconnected from yourself for too long.

If you constantly swallow your boundaries, needs, desires, real opinions, and emotions then eventually your system is going to demand your attention and the rage that explodes into your life is the message.

The way back home is in learning how to hear the message before the explosion and so the next time you feel that internal pressure building up then don’t immediately jump to “How do I get rid of this anger?” and try out something new like:

“What has been building up over time?”
“What am I protecting?”
“What primary emotion might be underneath this?”
“What part of myself have I sent into exile in the shadows?”

When you’ve figured out what’s “down there” then you’re ready for one of the most important questions of them all:

“What would it look like to act from REALNESS here?”

Ultimately, rage is what happens when we’re unreal, disconnected from our REALNESS, and keep trying to treat that disconnection as normal and so the solution is always to become more integrated by choosing wholeness over fragmentation.

Don’t suppress the fire but learn what it’s trying to illuminate and act from the light of truth instead of the shadows of the Void

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If it’s time to grow real and start facing yourself and life so you can take real action then book a free coaching session with me now.

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