What Happens When You Keep Swallowing Your Anger?

Anger is often treated as a flaw while staying quiet is praised as maturity, especially for women. In this talk Anahita asks what happens to anger when it is never allowed to exist, and how swallowing it can turn into resentment, tension, exhaustion and a sense of disconnection from yourself. She explores the wide space between silence and aggression, and invites you to ask what your anger is trying to tell you. Emotional maturity, she suggests, is hearing that message without letting anger decide your behaviour. This content is educational and is not a substitute for one to one professional care.

Transcript

Anger is often treated like a character flaw while chronic self-silencing ourselves is rewarded as maturity. Why? And what happens to all of the anger when nobody allows it to exist? We're being taught that being calm means being emotionally mature, Especially as women. Don't react, Don't make a scene, Be understanding, Forgive, Keep the peace, Be their peace. And sometimes that is emotional regulation but a lot of times what looks like peace from the outside it's actually fear fear of conflict, Fear of being rejected, Fear of being called difficult or dramatic or aggressive or too much. So instead of saying that hurt me you stay quiet instead of saying hey that crossed my boundaries you tell yourself that you're overreacting you gaslight yourself instead of saying no you just smile and say oh it's okay don't worry about it it's fine but it is not fine it's not fine and anger doesn't simply disappear because you decided to not express it it ends up becoming resentment, Irritability, Emotional withdrawal, Passive aggression, Or that moment three hours after the incident where you start thinking, Oh, I should have said this and I should have said that, Then you end up overthinking it. And sometimes you don't even recognize it as anger anymore. You just start noticing that you feel tension in your body, That you're feeling exhausted, That you're in burnout, That you feel frustrated, Or you feel like this sense of disconnection with yourself. But here's what I think that we often get wrong. The opposite of suppressing anger is not exploding. There's this entire space between silence and aggression. You're allowed to say, Hey, I'm angry. You're allowed to say, No, I do not accept that. You are allowed to say, Hey, That hurt me. You're allowed to say no, Like no is a full sentence. Anger itself is not automatically dangerous. Anger is information. It can show up when something feels unfair, When you have a boundary crossed, When you feel betrayed, When you feel dismissed or repeatedly asked to abandon yourself to keep somebody else comfortable. That doesn't mean the anger is always correct. Our emotions can often be influenced by our own wounds, Old wounds, Assumptions, Fear, Past experiences. Anger should not automatically control what you do next. But perhaps before immediately trying to breathe the anger away, Meditate it away, Forgive it away, Or convince yourself that you're spiritually above it, There's a question that is worth asking ourselves. And that question is, What is this anger trying to tell me? Have you ever tried that? Because sometimes anger is not asking you to hurt somebody is asking you to stop hurting yourself. To start loving yourself, To give yourself what you deserve. Sometimes it's saying, Enough, This is not okay. You keep saying yes when you mean no, You keep accepting something that it's costing you. And if every time that signal appears, You silence it because you want to be calm, You want to look all zen and super evolved and understanding, The evolved person in the room, The mature one. You may become very good at regulating everybody else's comfort while becoming completely disconnected from your own truth. Emotional maturity is not never becoming angry. Emotional maturity is being able to hear what your anger is telling you without allowing that anger to decide your behavior for you. You can feel anger without becoming cruel and seeking revenge. A boundary without attacking someone. You can protect your peace without pretending that nothing affects you. Maybe the question is not how do I stop being angry. Maybe sometimes the question is what have I been tolerating for so long that my anger finally has to speak for me.