Anger Is Hurt Wearing Armor

It often feels less vulnerable to shift the energy of hurt into anger. I know, because I did it for years. Anger feels like power, while hurt feels like a wound somebody could press on. So when something cut me, I got mad instead, and I got good at it. I raged, I bit my nails until they bled, and I could hold a grudge like it was a job.

What I didn't understand then, and what I teach now, is that anger is almost never the real feeling. It's the armor the real feeling puts on so it can walk around in public. Underneath every bit of my rage there was a hurt little girl who had learned that being sad got you nowhere and being scary at least got you some room.

So here is the work, and it's simple to say and hard to do. We need to sit with our anger until we can feel the pain long enough to figure out what is triggering it. That doesn't mean acting on it, and it doesn't mean stuffing it back down. It means sitting with it and asking it what it's protecting.

Start with your body, because your body already knows. Notice where the physical location of your anger arises. Is it your stomach, your neck and shoulders, or your jaw? Every toxic emotion we swallow gets stored somewhere in the muscle tissue, the cells, the organs. When you find where the anger sits, you have found the door. Breathe into that place. Put your hand on it if that helps. Then ask, gently, what hurt you?

The answer usually comes faster than you expect, and it's usually older than the thing that set you off. Someone was rude to you at the store, and what came up was every time you were made to feel small. That's the trigger doing its job. Once you can see the hurt, you can tend to the hurt, and the anger doesn't have a job anymore. Then you can release it in a healthy way. Cry if crying comes, move your body, write it down and burn the page, or say it out loud to somebody safe.

And then do the part most people skip. Fill the empty space where anger lived, and fill it with love. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the heart, so if you don't put something in that space on purpose, the old tenant moves right back in.

Be gentle with yourself as you heal. Remember that when you're dealing with deep emotions, you get exhausted a lot easier. That isn't weakness; it's your whole system doing heavy lifting. Schedule time to sleep during your healing process, the way you would schedule anything else that matters, and I mean that literally. Put it on the calendar.

You have a choice to not suffer. Anger will tell you it's keeping you safe, and for a while it kept me safe too, but it also kept everyone else out. When you're ready, set it down, because there's something softer and much stronger waiting underneath.