I think Anger gets a bad rap. I think most of us grow up without a full understanding of anger – its meaning, its value, and how to work with it in a healthy way. Yet it’s everywhere, and it can feel scary (to witness, to receive, to feel). So we often turn away from anger. A lot of us keep ourselves from expressing it. Or the opposite – some people take up residency in anger and live there most of the time.

At the most basic level we can say that anger arises when we perceive a violation. It’s a powerful, protective emotion that helps us rally our energy to “fight the violation.” But no one really teaches us how to harness that power, how to control it and use it for good.

For many of us, our first experience of anger is seeing our parents angry, which is so monumentally scary for a young person. Mom’s angry = I don’t get fed, I don’t get loved, she will leave, I will be cast out, I’m bad. It’s unfathomable, and it becomes like part of our cellular structure: Don’t make others (mom) mad.

Also for many of us, we experience pains in young childhood (getting told “no”, being treated unfairly, or worse) that we would naturally feel angry about. But maybe there’s no room to feel angry. “Don’t you talk back to me!” says dad. We have no outlet for our feelings, no language to even recognize our feelings. So what do we do with all that anger energy? We stuff it. We eat it. And again, it’s like it just stays in our cells.

And then there are those of us who experience the opposite, who are angry all the time. We have an ongoing, deep-seated upset, and no one ever helped us get to the bottom of it. No one helped us feel or understand.

I think many of us, then, carry around a lot of deep anger that we may not even recognize. Or conversely, our anger is the only emotion we recognize. So I love working with clients’ anger. I say bring it! I love helping clients vent and start to explore – how they were hurt, where was the violation… I love helping clients discern and speak their anger, helping them learn how to harness their anger-power for self-protection and for action. Helping them be released from imprisoning anger into ease and calm. Helping them stay anchored in the face of other people’s anger.

Do you have anger? Do you fear anger? Do you shun anger? Bring it. Bring it all. I’m here for it. Let’s gooooo!