I wasn’t always comfortable with my anger.
In fact, for a long time, I was afraid of it.
I grew up around hot tempers. Raised voices. Anger was loud and physical, and often left wreckage in its wake.
So when I felt anger rise in my own body, it scared me.
If my anger was felt on behalf of someone else? No problem.
I could puff up, speak up, roar.
I once stopped a man from assaulting a woman in an empty square in Athens when I was 20. My body moved without hesitation. The anger made me feel sharp, clear, completely in control.
But when my anger was on behalf of me?
That’s when things got blurry.
If someone crossed my boundaries?
I’d freeze.
I’d disassociate from the part of me that felt violated.
Not because I didn’t feel the anger, but because I feared what might happen if I let it out. Because when there wasn’t the perspective shift—the separation involved in feeling anger on behalf of someone else—my internal distinction between feeling and action would also get blurry. I’d been on the receiving end of anger where feeling and action were mixed together, and it made me afraid that expressing my anger would result in harm.
I hadn’t learned how to express anger as an emotion rather than an action.
So I turned it inward.
Questioned its validity.
Swallowed it whole.
But here’s what I know now.
Anger is not the problem.
Unconscious anger is.
Suppressed anger doesn’t disappear.
It calcifies. It turns into resentment.
It builds and builds, creating an internal pressure cooker, looking for the slightest excuse to explode.
And healthy anger?
It lives in the body before it lives in your subconscious.
It’s heat in the chest. Clenched fists. A tight jaw.
It’s your system saying: “No more. Not this.”
When honored, not feared, anger becomes an ally.
A boundary signal.
A reclamation of energy.
A fierce devotion to self.
The most healing thing I’ve done is separate anger from action.
To let the sensation exist in my body.
To name it.
To ask: What are you trying to protect?
To give it a job, not a leash.
Sometimes that looks like writing an unfiltered letter I’ll never send.
Sometimes it’s venting to my husband, and once the anger wave passes, inviting him to reflect on what he sees.
Sometimes it’s initiating a direct, grounded conversation. Naming what happened. How it made me feel. Why it matters.
Not to provoke conflict, but to create truth.
To show myself through my own actions: “Your feelings matter.”
Because anger, when given a safe container, teaches us boundaries we didn’t know we had.
But here’s something else I’ve come to understand:
My anger on my behalf often conceals grief.
Grief for the girl who stayed quiet when she wanted to scream.
Grief for the moments I didn’t protect myself.
Grief for the years I thought silence was maturity.
Anger guards grief the way a lion guards her cubs.
And when we finally let anger speak, we often find the tenderness it was protecting.
That something is over.
That something mattered.
That we’re allowed to want more.
So no, I don’t fear my anger anymore.
I’m learning to listen to it.
To move with it.
To thank it.
Because it’s not my enemy.
It’s the fiercest part of me that still believes I’m worth defending.
And that?
That’s not dangerous.
That’s beautiful.
That’s sacred.
