Passion, assertion, initiative, drive, action, sexual desire, aggression, and anger: these are all energies that belong to the realm of Mars or Aries, the God of War. These more primitive instincts come from a deep place in our body, not from our thinking mind. They come from a place of survival, a place of protection, and are the very qualities that have helped humans evolve to where we are today. They have essentially ensured our continuation as a species. Without these traits we would have no drive to get out of bed in the morning, no libido, and no ability to protect ourselves when we’re feeling threatened, an ability which often manifests as anger.
For the most part, I think that anger gets a bad rap. It is rare to meet a human being who has a healthy relationship with anger. Women and men alike repress it, judging it as “bad,” “scary,” or “unhealthy.” I am sure we’ve all known someone who has “anger issues.” We learn our expression of anger from our parents when we’re children, mirroring their (commonly) unhealthy relationship with the emotion. It’s usually one of two things: either we had a parent who would express anger in a toxic way, flying off the handle on a whim, screaming, name-calling, projecting, and then not apologizing or addressing what just happened OR we had a parent who was unable to consciously express anger and would emotionally shut down and ice us out when they were mad, denying that they were upset and then acting in a passive aggressive way. Of course there are many other ways anger can show up and be acted out, but I think it is a rare thing to have been raised by someone who had a healthy relationship with anger.
Our society does not have a healthy relationship with anger, so how could we expect ourselves or our parents to? Stereotypically, women are “bitches” if they are assertive and driven, or perhaps “crazy” if they get mad, and men who are “angry” can get violent, resulting in someone getting physically hurt. There isn’t a lot of room in between the extremes given to our gender roles to find a psychologically sound way of expressing anger.
I know for myself. I grew up in a home with a mom whose anger was quite toxic. She would erupt suddenly as if out of nowhere, scream and get scary, and then totally shut down and ice people (me) out. The experience of it was so terrifying that I split anger off completely, denying that I had any connection to the feeling at all, thinking that if I identified with it, I was an “angry person,” like my mother. My dad was the opposite, a Libra who rarely got mad, and kept his mouth shut for long periods of time, and tolerated way too much from his wife who would perpetually cross his boundaries. I remember that he would get quiet and go on really long drives, not able to verbally express how pissed he was at her. He expressed his anger by leaving, which perhaps he thought was safer or more acceptable than her hysterical display, but neither were healthy. These two extremes of passive repression and toxic expression taught me one thing: there is no way to healthfully express anger. The solution to this, as I mentioned earlier, was to repress it completely. So what happened? Well, I was always dating very angry men in my youth. They acted out the anger for me that I wasn’t in touch with. I was unconsciously drawn to them—they could be the bad angry guy and I could be the good nice girl. It wasn’t until much later that I was able to finally consciously get in touch with my anger (and later, rage), which was not a pleasant experience, let me tell you! But it was something that had to be done so that I could stop disowning parts of myself that were necessary to become a more whole person. My anger was in my shadow, and in not being connected to it, I was not able to be as creative or feel empowered in ways that I am now.
“The shadow also contains a good deal of energy, and it is the cornerstone of our vitality. A very cultured individual with an equally strong shadow has a great deal of personal power. William Blake spoke about the need to reconcile these two parts of the self. He said we should go to heaven for form and to hell for energy—and marry the two. When we can face our inner heaven and our inner hell, this is the highest form of creativity.” –Robert Johnson
To get in touch with your anger is to get in touch with your inner fire as well as your boundaries. Many of us grew up in a home that lacked boundaries, so this is also a difficult thing to learn: that healthy love cannot exist without them. What I have learned is that anger shows up when a boundary has been crossed, and rage shows up when you have been violated or betrayed. Getting in touch with your anger can teach you a lot about yourself and your internal boundaries—in fact you might not even know a boundary exists until the anger is triggered.
Our feelings are always teaching us something, and every feeling serves some biological purpose. No feeling is useless, but the darker, less desirable ones certainly don’t FEEL good kicking around in our bodies. Not to mention all of the judgments and associations they are entangled with. Whether those associations are learned from our families or society, they are there and they make owning anger feel like a dangerous endeavor. So now we have this emotion that when it enters our bodies, it feels not only unpleasant, but also scary and dangerous. It becomes an energy we don’t know what to do with. And then our heads enter the picture and tell us, “What’s the point of feeling angry? It doesn’t do anything.” The mind begins to intellectualize the emotion to circumvent actually feeling it. But the whole point is to actually feel it, to be with it, and eventually, learn from it. It isn’t necessary to do anything in the moment, but to listen to it and then excavate the wisdom that is underneath it. And this can take time, and is much easier said than done. When we consciously embody our anger, we don’t know how long it will be before it dissipates... Hours, days, weeks, months? But I think it’s important to let it run its course, so that we can fully understand the messages it’s trying to give us. More often than not, anger arises when we have failed to protect ourselves in some way by not asserting our boundaries. In this sense, it can be a great teacher, educating us on our limits and what we will and will not tolerate, helping us know ourselves more deeply, teaching us when to assert ourselves and when to simply walk away.
When we don’t allow ourselves to feel anger we also don’t get to connect with its important martial cousins: assertion, passion, drive, sex, or any of the more spirited, fiery energies that are crucial to healthy self-esteem and self-preservation. Developing a healthy relationship with anger does take work, but getting in touch with your personal power is priceless.