07/06/2026
Sambodhi:
The first anger I was confronted with was my mother’s. It came unexpectedly, roaring down the corridors, leaving me scared and shaken. Even as a little girl, I could sense that she felt embarrassed that she couldn’t control her anger, and would explode like that. Her anger was the peak of all the things she couldn’t keep together anymore.
As I grew up, I copied the same behavior. I accumulated hurt, pain, and stress, piling it up until, in an unaware moment, I let it all out – leaving in its wake astonished friends, damaged relationships and missed opportunities. Afterwards, I felt ashamed, and just like with my mother, it felt bigger than me, as if I had no control over it.
You might have other ways of acting out your suppressed anger. Perhaps you become hostile towards the people around you, make sarcastic jokes, or find yourself bursting into tears easily. Suppressed anger can also make you space out, dissociate, become confused, emotionally shut down, or disconnected from yourself and others.
In our society, anger is often seen as something negative that needs to be managed or controlled. A quick web search on “anger” shows prompts that describe ways of fixing a problem: “control”, “solve”, “help”, or “treat”.
In traditional anger management, the focus is mainly on control and regulation, or on reducing the intensity of the emotion. How often have I heard “count to ten” when facing this strong feeling, as if my only option is to wait and hope it will go away, or as if I’m not supposed to experience anger at all.
What is Anger:
Anger is a natural human emotion that arises when something is perceived as wrong, unfair or threatening, preparing the body and mind to respond and to protect itself. Anger is tied to our basic survival and related to the “fight, flight or freeze” response of the sympathetic nervous system.
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