When Women’s Anger is Overlooked in Relationships
Women are allowed to express their full range of emotions, anger included. They want to be fully seen and not confined to the role of a “nice, girl-pleasing” woman.
Woman, your anger has consequences on your health. Already fifty years ago research in psycho-oncology revealed a connection between unexpressed emotions and extreme repressed anger and the diagnosis of breast cancer (1). Repression of anger is when you continually refrain from stating how you feel and turning this anger towards yourself. I believe you know how it feels like.
Taking care of our emotions is a societal responsibility
Imagine. This study was published fifty years ago and at that time, working on feelings was not something considered normal. Unfortunately, it remains the same fifty years later in most areas of our society. Even though nowadays, knowledge and practices about conscious feelings are slowly percolating in society, there is still so much to do and learn about that field. My invitation is that more people learn to consciously feel and experience new changes in their life.
I heard many people have had this childhood experience when being angry, they were sent in a room alone to “calm down”, leaving them with a feeling of being “wrong” when they felt anger. To survive in an environment where feeling angry was considered as being dangerous, bad, or wrong, we adapted to the rules and find strategies to repress anger. However, something else is possible regarding our relationship with anger. Feeling angry and practicing to use it consciously can bring new results in your life and for all those around you. Are you willing to experiment with something new?
Girls/Boys education with anger
Boys are praised for being adventurous, discover, and getting dirty. Girls are praised to be pretty, calm, and sweet. So like many little girls, I have been educated to develop more of my feminine qualities: elegance, well-mannered, soft and gentle, avoiding being loud and messy. Through observing my mother and other mothers’ behavior, I received the message that women’s role is to take care of other people’s needs, bring comfort and harmony. These feminine qualities are in contradiction with what I have learned about anger, which is loud, dangerous, disruptive, and reveals conflicts. Also, women tend to turn their anger down themselves creating self-destructive behaviors (such as beating yourself up all the time with thoughts, binge eating, low dramas…). It creates anxiety, frustration, depression, irritability, and resentment. On the other side, because men have traditionally been viewed as protectors and builders, men’s anger is commonly more “acceptable”.
I wonder if men even realize how much women are influenced by their education of repressing their needs, voice, and desires or more commonly minimizing them to appear to be a “good girl”. Often when an adult woman gets angry, people don’t take her seriously, her emotions being not “rational”. This hidden ban that a “respectable” woman should not get angry (otherwise you are a “bitch”) shows up at work as well as in our most intimate relationships. I have experienced this message repeatedly without first knowing what was going on behind the scene for me. It often ended up in explosive outbursts of anger or implosion by breaking down in tears. It resulted in a feeling of separation, my partner was not willing to connect with me when I was angry. I remember him saying “I can not listen to you when you are in that state”, “Calm down first”, “You really have a problem with your anger”. I often felt ashamed of my behavior, not responsible for creating the beautiful relationship I wanted. I ended up feeling something was not working in our relationship. I did not feel heard when expressing my needs and being angry at the same time.
Expressing my anger created discomfort for him. I was making him uncomfortable with his relationship to his anger. If your anger is not taken seriously by your partner and he makes you feel wrong when you express it, be careful and check out if you feel that he really respects you and takes your needs seriously. Men tend to be angered by women’s negative emotional reactions. As a result, the information behind your anger might not be taken seriously; worse, your anger now becomes the problem.
Men tends to be angered by women’s negative emotional reaction.
Your anger shows your determination to take yourself seriously
Coming back to our education as small girls and integrating that a woman’s role is to keep harmony and peace. To keep harmony and avoid conflicts, we, women, minimize our feelings, even give up our ideas, space, voices, and needs. We unconsciously use some strategies to deal with the situation, by turning our anger into silence creating a feeling of separation, or when noticing our partner’s uncomfortableness with our anger, trying to make them feel comfortable again and protect them from their discomfort. Those strategies result in neglecting your necessities that your anger initially was trying to get your attention on.
In both ways, acting like that doesn’t bring you in your power. I tried it so often and ended up feeling confused about my own opinions and needs, feeling sad, depressed, and small. I was doubting my relationships and focusing on what was not working. Instead, after learning to express my anger from lower to higher levels of intensity, I started to create deeper relationships with myself and others. Why? Because I started to trust myself, my voice and take care of my needs.
Taking your power back and create intimacy instead of separation !
I invite you woman, to embrace your anger and become comfortable with it even if people do not appreciate it. By being with the anger, you start taking your authority back, you start to stand in your power.
Something shifted inside me when I learned to feel my anger and experience it in my body so that I can very quickly recognize it. Something shifted inside me when I started to feel anger as this free flow of energy and not as a “bad sensation”, “uncomfortable”,” negative” sensation. When you start to feel these physiological changes in your body and you don’t tag that sensation with unpleasant, bad or uncomfortable, you will start to have new results in your life. Now I feel more protected by myself because I know I can rely on my anger to tell what is needed. I am more able to share my feelings authentically without being the victim of that situation. I am more creative because I allow myself self-expression. My anger become the fuel of my creativity.
When I have something to say, I know how to use low intensity of anger so that what I say is landing in the space. I feel more heard and seen. Anger brings safety in the space because I know how to put boundaries with someone or a situation. Here is a revolutionary idea: anger creates intimacy! This gives me a sense of belonging and contribution. This is a deep sense of joy in me for being alive and that my life matters. These are some of the benefits women and men get when developing a conscious relationship with anger and use it as a way of living.
(1) S. Greer, Tina Morris, Psychological attributes of women who develop breast cancer: A controlled study, 1975
Deepening readings:
- Agneta H. Fischer, Gender and Emotion: Social Psychological Perspectives.
- Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her. The Power of Women’s Anger, Atria Books, 2018.
