Anger is one of our four primary emotions – joy, sadness, fear, anger. Yet it is spoken of as if it’s absence is acceptable – even a virtue. If the same person claimed not to feel joy, sadness, or fear, they might quickly recognise that something essential in their emotional pallet had gone missing. But anger, somehow, gets an exemption.
Part of this comes from a failure to distinguish anger from rage. Rage is the fuming, shame-inducing explosion: red-faced and uncontained. Anger is something different. It’s a powerful, coherent, and morally grounded response to frustration or injustice. Anger says, “Listen. Do not interrupt me. Something needs to be spoken.” Rage may need management, but anger needs encouragement. It should not be suppressed; it wants to expressed.
The habit of the denial of it often starts early on. In childhood we may learn, implicitly and rapidly, that the expression of anger threatens attachment. To maintain proximity, approval, or safety, a child may suppress it. In Freud’s terms, what is repressed, returns. The absence of conscious anger frequently masks its unconscious persistence, re-emerging as enactments, anxiety, depression, or other symptoms.
Donald Winnicott offers an additional lens through his concept of the False Self: a compliant, accommodating structure that forms when a child must prioritise the parent’s needs over their own. The False Self might be apparently not angry. Not because anger is genuinely absent, but because its expression would endanger the relational equilibrium the child depends on. The compliant child becomes the agreeable adult who “doesn’t get angry,” at the cost of their authenticity and vitality.
Gendered socialisation reinforces these patterns. Anger in girls is less acceptable; they are allowed to be emotionally expressive in all domains except this one. Boys, on the other hand, are granted anger but denied sadness or vulnerability.
Anger has a bad reputation. An important task of therapy is to restore a healthy connection to this primary emotion. Anger at past failures of care, at present injustices, and at the ways you might be diminished or mistreated. Far from being something to not feel, healthy anger is a prerequisite for self-respect and psychological integrity. To feel it fully is not only permitted, but crucial.
Image credit: Kat Love
