I have bitten back my anger most of my life and I am just now figuring out in my 40’s how to deal with it. I have found that spending so much of my time and energy suppressing my anger did not make it go away. It just went underground. Having it go underground was so dangerous… it still existed, I just chose to ignore it and by doing that I found myself exploding for no real reason and having this nest of hornets in my chest all the time was so anxiety inducing and cut logic and reason off at the knees. I reacted emotionally to everything and let my emotions determine my reality. If I “felt” it to be true then I believed it to be true. This is the danger of not dealing with your emotions – either you deal with them or they rule you. Case in point: I know a man who is just running scared from his true emotions so he would so much rather pretend every day that everything is ok rather than have a real conversation or face real fear/pain/doubt/anger… He has chosen to live an extremely self-righteous life – which is funny since he professes to be an atheist now. He has turned his back on his family, ruined his marriage, radically changed his entire world – but denies that there is any catalyst for these changes despite all of the evidence from his life that there has been traumatic horror that he refuses to admit to or to face….so all that pain, all that anger – it is still there and it manifests itself as a cold hatred and a barely contained contempt for the pain or emotions of others.

What I am finding that works for me is giving all that anger a direction and pointing it to where it actually goes. Where it belongs. I had to come to the realization that all I was doing by withholding my anger was letting my abusers off the hook and pretending that pain doesn’t hurt was only giving them a pass. All I really did was hurt my own heart over and over again while they got to believe that what they did must not have been so bad since I am obviously ok with it all. I don’t want to live that lie anymore. I invite everyone to stop living a lie…. If you aren’t living the truth and speaking the truth – whose lies are you telling? They have to belong to someone. Who are you lying for? Who are you protecting? Who are you serving by being false… being fake….? You may think you are serving yourself, but you can only serve your true heart by living and speaking the truth. Stop pretending. Just stop lying to yourself. Find your heart and let others see it – glorious, broken, scarred… every beautiful and every ugly corner of it. There is no other way.. otherwise that anger will just sneak up on you and it will come out when you don’t want it to.