Anger and Pain

Expressing healthy anger is the key to pain relief, more connected relationships, and a good life.

Just over a decade ago, right around the time I turned 40, I still believed overcoming pain was just about fixing the body. Simultaneously, I was also at a point in my life where I was going through a lot of personal change, as tends to happen around mid-life. The point in our personal and professional lives when we start to become aware of our conditioning, our choices, and our patterns. To take stock of whether those are still serving us. While I’ve always been fairly socially savvy, I would not say I was exceptionally emotionally intelligent or competent at that point. So I wasn’t using my feelings to guide my life choices. And, talking about feelings was definitely not yet part of my work in supporting people in recovering from chronic symptoms.

Singapore - 2015 - 42 years old

Recognizing that I needed support as I navigated what I called my “mid-life opportunity”, I sought out a skilled therapist to help me navigate this big life change. As we talked about my childhood, I remember vividly telling him it was great and mostly uneventful until I was 17 and my parents divorced. I can only imagine his internal reaction as I tried to essentially bypass my entire childhood…as though it was all roses and no thorns. Understanding psychology far more intimately now, it’s almost embarrassing to reflect on my naivety. While I had a relatively healthy and safe childhood, as we unpacked all the beautiful AND challenging things, I started to see my inherited and conditioned personality traits more clearly. How those personality traits served me in essential ways, and how they did not.

Me. Naturally Joyful at Age 5

This led to an illuminating journey of self-awareness that I am 100% still very much engaged in. Part of this journey has been learning about my anger. I was the “easy” kid, the “golden child”, the one who mostly went along with things and never really got into trouble (despite quietly rebelling and consistently testing boundaries in my way). I’ll spare you the details of my family dynamic, but suffice it to say that, like was the case for most of us, anger was not an emotion that was particularly welcome in my family. I made a habit of repressing it, theoretically, to protect myself and others. So when my therapist started to encourage me to express anger about some of the hard things that happened to me through the first 40 years of my life, I wasn’t “feeling it”.

An Anger Fueled Pikes Peak Marathon, 2000

First, I tried to bypass by trying to convince him that I wasn’t angry. Next, I tried to bargain, trying to argue that expressing anger didn’t feel helpful. Essentially, I was trying to protect myself from the depth of the anger and rage inside of me. Subconsciously, I knew it was there, but I worried about the consequences of opening Pandora’s box. He supported me in moving through this, but I’d give myself a C grade in terms of how well I expressed my anger in those sessions.

As I moved through my 40s, these skills allowed me to navigate better the massive life changes that punctuated my 4th decade. Through this new awareness, I saw my life and myself more clearly, informing a new and more intentional direction. I was more consistently tuning into my intuition. However, anger remained an emotion that I mostly subverted and kept buried in an attempt to protect other people, as well as myself. Luckily, anger is like an inflatable ball that we’re trying to hold underwater. At some point, it’s going to surface. While I still didn’t see anger as a gift at this point, I knew it was important.

Around this time, in parallel with the emergence of modern pain science, I was starting to appreciate the role of psychology in chronic symptoms. It was becoming clear that anger was one of the most important drivers of these symptoms. Dr John Sarno, MD, wrote extensively in the 1990s about how anger and rage connect to pain. His books helped me recover from an episode of back pain in my early 20s. While I understood the role of anger and rage intellectually at that point, I wasn’t yet emotionally intelligent enough to know what to do with those feelings.

All The Rage: Dr John Sarno Documentary

Fast-forward a few decades. Gradually, and with cautious curiosity, I began to explore anger’s nature and value. I started to understand that it was hurting me and others to keep it inside.

We say “sadness connects” and “anger protects”.

Because I still wasn’t engaging with my anger in healthy ways, it offered no protection, quite the opposite. My encumbered relationship with anger was blocking me from being my authentic self, from showing up fully in my work, my relationships, and my life. So, I decided to accept and acknowledge that anger and rage were an essential part of me and that I could no longer ignore them.

Today, anger is my favorite emotion because I see how it protects me and, paradoxically, leads to massive joy and connection on the other side. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t talk about anger and rage with my clients. Once a month, I’ll work with a client who ( like I used to) declares that they don’t have anger, as if one can opt out of an entire emotion. But I have massive compassion and empathy for people who feel this way. “Anger” makes up most of the word “Danger,” after all.

We try to bypass anger in endless ways, keeping it buried as deep as possible, where it can do no harm. We use humor to cover it up, try to exercise it away, F#ck it away, drink it away, or work it away. We stay sad or depressed instead, we misbehave, or it comes out sideways as coldness, shortness, or passive aggressiveness in our relationships. When it gets too big to hold, it explodes, and we tend to express it publicly in ways that don’t serve us or others, often doing significant harm.

All of these strategies have one thing in common. They do nothing to relieve the emotion. Nothing that allows us to release and learn from it. For instance, trying to exercise anger away abstractly, without understanding why we’re angry, is a lot like masturbation. It helps in the short term, but doesn’t move us toward love and connection with others. So, how can we overcome our resistance and learn healthy anger expression?

The first thing to know is that healthy anger expression is best done privately and explicitly directed at the person, people, situation, or target to which it is connected. Anger is best expressed by yourself and for yourself. Find a place where you can be alone, where no one will see or hear your anger. Through expressive writing, visualization, and/or movement, the goal is to let it express as fully as possible, saying and doing whatever the anger needs to do. While anger and rage can be wildly intense, they don’t tend to last long once we allow them to express fully. While repressing, or, conversely, publicly and abstractly expressing anger, leads to it sticking around indefinitely, my experience is that anger lasts less than 5 minutes once we allow it. You must call up the specific memory the anger is attached to and direct it at the intended target. While anger can be expressed somatically through the body, it’s difficult to “feel” and release it if it’s aimed abstractly.

Before you start to know your anger, I want you to understand that it’s not the end game. Anger is merely a checkpoint on the way to other, more productive feelings—emotions like compassion, forgiveness, and love. Buddhists also describe anger as the “clear mirror” guiding us toward lessons learned and clarity of action. Anger doesn’t last long, but the benefits of this powerful emotion are far-reaching and long-lasting. Here is a visual illustrating how I guide people through anger while recovering from chronic symptoms.

Time Traveler Process Starting with The Hurtful Experience/Memory

I call this the “Time Traveler” visualization, and it’s a powerful way to practice anger expression and to see that it transforms into other, more productive things. You can use the Time Traveler visualization exercise to rescript a hard memory and express and release the emotions connected to that memory in the process. Because our memories degrade, are inaccurate, and only survive through the emotions they create, we can rescript them to change them. This allows us to express the feelings associated with those memories while using them for growth.

Journaling is another powerful way to confront anger and express it privately. Consider free writing about anger for 10-15 minutes to get it out of you and onto the page. Write continuously about your feelings. Don’t edit or overthink. You don’t need to be able to read it or need to share it. Just get it out of you. Burn or trash it when you’re done.

You can also add movement to visualization or as part of writing to make the expression of anger more “somatic” or body-based. I can support you with this process in the clinic if you’d like to add it to your gym program or movement practice in more productive ways. Movement is a powerful way to mobilize anger through you and ultimately out of you. But, most of us exercise to burn off anger without knowing why we’re angry, much less who or what we’re angry at. This reinforces anger rather than releasing and transforming it. It’s like practicing it reinforcing it’s presence. The goal is not to get stuck there.

Here’s a simple example of how I expressed my anger after a challenging grocery store interaction a few weeks ago.

Again, anger needn’t take a long time. However, the results benefit you and everyone around you and can last a lifetime. I’m consistently working on my anger expression skills to have more compassion for myself and others. I hope you’ll find it generative. And, while emotional awareness and expression aren’t always needed to overcome chronic symptoms, they’re legit the fastest way to interrupt patterns of thought, behavior, and feeling, resulting in significant change. If you’d like to learn more about how emotions and pain connect, please reach out and let me support you in learning this vital life skill.

I’m in the process of updating my recorded and guided Time Traveler visualization. Paid subscribers will receive a copy for their personal use in the next few weeks. This will allow you to work through hard memories, past and present, as I’ve described above, to grow and learn from them rather than let them hold you back. Please sign up for a paid subscription today to gain access to my new guided visualization. Or come see me as a client, and let’s talk about the role of anger in your symptoms, and in your life.

May you effortlessly convert your anger into love and wisdom. Be well, everyone.