When Anger Is Really Love in Disguise

These days, I see a lot of young people in my therapy room. 

Their faces still hold a little baby fat. 

When they smile, they still look like beautiful kids. And when they cry, they’re truly sad and have no clue what to do.

 

They all have one thing in common: outside my therapy room, they swallow, suppress, and hide.

 

People may think young people only care about their “face,” but deep down, they love their parents.

They hide because they don’t want them to worry. 
They suppress because they’ve been told that feeling their feelings is unacceptable. 
They swallow because they’ve been told crying is weak. 

Holding everything in becomes their way of loving and bonding with their parents, and it’s how they reach the standard of a “good child.” 

Then, as they grow older, society expects them to meet another standard.

 

So they suppress, store, and stuff until nothing more can be held. Like a pressure cooker, they need a valve to release.

 

The anger issues we see nowadays are, sadly, often just needs that haven’t been tended to for a long time. They’re boundaries that have been violated, or “going along” that’s been mistaken for unconditional love.

 

I remember when I was younger, I had no idea how to deal with this emotion. It was an intense force from inside that felt like it wanted to explode out of my body. I chain-smoked a lot so I wouldn’t have to feel it. The deep inhale and exhale helped me channel the energy out.

 

I was just like the young people I see now. We were making the best of it. We were far from being delinquents. But with tension, pressure, and strain stored and suppressed day after day, we couldn’t hold it in anymore.

 

Behind those beautiful, youthful faces, they try things you can imagine: drinking, partying, bumping their heads into walls, cutting their arms.

 

The sad part is that this doesn’t stop when they grow out of this phase. I’ve seen many adults in my practice whose anger drove them to hurt not only themselves, but others: to sabotage, to destroy, to take revenge.

 

What I’m saying is this: it’s not a character flaw, and it’s not a deficiency. It’s a soul that hasn’t been taken care of for a very long time.

 

If you’re angry right now, you may want to slam a door or punch a wall. I remember that feeling well. When I was angry, I wanted to displace the discomfort onto something else, and if someone was around, that energy would aim for them, whether as a raised voice or a sharp order to do something else.

 

Yes, I’ve been there. It made things worse. But it also led me to become better.

 

If you realize the energy needs to go somewhere, let it go:

When you’re ready to sit, inhale for 5 seconds and exhale for 5 seconds, for as long as you need.

You’ll feel relieved. Your body settles. The blurred lens seems to clear. Your breathing returns to normal.

 

The body needs to do what it needs to do.

Most of the time, we try to calm ourselves too soon. We want to think the anger through. We convince ourselves it has no place. But if we let anger run its course, it’s not as frightening as we think.

 

A pressure cooker is highly functional and efficient, and so are the human body and mind. But to keep them functional, we need to release the valve.

It’s unrealistic to expect a pressure cooker to perform while trapping all the steam. If you let the air out from time to time, you keep it intact. If you don’t, it will explode.

 

Anger tells us our values have been violated. It tells us something unjust is happening, that our needs and time are being taken advantage of, that we’re unsafe and need to get away, or that we need to be assertive and stand up for ourselves.

 

If we’re open to its message instead of judging it, we’ll see how loving it really is. I know it’s a kind of tough love that we tend to resist. But true love isn’t always comfortable. It pushes us out of our so-called “comfort” zone, because love wants you to grow.