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Women & Anger: Why We're Told Not to Be Angry and What Happens When We Finally Let Ourselves Feel Rage
14 Plays7 days ago
Why is women's anger so often dismissed, suppressed, or even feared? The cool girl who doesn't get mad. The "hysterical" woman. The "spicy Latina." We're taught from childhood to be nice, polite, and agreeable - which actually means don't be angry, don't disrupt.
Here's the truth about women and anger:
- Anger happens because we've been wronged - expressing it means accepting we're worthy of having that injustice corrected
- Every dismissal creates a feedback loop of "I am not worthy of better" that destroys self-esteem over time
- Why they fear it: freely expressing your anger makes you ungovernable, uncontrollable for someone else - and that's liberation
I know this because I lived it. I suppressed anger in an abusive relationship, and it manifested as depression. Through self-forgiveness meditation, I found all the rage underneath, then had to teach myself to be angry in a healthy way again.
Subscribe. Share. Remember that your anger is valid, informative, and just might change everything.
Small steps, big healing. Keep growing! ✨
Join the conversation! How do you honor your anger? DM me on Instagram @YourCoachMari!
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Transcript
Introduction to Growing With Soul
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello beautiful souls and welcome back to another installment of the Growing With Soul podcast where we explore the moments and stories that shape who we're becoming. I'm Marisol and this is where I love to have real conversations about growth, self-discovery and learning to put yourself first.
00:00:17
Speaker
Whether we're diving into books that change our perspective or unpacking personal experiences that teach us something new, this podcast is for women who are done playing small. and are're ready to embrace their own journey.
00:00:29
Speaker
If you've struggled with putting everyone else first or battled self-doubt, you're in the right place. This isn't about perfection. It's about the messy, beautiful process of growing eat into yourself.
00:00:42
Speaker
So come grow with me.
Understanding Women's Anger: Socialization and Stereotypes
00:00:44
Speaker
Today's episode is one that is near and dear to my heart because it is something that I have struggled with my entire life, essentially.
00:00:53
Speaker
and I am talking about anger, women and anger. And ultimately, i have been curious about and and angered by you know, why is it that women's anger is so often dismissed, suppressed, or even feared?
00:01:16
Speaker
Like, think about it. If you look at maybe your own lived experiences, if you look at media, often women are portrayed a certain way. And whether that is like the cool girl, the chill girl who doesn't get mad about anything. And that's like what guys look for in dating. Or it's, you know, completely dismissed if they're angry or women are hysterical if they're angry or they're just like crazy if they're angry or whatever it is.
00:01:43
Speaker
You know, that's various different forms of dismissal, lived experiences, suppression of anger. Right here, baby, suppressed my anger for a long time. But also, I think that part of that dismissal does come from being fearful of women's anger.
00:01:59
Speaker
But ultimately, what we're going to talk about is exactly that. Women and anger and the lens through which at least in Western culture as we view it. We're going to talk about socialization and ultimately as well, liberation through rage Because girl, um we're angry, feels so good.
00:02:19
Speaker
So let's go ahead and get into that. Ultimately, i do think it starts from a young age when it comes to women and anger.
00:02:33
Speaker
And it can be a little sneaky as well, because if I look back, if I take myself again as like an example of anger, then... then I don't think my anger was ever really suppressed as a kid. That happens definitely later on in life.
00:02:50
Speaker
But you do, you still are subject to the media that you see. And I mean, there's also school, not that I think about it. But in childhood, often girls are taught to be nice and polite and agreeable.
00:03:07
Speaker
And if you didn't even get that in your household, you probably got that in school and through the media that you consumed. So to be nice, to be polite, to be agreeable is to not be angry.
00:03:21
Speaker
Because if you're angry, you're disrupting. And that is the last thing that little girls are taught to be, is a disruption.
Intersectionality and Patriarchal Dynamics
00:03:30
Speaker
And like how I mentioned earlier, once we are older, you probably start seeing this in our teenage years, but definitely as young women into adulthood, that Our anger is often dismissed as just an angry woman stereotype. And you can even have intersectionality here and look at, you know, insert angry, like angry, insert race woman. Like that definitely happens as a Latina.
00:04:00
Speaker
I've seen that come across as, okay, well, it's dismissed as you're just a spicy Latina, like, or you're Latina, so you just have attitude for no reason. And that, the just thinking about it pisses me off so much. But like, that's that's a form of dismissal. And if you've heard that, if someone's told you that, get rid of them. yeah Kick them out of your life, okay? They're not worth eating around.
00:04:26
Speaker
But like, that's that was a form of dismissal and a form of someone not actually honoring your emotions and respecting you and enough to hear you out. So, once again, kind of that stereotypical, like, angry woman that feeds into those earlier dismissals that I did talk about when it comes to being hysterical, being irrational, being too emotional, being difficult.
00:04:51
Speaker
We see that a lot, I think, in, like, the acting world where women are often labeled as difficult to work with, and maybe that's because they're You know, it's about, oh, I was expressing like boundaries or I had like ideas or opinions about certain things.
00:05:07
Speaker
Or maybe something happened on set that did make them angry and they expressed that even if it was in a professional and polite way. So expressing anger and boom, all of a sudden you're a difficult person to work with. You are blacklisted. So we see that a lot in Hollywood as well. And feel like just by talking about this and the little bit that I've said, we all can think of stories of something that's happened to us personally, or we can think of stories that we've heard, whether it is in Hollywood or maybe someone we know in in life that this has happened to. And
00:05:46
Speaker
we kind of get into the crux of why is it happening? Like, why are we suppressing our anger? Why are we being dismissed? And don't even think it's the suppression necessarily. That just happened. I'm going to get into the suppression of anger because exhibit A, me. But or why?
00:06:09
Speaker
Why is it that society, this patriarchal society, has women women's anger dismissed? And you know what? It's all in the power.
00:06:22
Speaker
It's all in the power because think about it. Anger is a powerful emotion. Think about it. Think about the times that you've truly been angry, incensed, enraged, irate.
The Transformative Power of Anger
00:06:35
Speaker
Like there is so much energy behind that emotion.
00:06:44
Speaker
It is a powerful thing. And there are very unhealthy ways to deal with anger because frankly, you have so much energy from that emotion that like you need to do something with that energy. what do some people do? with They yell, they throw things, like you know and those are not healthy ways of expressing and managing and dealing with their anger.
00:07:05
Speaker
But think of the power behind that, the energy levels behind that. On top of that, on a deeper level, with anger being powerful, what is it what is it to be angry?
00:07:19
Speaker
Why do we feel angry in general? It happens because we feel we've been wronged.
00:07:30
Speaker
Stay with that for a second. It happens because we feel we've been wronged. To feel anger, to express anger, we have to accept that we've experienced an injustice.
00:07:49
Speaker
And through expressing it, we then are accepting and owning the fact that we are worthy of sharing it and having that injustice corrected.
00:08:07
Speaker
Think about that. Think about that. Because every single time you've been dismissed in your anger, every single time you've been like downplayed or essentially you learned to suppress it, it is a feedback loop of I am not worthy of better.
00:08:26
Speaker
It is a feedback loop of just diminishing who you are, diminishing your self-esteem, diminishing your self-worth, which is what I've spent a long time on this podcast talking about.
00:08:39
Speaker
When we are taught to suppress our anger, when we are dismissed in our anger, this is what that behavior is signaling and subconsciously teaching us.
00:08:50
Speaker
So anger is often a call to a rise up.
00:08:57
Speaker
Essentially, freely expressing your anger makes you ungovernable. It makes you uncontrollable for someone else. And what is something that we've talked about plenty on this podcast?
00:09:11
Speaker
Toxic relationships, emotional abuse. That comes with controlling behaviors. And when we're angry, justifiably angry, and express it,
00:09:26
Speaker
you can't be controlled anymore. And if you take that to the macro level, we can see that in society overall, we can see that in our fight for different liberties, different rights.
00:09:44
Speaker
You can see how it starts small in the personal, and you can expand that out overall to say maybe political policy.
00:09:54
Speaker
But let's take a beat to go back and look at how we suppress our anger. First of all, before we go on I do want to recognize that suppression of anger is something that a lot of us do because we do learn it from a very young age. So I do want to give it its moment so that we can reflect. And if you are still experiencing this, that you can resonate and maybe spend some time to reflect as well.
00:10:26
Speaker
So the first thing that we do in suppression of our anger. So this is now us. having maybe learned that expressing our anger gets us really nowhere productive or maybe it gets us into a worse situation.
00:10:41
Speaker
So we stop expressing our anger and we might even take it further as to just shut down anytime we feel anger. We just shut that emotion down, you wall it up and you throw it away.
00:10:55
Speaker
You don't even let yourself feel anger anymore. Part of that, so what happens when we do that, how we do that, we internalize it. We turn that anger inward and that can turn into shame, guilt, self-blame.
00:11:10
Speaker
So now we've just turned it into something completely different. and ultimately are now blaming ourselves. Something happened, it pissed us off.
00:11:20
Speaker
There was no point in feeling anger because for whatever x Y, or Z reason, you turn it inward and now you feel like shit because you were the one who was wrong. Somehow it was your fault.
00:11:32
Speaker
We have emotional displacement as well, which can happen as a result of perhaps doing this continually. which is essentially channeling the anger into sadness, anxiety, or depression.
00:11:44
Speaker
so this one, it gets me. It gets me every time I think about it because that was me. That was definitely me, which I'll get into in my growing pains, but that was something I experienced. That was a huge part of ah my depression.
00:12:00
Speaker
The other thing that we do as well, there are, or there can be, physical manifestations of suppressed anger. And it shows up in our bodies. It shows up as tension, it shows up as headaches, it shows up as fatigue, chronic pain. This is where this is where somatic therapy is really good.
Personal Journey of Expressing Anger
00:12:21
Speaker
So if you have been say going to talk therapy and it hasn't been working and maybe you're still feeling all these types of aches and pains, try somatic therapy, because that can be a game changer.
00:12:34
Speaker
So, Roaring Pains is a new segment where I talk about where I have still been struggling with certain things related to the topic at hand. So today's topic, women and anger, like I've mentioned, anger is something that I've struggled with throughout my life.
00:12:50
Speaker
um As a kid, i i don't recall being angry that often, but like I do i do remember like my mom having conversations with me about like how to express my anger in a healthy way um instead of just like sulking or like throwing a temper tantrum as like a little kid, you know?
00:13:09
Speaker
As an adult, that's where little bit more tricky because I was in an emotionally abusive relationship and I learned in that relationship that it was pointless to express my anger. And that expressing my anger only led me to a worse situation where somehow It was my fault that X, Y, and Z happened anyway.
00:13:28
Speaker
And I just learned that if I were to express my anger or if I was upset about something, that it was somehow going to get twisted on me anyway. And it would just lead to an argument.
00:13:40
Speaker
And like there was no point. There was no point. So I suppressed my anger a lot. i didn't like I didn't allow myself to feel anger by the end of that relationship.
00:13:53
Speaker
and For me, it did manifest and it was a huge part of my depression. So what does that look like? like i I say that, but what does it look like?
00:14:04
Speaker
For me, I realized that I was extremely angry deep down underneath the depression. Through meditation, i did a self-forgiveness meditation consistently trying to work on my depression and heal my depression.
00:14:18
Speaker
And through be like void of depression and digging deeper into the darkness, i found a lot of grief, a lot of sadness, and then digging even deeper, that's where I found the rage. All the rage was there.
00:14:37
Speaker
And I essentially had to start working on it just by allowing myself to be angry, like at any level. When I say angry, I don't just mean like enraged. I mean like any level of angry from like annoyed to like upset to like enraged. Like anytime that I would feel upset to any degree, any level of anger, i would have to like literally remind myself It is okay to be angry. I'm allowed to feel angry. This is a normal reaction. like I would have these like affirmations every time that I was angry because I was teaching myself how to be angry in a healthy way again.
00:15:15
Speaker
and it's something that I kind of still do because i am very blessed, I would say, at this point in my life to have a peaceful life where the people that I'm closest to are wonderful and beautiful and amazing and I have healthy relationships, healthy friendships. Like the people in my family that I'm closest with, that I see on a consistent basis, are beautiful and amazing. And even when we do get angry and annoyed with each other, like it's fine and we talk about it and it's fine.
00:15:47
Speaker
So I'm in a very peaceful place in my life. So I'm not feeling anger or enraged often, thankfully. So I don't get to practice that often.
00:15:58
Speaker
But when I do, I do have those affirmations to remind me that I'm allowed to be angry and that I'm allowed to express that anger. and that there are healthy ways to do it.
00:16:10
Speaker
So what happens when we let ourselves feel rage? Like I mentioned, do we have that initial discomfort, but then we have clarity and truth because like I mentioned, anger happens because we've been wronged to some degree.
00:16:26
Speaker
And through that, it reveals what matters to us. It reveals what boundaries we've had, what boundaries we have been crossed, or boundaries that have been crossed that maybe we didn't realize we had. Again, we have that energy, that motivation.
00:16:40
Speaker
Rage is a fuel for change, personal, professional, political. And like I mentioned, anger is a powerful thing, which is why women have been suppressed through the dismissal of our anger on a personal level level to a societal level.
00:16:57
Speaker
And it can be used to set boundaries, to have healthier relationships. It can be used to break cycles and how expressing our anger authentically can interrupt to these perhaps generational patterns that we've been witnessing in our lives throughout throughout our lives.
00:17:18
Speaker
Additionally, like I mentioned, politically speaking, collective power. When we are all enraged that, you know, it can be a catalyst for social movements and for six steps systemic change, it doesn't have to be just to women. Like, we can see this en masse. Like, you could even take our current political climate. How many protests have we had just in the last, like year and a half? Like, that is collective rage, collective anger.
00:17:48
Speaker
And then it's still technically March, so Women's History Month. And, you know, there's always that March on Women's Day. And i am always amazed by the March that happens in Mexico because it's not just a march, it's a huge protest. And that is collective anger and collective rage for a married reason in Mexico. And I'm always just like, since I've always had issues expressing anger, when I see anger like that so publicly, I'm like, oh, my but i I love to see it because I'm just like the freedom in that, you know?
00:18:21
Speaker
And with that being said, expressing our anger brings liberation and authenticity. There is a freedom that comes from no longer performing this emotional labor of suppressing our legitimate feelings.
00:18:37
Speaker
And there is a freedom in being so authentic to yourself and to your worth by being angry and expressing why you're angry when you're angry in a healthy way.
00:18:50
Speaker
In a healthy way. That is still possible. So ultimately, when it comes to anger, if you've been struggling with it, i completely understand and I get you because I have struggled with it too.
00:19:03
Speaker
There are healthy ways to express it on a myriad of different levels, whether it's personal, professional, political. There are ways to go about expressing your anger. And remember that you are worthy of being angry. You are worthy of expressing that anger. And you are worthy of whatever wrong being fixed.
00:19:25
Speaker
I would recommend for the next week to take some time to look at how you do honor your anger. Is it something that you don't have a problem with and you're like, girl, what are you talking about? Kudos to you if that's you. That's amazing. I'm a little jealous.
00:19:39
Speaker
But if you do suppress your anger, what is it that's silencing you? What's going on there? Take some time to reflect on it and think about maybe ways you can honor that anger instead in a healthy way.
00:19:52
Speaker
Remember that your anger is valid, it's informative, and it just might change everything for the better.
Call to Action and Support Services
00:19:59
Speaker
If you have stuck around to the very end, i truly appreciate you. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to share it out with a friend.
00:20:08
Speaker
And if you've been enjoying the podcast, make sure to subscribe and to leave a five-star review. I am a certified life coach. And if you would like some assistance with honoring your anger and your self-worth, as well as working on anything else that may be outside of your comfort zone and you would like support, definitely hit me up.
00:20:28
Speaker
You can schedule your very own discovery call with me through the link in the show notes. Until next time, keep