WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR ANGER?

There’s an old saying that’s been doing the rounds for long enough that most people have heard some version of it, even if they can’t quite place where it came from.

Most of us grew up with some version of the message that anger was dangerous, or embarrassing, or unbecoming, or simply not something that well-adjusted people displayed in polite company. We were taught to manage it, suppress it, channel it into something more acceptable – and so we did, or at least we learned to look as though we did, while quietly carrying it around underneath everything else we were managing.

The trouble with suppressed anger is that it doesn’t actually go anywhere. It just changes shape. It becomes resentment, or bitterness, or a low-level cynicism that we stop even noticing because it’s been there so long it feels like personality rather than pain. It turns inward and does its damage there instead – and in my experience, and in the experience of many people I’ve worked with over the years, that internalised anger has a way of finding an outlet one way or another, whether we choose to give it one or not. Sometimes that shows up emotionally, sometimes behaviourally, and sometimes – and this is the part we really don’t talk about enough – it shows up in the body. Dis-ease, in the very literal sense of the word. The body keeping score when the mind has decided it’s all fine.

FINE, as we’ve established, stands for F***ed-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional.

What I learned about transmutation

The shift happened when I stopped trying to make the anger go away and started asking what it was trying to tell me.

Anger, underneath all the heat and noise, is almost always pointing at something that matters – a value that’s been violated, a boundary that’s been crossed, a version of yourself that deserves better than it’s been getting. When we treat it as something to be suppressed or managed rather than something to be understood, we lose access to all of that information, and we lose the energy it carries too, because anger has energy in it – a lot of it – and that energy can be extraordinarily useful if we’re willing to work with it rather than against it.

I’ve heard it described as transmutation – taking the raw material of something painful and choosing to turn it into something that serves you rather than damages you. It sounds more esoteric than it is in practice. In practice, it looks like using the anger at what was done to you to fuel the determination to build something better. It looks like letting the pain of a difficult chapter become the thing that makes you the most effective person in the room when someone else is going through something similar. It looks like taking the hot coal out of your hand, not because you’ve forgiven everything and everyone and achieved some kind of enlightened serenity, but because you’ve decided your own future is more important than the fire.

I shed my anger about the hardest chapters of my life a long time ago, and I want to be clear that this wasn’t a performance of positivity or a spiritual bypass of the difficult stuff – it was a genuine process, done properly, with a lot of support, over a long time. Wherever the people from those chapters are now, I genuinely wish them well. Not because I owe them that, but because carrying anything else would cost me far more than it would cost them, and I’ve got better things to do with the energy.

Where are you still holding the hot coal?

That last question is the interesting one.