Letters to Anger
What this powerful emotion is teaching me about self-trust
As a therapist who is also an Aries, I thought I was familiar with anger. I thought I had an ease and a fluency around anger because of how often I myself am perceived as angry, or described as “intense.” And yet it wasn’t until recently, when I started an ancestral healing coaching program with Cassandra Solano, that I began to understand how complex my own relationship to anger really is.
I’ve written about the utility of anger before, especially in terms of therapy. Anger can be an incredibly useful and illuminating emotion, and a trusting relationship with a therapist can be one of the best — or perhaps one of the few — places where we can truly come to familiarize ourselves with our anger. What is it like to feel anger? Where do we feel it in our bodies, and what is its somatic quality? How do we experience it relationally — especially in the present, with and toward our therapist? Do we suppress it, express it, or ignore it and wait for it to go away? How do the various aspects of our identities impact how we experience our own anger, and whether or not we express it?
Like other emotions, we learn about anger in childhood, in our observation of our caregivers’ relationships to anger and how it showed up in their relationships; between our parents, or with us…
