I wanted to write about anger for some time. As I sat down to begin this column, a recent psychoanalysis session came to mind. I told my analyst about something that might have angered me—but instead, while talking to her, I experienced a sudden wave of irresistible sleepiness. I described this sudden onset of fatigue, as I felt the overwhelming weight of my eyelids and gave up keeping them open, so that I lost the thread of what I had just been talking about. “Maybe you’re putting your anger to sleep,” my analyst said.
The more patients I treat in psychotherapy, and the more psychoanalysis I receive as a patient, the more I think that anger is often the most difficult emotion to feel. More than grief, more than love, more than hate, more than grief, anger is repressed, or exercised, or drunk or drugged, or killed, or sent to sleep. Anything, it may seem, but allowed in our thoughts and feelings.
Often this is because we have a visceral fear of our anger. Sometimes this is linked to someone’s history of childhood abuse, if they grew up in a home where a parent’s anger was expressed through violence. But often it is not. Sometimes this fear can take root in a mind that finds emotions indigestible and overwhelming, leading to an unconscious confusion that angry feelings are the same as violent action, that anger itself is harmful, and that this damage is always already irreparable.
Or – and sometimes and – the fear comes from an internalization of racist and misogynistic tropes: a person unconsciously fears being singled out as “the angry woman” or “the aggressive black man”. Such stereotypes are insidious, digging into the minds of their targets, who may end up denying themselves the ordinary and vital experience of feeling angry when wronged.
I say ordinary and vital because feeling angry when we are wronged can be a creative and rich emotional experience. This is crucial for good mental health and for fulfilling relationships. It lies at the root of that valuable instinct to leave relationships where we are not treated well. When we kill that instinct, we also kill a part of ourselves – and we put our safety at risk.
The vibrant, dynamic energy that anger can bring can all too easily be bitten back into teeth-gnashing resentment, a colorless, stony feeling of martyrdom and grievance, impervious to understanding. And there can be all kinds of important feelings hidden under that anger that won’t get a word if that anger can’t even be felt.
Realizing this is, in my experience, crucial to good relationships. Until a few years ago, whenever I felt that an argument with my husband was on the cards – whenever his voice started to rise or whenever I felt a nascent pounding in my chest – I would have the room left and closed the door.
One thing that made me realize the seriousness of this was a conversation with psychoanalyst Josh Cohen. “I have only two words for a woman who cannot get angry with her husband,” he said. “Tap and tap.”
It helped me understand that conflict and anger in any love relationship – and I’ve never seen this more clearly than since becoming a mother – are inevitable and necessary for survival. Cohen’s book All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World, about anger in intimate and political life, is published in October. I think I will ask my husband to get me this for Christmas.
It took a lot of therapy for me to understand that in trying to cut off the oxygen for these arguments by leaving the room, I was actually trying to close the door on my own anger. I stifled my husband’s feelings as well as my own – and our relationship, robbing us of the chance to fight it out, express ourselves, understand each other and come back together again. It was transformative when I finally understood that if you can’t feel truly angry with your partner, you can’t make meaningful recovery.
Although I can now feel and express anger towards my husband, it does not mean that I am comfortable feeling anger more generally. This work is very much in progress. As I listened to my analyst’s words, forcing my eyes to open and fighting the sleep that seemed so unyielding, I felt the truth of her words in the pit of my stomach. I unconsciously put my anger to sleep. It is time for us to wake up.
