The question I am a 42-year-old woman about to undergo a mastectomy to treat breast cancer. I’m increasingly feeling what I think is anger, which has always been a difficult emotion for me to experience in myself. In the past I’ve squashed it down and turned it inwards, resulting in a low mood. However, I feel as if I’m about to have a reckoning with anger. It’s coming for me. My usual coping mechanism for negative emotions is shaking them out of my body by running, but I won’t be able to do that for a while. I feel I’ll need to go through the anger and come out the other side, but I am afraid. I know the fear and the anger are connected. I worry about the effect anger will have on me, as the only angry woman tropes I know are negative ones. More than that, though, I worry about loved ones as I don’t want my anger to scare them, making me the one they must walk on eggshells around. What I want to know is how to recognise and experience my anger in a healthy way, so I can chip away at it, rather than risk it building up and engulfing me.
Philippa’s answer Society has long imposed a double standard where women are expected to suppress their anger while being allowed to show sadness or vulnerability. Men, meanwhile, are granted permission to be angry, but discouraged from showing sadness or tears. Even though we intellectually understand that these stereotypes are outdated, they still linger, influencing our relationship with these emotions. Anger is often stigmatised, particularly in women, where expressions of it are seen as shameful. Don’t let this stigmatisation get you down. Anger is a completely valid and natural response in the face of what you are enduring. From your longer letter that I needed to cut for space reasons, it sounds like you had a terrible role model in your childhood when it came to learning how to channel anger in productive and non-harmful ways. This has made you see anger as only a bad thing. Change your relationship to your anger.
Think of your anger as the part of you that loves you the most. Your anger is looking out for you, wants to protect you, is telling you what you need, showing you what you want. Anger is good. It has a bad rap because we haven’t all learned how to channel it safely and constructively, but you can do this – and step one is remembering that your anger is on your side. It is a useful emotion, a signal that something important is happening within you, a message that requires attention rather than suppression. The suppression of anger can lead to low mood, as you’ve experienced in the pas. You have good people around you, you are loved, you don’t have to put quite so much effort into playing nice.
Think about anger as a dial, with levels ranging from 1 to 10. Level 1 might be a simple, calm assertion of a boundary, such as saying, “No, I don’t want that”; level 2 could be, “I don’t like it when you do that, please do this instead.” As the dial moves up, the expression of anger becomes more assertive, making what you need to say more forceful. At level 10, anger explodes in a way that feels overwhelming and potentially destructive. The goal is to practise recognising and expressing your anger when it’s on the lower levels of the dial. By acknowledging the first stirrings of anger and asserting yourself early, you can often prevent anger from escalating to a 10. Keep practising this: the more low-level anger expression you practise the more in control of it you will feel. Using the anger dial on the low numbers releases the pressure before it can build up.
Explore your anger. Notice where you feel it in your body. What parts of you are tightening or collapsing? This will make it easier to recognise as it begins. Try writing, too, and allow the anger to flow on to the page uncensored, helping you process the feeling into words. Artistic expression can be a transformative outlet for anger, where words might fail. Try hurling a pot of blood-red paint on to a large canvas you have previously painted pale pink.
It’s frustrating that you can’t run for a while – another thing to be angry about – but something as simple as punching a pillow can provide a physical outlet for the energy that comes with anger. When you’ve expressed the energy like this, it is easier to speak to someone else about how you feel in a calmer way.
Talk openly with people close to you. Let them know how you are experiencing your anger. It’s not so much that they need to tread on eggshells around you but that you do require more consideration. Because of what you are going through – and you can tell them when you do.
Soraya Chemaly’s book Rage Becomes Her shows us how to embrace anger in a healthy and constructive way. Chemaly provides insights on how to recognise and validate anger, how to express it without self-destruction or harming others. The book encourages women to reclaim their anger and use it as a force for personal and collective empowerment.
You can also talk about how you feel to the good people at Macmillan Cancer Support (macmillan.org.uk) .
Every week Philippa Perry addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Philippa, please send your problem to askphilippa@guardian.co.uk. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions
