I have wanted to write about anger for some time. As I sat down to begin this column, a recent psychoanalysis session came to mind. I was telling my analyst about something that might have made me angry – but instead, as I spoke 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 trying to keep them open, so losing the thread of what I had just been talking about. “Perhaps you are sending 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 hardest feeling to feel. More than sadness, more than love, more than hatred, more than grief, anger is repressed, or acted out, or drunk or drugged away, or killed off, or sent to sleep. Anything, it can seem, but allowed into our minds and felt.
Often, this is because we have a visceral terror of our anger. Sometimes, this is linked to someone’s history of abuse in childhood, if they grew up in a home where a parent’s anger was expressed through violence. But often it isn’t. 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 actions, that the anger itself is damaging and that this damage is always already irreparable.
Or – and sometimes and – the fear comes from an internalisation of racist and misogynistic tropes: a person unconsciously fears being cast as “the angry woman”, or “the aggressive black man”. Such stereotypes are insidious, burrowing into the minds of their targets, who can end up denying themselves the ordinary and vital experience of feeling angry when they are wronged.
I say ordinary and vital because feeling angry when we are wronged can be a creative and rich emotional experience. It is crucial for good mental health and for fulfilling relationships. It lies at the root of that valuable instinct to leave relationships where we aren’t treated well. When we kill off that instinct, we also kill off a part of ourselves – and we put our safety at risk.
The lively, dynamic energy that anger can bring can all too easily be bitten back into teeth-grinding resentment, a colourless, stony sense of martyrdom and grievance, impenetrable to understanding. And there might be all sorts of important feelings hiding underneath that anger that won’t get a word in if that anger cannot be felt first.
Realising this is, in my experience, crucial to good relationships. Until a few years ago, whenever I sensed an argument with my husband was on the cards – whenever his voice started to rise or whenever I felt a burgeoning thumping in my chest – I would leave the room and close the door.
One thing that led me to realise the seriousness of this was a discussion with the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen. “I have only two words for a woman who can’t get angry with her husband,” he said. “Tick and tock.”
It helped me to understand that in any loving relationship – and I have never seen this more clearly than since becoming a mother – conflict and anger are inevitable and essential for survival. Cohen’s book All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World, about anger in intimate and political life, is out in October. I think I will ask my husband to get it for me for Christmas.
It took a lot of therapy for me to understand that in trying to cut off the oxygen to these arguments by leaving the room, I was in fact trying to close the door on my own rage. I was suffocating my husband’s feelings as well as my own – and our relationship, robbing us of the chance to argue it out, express ourselves, understand each other and come back together again. It was transformative when I finally understood that if you cannot truly feel angry with your partner, you cannot meaningfully repair.
Although I am now able to feel angry with my husband and express it, that doesn’t mean I am at ease with feeling anger more generally. This work is very much in progress. As I listened to my analyst’s words, forced my eyes to open and fought the sleep that seemed so unyielding, I felt the truth of her words in the pit of my stomach. I was unconsciously sending my anger to sleep. It is about time we woke up.
• Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood
