repressed anger

I know a lot of nice guys who say that they generally just don’t ever feel angry. I can relate to them, because I used to be exactly the same: I repressed my anger to the point where I didn’t even feel it any more. Yet certain situations would really bug me: when someone said or did something that should rightly have made me angry, I’d end up ruminating on it for hours, going over and over a conversation in my head replaying all the things I would have liked to have said until it drove me crazy. If only I had allowed myself to be angry! In fact, I was angry; but I just didn’t express it at the time and so I paid the price for it in self-recrimination later.

When we tell ourselves that we never get angry, we are just lying to ourselves. We’re playing the nice guy game to avoid conflict. And the problem with this is that we don’t end up standing up for ourselves. Feeling angry is normal: it’s an emotion that motivates us to stand up for what is important to us. If we repress our anger, we just end up angry with ourselves and that’s a recipe for misery and depression.… Continue reading…