Why Do We Suppress Anger?

Pain is “inaccessible” until we admit anger to ourselves.

It may sound strange that there are situations when we do not admit our anger.

There are situations in all of our lives when we think our anger is wrong. We feel guilty, and to alleviate both this guilt and anger, we hide them behind other feelings; feelings whose expression we judge to be socially acceptable or at least “not wrong”. This could be, for example, dissatisfaction or self-pity.

Everyone has someone they know who complains about the government or the cashier or the neighbours. And we also know people who complain all the time and undermine themselves in comparing themselves to others.

The first is projection, the second is internalisation, when we turn our anger towards the other person towards ourselves, that is project it onto ourselves. This is what young children do, blaming themselves instead of their parents (in order to instinctively maintain the parental “God image”). As adults, this is our self-criticism, an extreme negative manifestation of the internal (and often external) narrative.

There are many ways in which we instinctively try to manage and compensate for our anger; we suppress it, “transpose” it, project it, or direct it at ourselves. We do all this because we are afraid to face the original reasons behind it, the root causes of the pain behind our anger.

By suppressing and avoiding anger, we are in fact trying to hide the pain associated with it, the wounds that we acquired by attacking our person at some point in the past and have yet to heal.

It has failed to heal because we have turned away from it. Because we were afraid to face not only our pain, but also the abuser who caused our wounds. Anger was born out of this sense of hurt, out of our disappointment, out of our hurt, out of the abuse of our vulnerability. Our anger was born from a sense of powerlessness to defend ourselves.

For decades we can continue to carry this bag that drains our souls, decorate it and label it with many names, but until we reopen it and face its contents, these labels will only serve to further self-deception and our procrastination to process the real pain that lies beneath the anger.