The Cloak of Anger

Learning to listen to uncomfortable emotions

Hello friends and readers,

The following story is about me, both when I was younger and now as an adult. It’s a little bit raw, a little bit vulnerable, but I felt that it was worth sharing because it shows the ways that I’m healing from childhood wounds—work that I think many of us here are doing—and how anger is a necessary expression in that healing. They say that anger is really just the cloak of another emotion. It could be frustration, hurt, shame, jealousy, or any other painful feeling, but it seems to me that anger doesn’t come out until those other emotions have been dismissed, often repetitively.

Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash

Last week, I totally blew my top at my mom. There had been some confusion around if and when we would eat birthday cake (it was my 32nd birthday!), so I asked my mom if she could start communicating her expectations better so that everyone knows what she’s thinking. To this, I was met with a dismissive response. So I tried again to be reasonable by sharing that we just don’t know what she’s thinking if she doesn’t tell us. Again, I was dismissed. I said that it’s not that I don’t want the cake, it’s just that I want more communication. Dismissed a third time.

At this point, I could feel the anger of not being heard welling up in me. I’ve been practicing letting my anger out safely in small bursts over the past year or two, and so this time I chose not to internalize it as I usually would. I slammed my hands down on the table hard and yelled “Just listen to me!” After asking, again, to be heard and being met, again, with defensiveness, I ended the interaction with a retort about me being the adult and her being the child, and left.

This is not the first instance of asking to be heard and being met with silence or dismissive responses; it’s certainly not the first time I’ve been told that the need I asked my parents to meet was unreasonable. After leaving the room, I went to Sage¹ and for a few minutes my breathing and my heart were racing. A couple minutes later, Jason came in and I told him what happened, what I said, and why. And…I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel shame about losing it. Once my heart rate slowed down and I could breathe again, I felt really calm.

A friend and I talked about this a couple days later, both with our similar but unique stories, and I said that my reaction was not just about this one instance, it was the culmination of all the anger that little Aleesha was never allowed to express for risk of being alienated from her caretakers. Anger plays an important role in our sense of justice for ourselves and others; without it, little Aleesha never knew when her boundaries were being crossed or whether her needs were valid or not.

I’ve been reflecting this past year on what it means to acknowledge and truly hold space for the parts of me that are angry. It feels scary because throughout my life, I received the message that my anger is unhelpful at best, and at worst, toxic. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t the quiet, good girl; I suspect I quickly learned to internalize my frustrations and bids to have my needs met when my outbursts were dismissed or maybe even punished by the big people in my life. But the internalized anger didn’t leave my body—it just festered there and came out as perfectionism, shame, silent treatment, ghosting, judgement.

Big Aleesha has finally cultivated enough safety throughout the years to learn what it means to express anger as an act of reconciliation. It’s absolutely okay to be mad, to be loud, to express myself—if I never let others know that something is wrong, it’s impossible to make it right. And the crazy thing is that our closest relationships actually require these ruptures in order to make the necessary repairs.

So the day after the explosion, I wrote my mom a note, not to apologize, but to say the things I’ve been too afraid to say, to hold boundaries that I wasn’t sure were even valid, to offer hope for the relationship to one day be a safe place for both of us.

Being an early childhood educator has brought me face to face with anger on many occasions. It can bring up a pretty significant sense of being unsafe, especially when it becomes loud and destructive, and the need to shut it down can feel incredibly overwhelming. However, punishing, dismissing, or getting into a yelling match with an angry child doesn’t actually uncover and meet their deeper need, and as the feeling gets bigger, they may become louder or more destructive as a way to show that something is very wrong; or, like me, they will become smaller and quieter, and shove it down.

As parents and caregivers, it is imperative that we separate our worthiness from our children’s behaviours. I’ve had numerous conversations with friends about this, and there’s one theme that keeps coming up: when a child is trying to share something difficult and the parent becomes defensive, an element of safety is removed and the conversation shuts down. Over time, it becomes impossible for the child to share without feeling guilty—the adult has shown that they are unable to see past the anger to the hurt, pain, fear, or sorrow underneath because they are focussed on their own discomfort.

This journey absolutely needs to start with us. Something I keep coming back to is that our pain may not be our fault, but it is our responsibility to heal. We need to hear the message that our anger is trying to tell us, get curious about how to find safe ways of expressing ourselves, and find the people who can be a safe place for all of it. In a relationship, we need to be able to give each other feedback about what’s going well and what isn’t—children included. If you find that feedback from your child is difficult, you need to take that to another adult who can hold space for it. It is NOT your child’s job to do that.

Notes to think about:

• Although there are unhealthy expressions of anger, anger itself is healthy. It’s okay for you to be angry. It’s okay for your child to be angry. If this feels unsafe, it may be helpful to dig into why and gain some coping tools with someone you trust.

• It’s important to learn how to dispel the flood of sensations that accompany anger safely, and teach children to do this too. I often do this by smacking my hands down on a table. I used to worry that by giving in to that urge, I would eventually hurt the person I was mad at, but I have never done that, nor have I even been tempted to. I would say that repressing the need to release the energy means we aren’t learning to identify and access a safe outlet, making it more likely that we’ll harm others when we reach our limit.

• An angry child is doing their best to show that something isn’t right. Sometimes we do need to help a child learn more effective tools to express themselves, but it can be easy for us adults to miss what’s really going on under the surface.

• Just because a child is quiet, doesn’t mean they don’t get angry. Like me, that child may have learned to internalize their difficult feelings in order to keep the peace. I never assume that a quiet child is a content child.

• Your child’s anger is about how they feel, not about your worth as a parent. They may say incredibly hurtful things when they are angry, but it’s important that we separate our worth from their expression, because what they really mean is often different than what they are actually saying.

How do you express your anger and frustrations?

How do you hold space for your children to express their anger?

1. Sage had woken up and was looking at me like da fuq? Jason went to check on Declan, who calmly went back to sleep when his dad told him that mama had big feelings toward grandma but we’re okay.