The Sacred Fire of Anger

We spend so much energy trying to get rid of anger. What if we've been misreading the signal the whole time?

Something powerful, strong and beautiful has been emerging a lot in conversations with my clients over the last few weeks. Anger.

For most of my life, I treated anger like a character flaw. Something to apologise for, to smooth over quickly before anyone noticed. If I felt it rising, my first instinct was to push it back down or turn it inward and let it quietly become something heavier.

I suspect a lot of us were shaped this way. Anger wasn’t safe to express, so we learned to call it something else. We used language of anxiety, frustration, “just being tired.”

It’s taken me a long time to realise that anger is energy. Raw, potent, directional energy. And like any energy, it doesn’t disappear when we suppress it. It just finds somewhere else to go.