Are you someone who proudly proclaims they never get angry?

Does anger feel unsafe and uncomfortable for you?

Or do you tend to bottle up your anger until you explode, leaving you feeling guilty and wanting to take everything back?

If you’re raising your hand, you’re not alone. I struggled with my own anger for many years.

But denying our anger intentionally or not doesn’t make it magically disappear, which is why I am covering 10 signs you might be suppressing or repressing your anger, six common ways anger presents, and tips on how to acknowledge, honor, process, and integrate your anger.

Prefer the audio? Listen here.

10 Signs You’re Suppressing or Repressing Your Anger

Anger is a complicated emotion for many reasons.

If you were raised to be a “good girl,” you were probably taught that being angry is inappropriate and not welcome.

Or maybe anger wasn’t an acceptable emotion in your family of origin.

Or you had the opposite experience, where growing up in a contentious household made your own anger feel threatening.

For those reasons and many more, suppressing anger is common because it feels safer. It’s how we protect ourselves from the anger we feel we can’t handle.

How can you tell if you have any suppressed anger after being disconnected from it for so long? Read through this list of 10 signs of suppressed anger and see if any resonate.

Sign #1: Emotion Swapping

Emotion swapping is where you swap your anger for a different, safer emotion.

I did this throughout my younger years because I was allowed to be upset, but I wasn’t allowed to be angry. I turned my anger into sadness, upsetness, and annoyance.

Can you relate?

Sign #2: Sarcasm

Do you say the opposite of what you think and feel with a sarcastic, biting tone? Maybe even an eye roll?

Sarcasm is a passive-aggressive way of expressing anger, disappointment, or frustration, and it can happen quickly. I used to be the Queen of Sarcasm.

If this is you, it’s worth thinking about why responding sarcastically feels safer than being direct.

Sign #3: Conflict Avoidance

Being uncomfortable with confrontation may indicate a fear of either your own or other people’s anger.

It’s a protective gesture, but it’s not effective in the long run. You’ll likely end up resentful, which you’ll still have to navigate. And if you’re conflict-avoidant, you probably won’t want to!

Sign #4: Control Issues

Feeling compelled to control others and situations in a bid for safety could be a sign of repressed anger.

High-functioning codependents tend to do this. Codependency is an overt or covert bid to control the experiences, feelings, and relationships of others.

This might look like inserting yourself as the solution to someone else’s problems, doing things for others that they can and should do for themselves, and jumping in to fix things as soon as a pal tells you something is wrong. (auto-advice giving)

Sign #5: Passive-Aggressive Behavior

Passive-aggressive behavior is one of the most destructive forms of suppressed anger, especially in relationships.

Maybe you slam doors, say you’re fine when you’re not, or take a long time to get back to someone when you’re mad at them because you don’t know how to express your anger. You let the silence do the talking instead.

Sign #6: Disordered Boundaries

Boundaries, according to me, are your own personal rules of engagement and consist of your preferences, desires, limits, and deal breakers.

Here’s a personal story illustrating disordered boundaries:

Long ago, my (fairly well-adjusted) college boyfriend got angry after I told him something.

I remember saying, “I don’t do anger,” to which he responded, “I don’t know if I can promise I’ll never get angry.”

“Not doing anger” is an example of disordered boundaries because it’s not my side of the street to say who can and cannot be angry.

It’s also an example of repressed anger turning into control.

With anger, disordered boundaries often present as rigid boundaries, too. Someone with rigid boundaries may take a while to get back to you or say something snippy instead of sharing how they feel.

Sign #7: Shutting Down

Shutting down can look like withdrawing in anger, saying “I’m fine” when you’re upset,  stonewalling (not talking to someone at all), or the transmutation of anger into depression or numbness.

Shutting down is often an unconscious safety mechanism. When our anger is too threatening to feel, we distance ourselves from it or feel nothing at all.

Sign #8: Exploding

When anger is bottled up, there is a cumulative emotional effect. It builds and builds, and then you explode.

You might be unaware of how close you are to snapping and might be set off by the most mundane thing.

As you can imagine, regularly exploding in anger can damage relationships.

Sign #9: Holding Grudges

When we don’t process our anger healthily, we might hold tight to grudges because it’s safer than saying, “I’m really angry about this,” or, “I don’t like how you treated me.”

It’s like having a massive file cabinet filled with hundreds of reasons why Bob is a jerk.

Grudges are heavy. Keeping bad feelings around doesn’t harm the party who did you wrong, nor does it protect you. It harms you.

When we keep anger alive, it lives within us and can become the “issues in our tissues,” as my pal Kris Carr would say.

Sign #10: Shame and Guilt

Anger might make you feel like you’re ‘bad,’ especially if your family of origin or culture thought anger was inappropriate for a girl or unbecoming of a lady.

These beliefs shame us into stuffing our anger.

Getting into a healthy relationship with our anger doesn’t look like shoving it down or having guilt and shame around it.

There’s nothing shameful about being angry.

It’s one of the most essential human emotions. Nobody has the power to avoid it. You will feel it, eventually. The question is, are you healthy enough to honor, process, tolerate, and integrate it?

Again, while consciously or unconsciously avoiding our anger is self-protective, it doesn’t help us. What does help is honoring our full range of human experiences and emotions, which requires getting comfortable with our anger and learning from it.

Inside the guide for this episode, you’ll find a list of questions to help you out.

6 Common Types of Anger

Understanding the most common types of anger can help raise your awareness of how your own anger presents.

Over the past 27 years as a psychotherapist, I’ve found people are more likely to internalize their anger than express it outwardly. We want to move more toward healthily expressing anger, which leads us to our first type.

Type #1: Assertive Anger

Assertive anger is the most constructive form of anger. It involves effectively communicating our feelings without damaging or hurting the other person.

For example: “I’m angry you didn’t let me know you’d be in late last night. I had a terrible night of sleep because I was listening for you. I’d like to make a simple request that in the future, you keep your word and let me know you’ll be late.”

I’ll be honest, it took me years to get comfortable with assertive anger.

If you told my 22-year-old self I’d eventually have these types of conversations regularly, she wouldn’t have believed it.

Type #2: Behavioral Anger

Behavioral anger is a physical expression of anger with the intent to harm. Breaking things, throwing things, and being physically intimidating are all examples of how this manifests.

Type #3: Chronic Anger

Chronic anger is when you’re endlessly pissed off. It looks like internalized or externalized resentment and persistent feelings of frustration and annoyance.

From a therapeutic perspective, it’s also a way to potentially avoid intimate relationships. It is hard to be close to someone who is always pissed off.

Type #4: Passive-Aggressive Anger

When people cannot be direct with their anger, it can manifest as passive-aggressive behavior.

Additional examples are one-word answers, eye-rolling, strategic incompetence, and the annoyed heavy siiiiigh.👀

I share a personal story in this post about how it can even manifest as being late to things, especially when you’re in a partnership where the other person likes to be early. There are a lot of layers to passive-aggressive behavior.

Type #5: Retaliatory Anger

Retaliatory anger is when someone hurts or attacks you, and you want revenge. It’s one of the most common forms of anger because people can easily justify it. If you harmed me first, I can harm you back.

I disagree with this premise. As Michelle Obama says, ‘When they go low, we go high’.

It is incredibly empowering to say and believe, “No matter what anyone else does, I will not act below my own level of integrity because I have to live with that.”

Type #6: Self-Abusive Anger

Self-abusive anger is rooted in feelings of guilt, shame, and lack of worthiness.

It looks like negative self-talk, substance use or abuse, self-harm, or disordered eating.

Self-abusive anger often occurs if you feel like you’re in a double bind. You might feel like it’s not safe to lash out anywhere, and the only “safe” place to lash out is within yourself.

What Can I Do If I’m Suppressing or Repressing Anger?

If you’ve reached this point and have discovered that you’re suppressing your anger, let’s explore what you can do.

First, know you can change how you respond and learn to manage and honor your anger, no matter what you saw growing up.

Harvard conducted a study¹ and found that with treatment, knowledge, and education, 75% of people who experienced explosive anger can change with appropriate intervention. Deconstructing the root causes helped make the treatment even more effective.

Inside the guide for this episode, you’ll find questions to uncover your anger blueprint and gain a deeper understanding of its source.

You’ll also find a resentment inventory to help you see where you’re harboring anger and where you might need to set boundaries.

Sometimes, a lack of boundaries can contribute to our anger and resentment because when we lack the words to set them, we might blame others for not knowing better.

To honor your anger at the moment, try breathing exercises, meditation, working out, or having an angry journal session where you rage-write all over the page.

All of this information is in the guide, which you can grab here.

A Note on How to Proceed

If your anger is rooted in shame and guilt, I want you to practice self-compassion.

Having anger does not make you a bad person. It makes you normal. We all have a right to our feelings.

And if you begin getting angry more often because you’re finally allowing anger after years of suppressing it, that’s okay.

Approach your anger with the curious mind of a beginner.

Forget all the judgment and what you were taught to believe about anger because not expressing anger is not good for your mental or physical health.

I hope this episode added value to your life. If it did, I’d love to hear what you learned: How does your anger present itself? How do you suppress it? How will you start to honor and process your anger? Share in the comments or tag me on Instagram (@terricole)!

I hope you have the most amazing week and as always, take care of you.

¹https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9281-anger-disorder-is-common-in-us-population/