As a firey Sagitarius woman learning to create a healthy relationship with anger has been profoundly life changing.
For me at age 16 I was hospitalised for an eating disorder, during my recovery it was a boxing bag that offered me a path of healing, to claim the life I wanted, own my power and feel my rage. It wasn’t countless hours of talking to shrinks, but moving energy through my body and working with emotion. The boxing bag was my medicine. My anger a prayer towards health.
Historically society has conditioned women to suppress anger, now as the wellness industry leans more into emotional literacy, there is an invitation to claim this powerful emotion and use it as fuel for change.
Claiming the life we want may not be a passive path, but an active one where we move from shut down or freeze, into fight and flight, before then landing on the soft grassy field of ‘emotional regulated’. This may involve saying ‘no’ to a boundary invasion or claiming what’s is rightfully yours. (Somatic therapy can offer a safe, supportive and grounded space to access these feelings.)
When we bottle anger up it can be dangerous, trying to keep a lid on things can cause the pot to boil over and when life is demanding of us, anger can be messy and cause harm to those around us. When directed at others and out of control it can violent and destructive.
However when we build an healthy relationship with anger, it is an energy and force we can use in positive ways to assert our boundaries and access and harness our raw unmasked inner power and energy.
Anger is not a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ force but an energy that needs to be expressed, to state a boundary or reclaim forgotten parts of ourselves. When expressed in healthy ways it’s is a vehicle to claiming our potency and innate charge and life force that runs through our body. It offers the needed energy to our system that has been frozen. This can propel ourselves forward into life and give voice to what needs to be owned.
Many of us hold our history in our body, anger may show up in a clenched jaw, tight fists or racing heart beat.
Often if we are are not given the tools to healthily express our anger externally. We may instead internalise it and lean towards self harming behaviours like food restriction, bingeing, substance abuse or self harm.
Anger needs a safe external place to land and sometimes a boxing bag may be just the place.
Many people have used boxing to reduce experiences of depression, anxiety and stress and it has helped a lot of people with addiction on there road of sobriety. For many people that are depressed and stuck it may bring us back to feeling our life force.
If we have the tools to discharge these pent up emotions without taking it out on others, we take responsibility for what is ours. By moving through these emotions with acceptance, presence and compassion we can learn to ride the wave when we are activated, instead of trying to run a mile.
This is something we can consider, when it comes to how we raise our children and the emotional environments we create at home.
As a mother of two boys there is a lot of energy that bounces around our home. The couch has become a jumping castle, there is many a wrestle and a non stop need to be active and moving. Rather then just making it wrong, how can we let kids express this energy in healthy ways, as a necessary part of discharging their energy and regulating their emotions.
The boxing bag still swings in the wind on our back verandah as it did when I was a teenager, my little one at the moment using it as he learns about his boundaries and life force.
I believe as mothers we have been told that a good mother is a ‘peaceful and calm one’, whilst I try and create a warm, loving and caring environment in the home kids pick up on what we are holding onto. And if we talking in a calm loving tone but raging on the inside, kids are more clued in then we think and pick up on the energy in the room. Sometimes they will express what we are repressing.
Motherhood can push us to the edge and sometimes healthy anger may be something that expressing safely away from our kids may benefit them i.e. Such as in the therapeutic space.
For me I have created safe places to let these feelings through the screams under waves or on a highway, the therapy room or the boxing bag. When we express the necessary fight response we can naturally come back into our homeostasis or ventral vagal space that will benefit us and ours kids as they feel the lightness too.
When we demonstrate our healthy relationship to emotions like anger we offer this life changing tool for our kids.
The permission to embrace and move through anger in healthy ways as a woman has been a monumental key on my healing path. I hope we can move beyond a society that values suppression over expression, and learn to move through anger in healthy ways, finding relief, freedom and a deeper sense of our innate power. As women, parents and human beings.
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For more on the benefits in Body Psychotherapy also known as Core Energetics and how it can support your emotional health head to.
https://fionawilks.com/bodypsychotherapy