Face your anger and let it out. It’s the only way to stay healthy

More than sadness, hatred or grief, rage is something that we shut away or flee. That endangers our relationships, our happiness – and our safety

I have wanted to write about anger for some time. As I sat down to begin this column, a recent psychoanalysis session came to mind. I was telling my analyst about something that might have made me angry – but instead, as I spoke to her, I experienced a sudden wave of irresistible sleepiness. I described this sudden onset of fatigue, as I felt the overwhelming weight of my eyelids and gave up trying to keep them open, so losing the thread of what I had just been talking about. “Perhaps you are sending your anger to sleep,” my analyst said.

The more patients I treat in psychotherapy, and the more psychoanalysis I receive as a patient, the more I think that anger is often the hardest feeling to feel. More than sadness, more than love, more than hatred, more than grief, anger is repressed, or acted out, or drunk or drugged away, or killed off, or sent to sleep. Anything, it can seem, but allowed into our minds and felt.

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