Owning your anger as an HSP - Part 2
For Highly Sensitive People, building a healthier relationship with anger starts in the body.
Welcome to my weekly newsletter building a supportive community for Highly Sensitive People (HSPs).
On Sunday morning, I went to see my friend Maria,1 a highly sensitive friend, and we had a long chat about anger.
Our catch-up came at a good time. Maria had recognised herself in last week’s newsletter, where I wrote about the ways Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) are taught to suppress their anger in childhood. Stuffing down our feelings like this causes a lot of unnecessary suffering: We may struggle to express our needs in relationships, or set healthy boundaries. Inevitably, our anger comes out sideways as irritability, low moods, passive-aggression and many other signs that we’re out of alignment.
This week, I want to explore how we can cultivate a more conscious relationship with our anger. I’d like to start by sharing some of what Maria said, with her permission:
“As an HSP, I’ve always felt misunderstood, not seen. ‘You’re weird. You’re too sensitive.’
“I question sometimes: ‘Why can’t I be like everyone else?’ I wake up thinking: ‘I don’t feel like feeling so much today. I wish I wasn’t highly sensitive.’
“In a room, I’m feeling everyone’s energy, feeling everyone’s feelings. Last night, I went out for dinner; I could feel everyone — their pain and frustration behind the smiles.
“I don’t know how to stay in my own bubble, and maintain that boundary in social situations so that I don’t take on everyone else’s energy. I leave feeling so tired and need to rest. I feel so disjointed. I deliberately push myself to socialise — but it’s too intense for me.
“I know that I suppress my anger, and that can lead to a lot of frustration and unhappiness. When I’m in a low mood, I need to get out of bed and move. Even when I really don’t feel like it. This morning I went for a walk and realized moving shifts me. No matter how much I don’t feel like it and want to stay in a cocoon, movement is key. I was having difficult thoughts, flashbacks of a painful memory. I went for a walk, the wind was blowing, and it gently shifted me into a better place.
“I’ve also realised that hard physical exercise can help me get in touch with my anger. I go into a class with an intention: To turn mental pain into physical power. I use my anger as fuel; I push so hard, I’m sweating, giving everything. It’s magnificent to see that I’m managing to translate mental pain to physical strength. In that moment, I stop comparing myself with other people. I can then go internal, almost like a meditative state, and I focus like I’ve learned in yoga.
“Then I’m running on the treadmill. I’m getting warm, my heart starts beating faster and I can feel the adrenaline. The instructor says ‘speed up’, then something happens — the anger comes. It's a cathartic experience.
“I connect with the anger through the exercise. I scream internally as I feel my childhood anger at my mother — my anger at being mistreated and misunderstood.
“And after the class, I often cry. It’s a way of accessing the tears.”
Buried layers
Maria’s account struck me because it spoke to so many of the patterns I see with HSPs I work with: the overwhelm; the repressed anger; and the deeper feelings of grief and sadness that lie buried underneath (often to do with feeling that our parents never really understood us).
Of course, hard-core circuit training may not be everyone’s idea of fun. But Maria has found that physical exercise — even gentle walking — can shift her mood. And when she does activate her system with intense exercise, then she’s able to really feel her anger in her body. The gym provides her with a safe container — nobody’s judging her, because they’re all focused on themselves.
When Maria manages to contact her anger in this way, the tears soon follow. These aren’t tears from wallowing in self-pity (what we might call “victim consciousness”). On the contrary, these are the tears that come when you’ve found the courage to work through layers of grief dating back to childhood. Maria feels physically rejuvenated by the exercise. Equally importantly, the anger and the tears show that she has cleared some old energy out of her system as well.
Take it to the body
The first lesson I draw from Maria’s experience is that we need to be in touch with our body to connect with our anger in a healthier way. I love the way she sets a clear intention to “turn mental pain (anger) into physical power” in her class. Maria went on:
“The moment on the treadmill where you feel your body is getting tired and achy, you feel you are pushing your limit and you want to dial the speed down — THAT is where I focus internally on my belly button — and in that moment my anger literally becomes fuel to put the treadmill speed up instead of down.
“That’s where I literally tap into my pain, flex all my muscles and just propel my legs forward with my anger, frustration, sadness, loneliness, feeling misunderstood — the whole spectrum. This is where the actual ‘magic’ happens. It’s a conscious decision.”
If you know you are carrying a lot of repressed anger, consider exploring whether there is some form of physical activity you can engage in while holding an intention to safely release your anger: running2; dance; martial arts; yoga; even a brisk walk can help move the energy through your system. My husband is an HSP and he likes to walk to a nearby patch of green space, take off his shoes, and place the soles of his feet on the grass. If you have access to a park or garden where you can comfortably go barefoot, you can literally let your anger soak away into the soil.
Get beneath the story
Another great ally we have in working through our anger is — as always — our breath. It’s easier said than done when we’re triggered, but we can make a conscious choice to sit and breathe through our anger, paying attention to the physical sensations we’re experiencing — perhaps our heart is beating faster, our throat is tighter, or we feel hot or cold. Exploring our experience of anger in this way helps to shift our focus from the ‘story’ of why we’re feeling angry to what’s actually happening in our body. We may notice that our anger dissipates faster, leaving a sense of calm. Or we may find sadness or anxiety hidden underneath. We can then sit with these deeper layers until they also shift and change.
This takes practice: If we can find opportunities to come back to our centre when we’re feeling reasonably calm, we’ll build our capacity to stay present even when we’re feeling overwhelmed. And if we’ve been conditioned to be afraid or ashamed of our anger, we can remind ourselves that anger is a healthy, normal and natural emotion that needs to be felt and — if the context is right — cleanly expressed.
Label your feelings
Neuroscientist Dr Matthew Lieberman has shown that labelling our emotions out loud can calm us down because speaking activates the pre-frontal cortex – the thinking part of the brain — and soothes the fight-or-flight response. By saying: ‘I feel really angry/disappointed/upset/hurt right now’ you can begin to think more clearly. There’s something so powerful about acknowledging what’s going on for you. The psychiatrist Dr Daniel Siegel calls this technique ‘name it to tame it’ and I find it works wonders with many of the HSPs and young people I work with.
Pause
Dr Elaine Aron, the American psychologist who invented the term HSP, says it’s sometimes important to “up regulate” our anger, since it is the “moral emotion” that helps us defend our boundaries. But Dr Aron also recommends pausing to give ourselves time to process what we are feeling before doing anything rash:
“Anger, like fear, is generally designed to create a swift response. When we are angry, we HSPs swiftly start thinking of what we want to say, write, or do. We rush to process it! The more time we leave for that, the better our ultimate action.”
Instead of firing off a hasty email, we can make more conscious use of writing to process our anger by dumping our thoughts and feelings down in a journal. I found journaling hugely helpful during a difficult couple of years on my own healing path. By setting our experience down on paper (and I personally prefer writing to typing) we can help to safely work through whatever we’re feeling, and gain new insights into what is really going on for us.
Exercise: How does anger show up for you?
If any of this resonates, and you want to explore your own relationship with anger, I’d invite you to take a few moments to think (or write) about the last time you felt angry. Consider the following questions:
What was the trigger?
How did the anger feel in your body?
How did you behave?
How far were you able to observe the anger arising within you and take a pause before responding?
Did you notice yourself judging your anger?
Did you recognise any patterns from your childhood or your parents in the way your anger played out?
There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ here — these questions are merely prompts that might help us gain a clearer understanding of how anger shows up in our lives, and how we can hear its messages without shutting down or feeling overwhelmed.
As ever, I love hearing from readers in the comments.
See you next week!
Name changed to preserve my friend’s confidentiality. Story shared with her consent.
Maria recommends this track for getting into the zone while running.