How often do you experience symptoms of stress related to your personal and/or professional life? How often do you have difficulty saying “no” to a boss, coworker, spouse or friend? Is anger an emotion you were taught early on was inappropriate to express? You’re not alone.
Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing®, wrote the groundbreaking book Waking the Tiger, which asks and answers the question: why do animals in the wild, who are routinely threatened, bounce back from threats with little to no residual impact? Levine writes about how animals assign no judgment to emotions—they simply and very naturally express the bodily response to a real or perceived threat activated by their autonomic nervous system. So why is it that we, as animals in our modern world, so frequently have difficulty expressing our emotional response to stressful events? It’s what we’ve been taught to do and it’s slowly killing us. Unprocessed emotion has a societal impact, too—we’re often killing each other with repressed, toxic, impulsive anger otherwise known as rage.
The prevailing wisdom in the medical and mental health communities suggest that repressing emotions—especially anger—has a profound impact on our body’s ability to protect us from dis-ease, including autoimmune diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, IBS, rheumatoid arthritis, along with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, ALS and cancer.
How could emotions cause disease?
Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. When emotions are repressed, this inhibition disarms the body’s defenses against illness. Repression of emotions disorganizes and confuses our physiological defenses so that instead of protecting us, these defenses become the destroyers of our health.
So, how do we express healthy anger so that it doesn’t kill us?
Healthy boundaries are part of expressing healthy anger. Boundaries are a way of expressing our inner advocate and sending the message to ourselves and to others that we matter. When we don’t express our needs, when we feel we’re not being heard, or when our needs simply aren’t being met, we build up resentment, which is a toxic form of anger that causes a stress response in our bodies, potentially resulting in dis-ease.
Beyond setting healthy boundaries there is also a need to release the primitive response of anger so that it doesn’t build up toxicity in our bodies. Levine’s work suggests expressing healthy anger is as simple as going back to our natural animal responses—a good, healthy and mindful growl. Yes, that’s right. Growl.
Expressing that animal response sends the message to our nervous system and our primitive brain (the amygdala) that we can—and will—protect ourselves. The growl has to be mindful—a slow and engaged expression of anger—like what a tiger would do. She would move into a preparatory stance, engage her body’s muscles, show her teeth and from her belly, growl on her outbreath. Try it on your own and notice what happens inside. It’s a harmless way of naturally releasing repressed anger and lowering the stress response in your body.
For more information about this topic, I recommend reading Dr. Gabor Mate’s book, When the Body Says No, or Peter Levine’s work in Waking the Tiger, which you can find links to on my Resources page.
Rebecca A. Ward, LMFT, SEP, PCC
Founder, the Iris Institute
Psychotherapy, Executive Coaching & Consulting