Being Angry Is NOT “Unattractive” or “Not Feminine”, It’s Healthy: Women, Anger and Relationships

Men, and society, have stifled women’s voices for centuries in many ways, but one of the most insidious ideas that has been propagated to suppress women expressing FULLY is the idea that it’s “unattractive” for a woman to be angry. First of all, the idea that being attractive should be topmost on any woman’s priority list is an idea that devalues women as human beings and turns them into objects, the very chattel they were treated as for so long. Women’s empowerment must be synonymous with women freely and fully using their voice to fully express, and the manipulative notion that anger is unattractive is pushed on women in our society as a disincentive against speaking up and speaking out. In short, it is a thought that applies suppressive pressure onto women in relationships and throughout the rest of their lives.

It’s a silencing of voices through societal messages that begins with the ‘helpful’ warnings of older women and men as a girl grows up. The message is clear: “you will never get a husband that way”. As if that should be her top priority? I find myself simultaneously disappointed and indignant at this sort of systematic suppression of expression.

First, before delving more deeply into anger and healthy relationships let’s dispose of the idea that women exist mainly to become partners to men (this should have gone extinct LONG ago). I am a relationship coach, BUT I believe in EMPOWERED relationships for powerful women. The truth is, ALL humans are CAPABLE of living on our own, we are usually just far more fulfilled when we have the RIGHT partner. So I do believe in relationships, but the RIGHT partner is one you can be your full self with.

THAT includes expressing anger.

Now, it’s important I draw a few distinctions here, because it is true that most of us dislike being around someone who is always filled with rage — it feels instinctively unsafe and sets us on edge. But we are NOT talking about extreme rage, or violence here. Let me explain.

Last weekend at a Maria Shriver book event, the interviewer was asking Maria if she was on her crusade against Alzheimer’s from a place of love, and Maria (lovingly) corrected her, “I have to keep it real, here. It is not out of love, it’s anger that more isn’t being done.” She went on to explain that righteous indignation is useful, and I agree. Righteous indignation is the type of anger we feel when something that is happening just feels wrong, feels unloving — and we have a burning desire to stand up for ourselves or others. This protective, fierce, fight for your rights type of anger is useful and healthy ESPECIALLY when transitioning from feeling disempowered to being more connected with our power. This is equally true in relationships with men as in activism.

I often have clients who have a powerful voice that they nonetheless struggle to fully use. One client, Ally, had spent her life being under-expressed in relationships with men despite being a vocal advocate and lawyer in her daily work. When we did the deeper work to unblock her voice with men, we found that as a little girl she had learned to ‘go along to get along’… in other words, she’d been taught to be quiet and not express her own needs, wants or opinions if they didn’t agree with her parents’ needs, wants or opinions. Whenever she DID express things that her parents did not agree with, they would escalate it into an angry, argumentative conflict oriented around control. Being a child, Ally suffered various consequences for having spoken up, such as the withdrawal of her parents’ love and approval. As she grew through her teenage years, however, her under-expressed side also developed more and more anger and resentment at feeling repressed. As an adult, she still associated the idea of expressing fully with being loved conditionally and emotional adandonment. That is one of the reasons it was so hard for her to express her needs to any man she was involved with — she feared he may disapprove of what she had to say and stop loving her. We guided her through an emotional healing of her teenage self, allowing her to express appropriate and righteous anger in visualizations — she FINALLY got to vocally stand up for herself and be REWARDED not punished or judged. At first the ONLY way Ally could bring herself to speak up was if she felt a high intensity of frustration and anger. The ANGER was the intense emotional boost that gave her the energy to overcome her fear. It temporarily let her speak up for herself. Like a rocket booster being powerful enough to pull free of earth’s gravity. But she needed a LONG TERM plan, so we came up with one.

The challenge was, long term it was not healthy nor sustainable to require anger in order to express needs, wants or boundaries. For Ally, it temporarily allowed her to express where she never would have before. As a temporary stage to begin fostering a willingness to fully express feelings, needs and boundaries, anger is a very healthy stage we may need to go through — the teenage years, if you will, before we grow into our confident ability to speak our needs and boundaries without requiring the force of anger to impel us. 

Anger IS useful, particularly for those seeking to connect to their power of expression for the first time, we just don’t want to live in it 24/7.

Once Ally began using her voice, we worked on reducing her fear by demonstrating to her deeper self that she no longer had to fear being unloved. To do that took more deep work on self-acceptance, self-love, and not relying on parents, her man, or others as her source of love and acceptance. Only THEN was she TRULY free to express fully with EASE.

She no longer needed the anger to overcome her fear, because her fear and external attachment had been drastically reduced.

Anger is often our response to a feeling of powerlessness. It is an attempt to re-connect to power and agency. Anger is a stage of the journey to individuation, to self-expression, to standing up for the part of us that feels like a victim at times, the inner child, or whatever we want to call the part of us that feels powerless at times.

The Women’s March after the last presidential election was a great example of people expressing their anger to stand up for what they (we) felt and feel is right, at a time when the circumstances could easily make us feel powerless.

Anger IS useful in the short term. ESPECIALLY when we transmute it into CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION.

BUT….

Anger left unattended can grow in unruly directions. If we ignore what our anger urges us to do, if we ignore our anger it as it grows like wildfire, then it can become self-destructive instead of constructive. Yet, when we HEED it’s message and stand up for what it demands, out of self love or love of others, then we immediately transmute that intense energy into massive ACTION. That is how the Women’s Marches and movement have gained so much steam. 

Should we claim it’s bad to have anger when so much GOOD is coming from the impetus it has provided?

Anger can be bad if we are unwilling to take positive action from it, if we choose to stay in growing resentment and hopelessness… in short if we choose to BELIEVE our powerlessness while still angry then it grows cancerous. It is not serving it’s real purpose, which is to MOVE us to powerful ACTION. But to take ACTION we must first believe we have some power and agency to actually affect some change. Anger crystallized into a movement is capable of changing entire cultures… and that progress changes the anger from something potentially destructive to something massively beneficial, cleansing and healing. 

Just as fire is not bad; it can become the fire that heats, feeds and lights the way for humans, or the wildfire that burns, harms, kills and destroys. Fire is not the enemy. Neither is anger. And it’s time we stopped expecting women to be less angry. Particularly because women, frankly, have a whole lot to be justifiably pissed off about. 

The #MeToo movement has created a wave of expression; women coming forward to share their powerful experiences with forms of sexual harassment, rape, abuse, unfair treatment due to power differential and many other wrongs that have been under-addressed for too long — and yet much of male reaction has been fear. Fear of women’s rightful and righteous anger as they express fully and stand up for themselves. 

Male discomfort with female expression cannot be taken as a valid reason to quiet angry voices – instead why are we not going into that anger with empathy and validation to understand the FULL depth of those painful experiences, the outrage.

Men can put effort into hearing how it felt. Understanding why it happened. Thinking about how to prevent it from continuing to happen. Instead of males running from the wave of expression, true strength and courage would be for us to RECEIVE it, to be PRESENT, to hear, listen and be available in whichever way best serves healing and empowerment.

But this male reaction of shying away from anger in women right now runs parallel to how many men act in relationships with wives and girlfriends – “I love you when you are smiling, attentive and attractive to my male ego, but I do not like dealing with any of your other emotions, so please don’t share them with me”.

How many girlfriends, wives, and divorced women have experienced relationships where they felt unheard, unheeded, and invalidated by men who preferred putting their partner’s emotional expressivity on mute rather than giving her a safe space to receive it?

Men, we have a lot of work to do if we want to continue calling ourselves men. Now, I’d like to turn our attention back to supporting women with expression of anger, because the vilification of anger in women is not limited to romantic relationships and sexuality. It is rampant in the workplace too. An article in the late 1990’s in Maclean’s, a Canadian Magazine, caught my attention at that time because it highlighted the unfair double-standard applied to women in the business world. Men with an ‘edge’ to their demeanor were praised as commanding, take-no-bullshit, tough, strong, assertive LEADERS if they allowed the emotion of anger to show up as part of their professional persona. (Again, we are mostly talking about an appropriate range of anger, not complete rage.) And yet, women who showed the slightest hint of an edge were labelled uncomplimentary things such as bossy, belligerent, bitchy, or worse. The double-standard sent the clear message that it was good for men to use anger in their career, but women were supposed to hide any upset or anger or be marginalized and seen as distasteful or emotionally unstable. “REALLY?” I remember thinking.

I had grown up with a successful Mother who DEFINITELY had an edge to her if you crossed one of her core values. I was, at the time I read the article, dating a high-achieving, very intellectual woman who displayed anger in ways that were very appropriate for many of the circumstances she encountered in her early political career. That article from the 1990’s stuck with me. The topic or women and misunderstood ‘anger’ was echoed loudly in Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book, “Lean In”, Tina Fey’s book “Bossypants” and many more as time has gone on. Often, traits like assertively having difficult, but necessary confrontational conversations are still interpreted as a man being ‘tough’ but a woman being ‘difficult’ in workplaces. While women are expected to go-along-to-get-along, men (especially in Hollywood) are admired for their intensity when they shout people down or gain a reputation for shattering multiple cell phones in angry rages.

So, when women DO decide to use their FULL voice and righteous indignation to stand-up for herself or something she believes in strongly it too often comes at the cost and consequence, of being judged by those around her.

Her family, her friends, her co-workers, and her romantic partner can all find it very uncomfortable to actually hear the full truth without the expected deferential tone to which they have shackled their definition of ‘feminine’. If we desire true equality, true human rights, it has to start in our BASIC relationships: our family, our friends, our co-workers, our romantic partner. And most overlooked, ourselves.

In my almost-decade of coaching powerful, successful women I’ve found the person they are MOST judged by for their anger is often THEMSELVES. This is usually learned from the systematic feedback, lessons, beliefs and consequences they accumulated throughout their lives. A Mother chiding, “Don’t scowl, it’s not pretty. No man wants to marry an angry girl.”  Boys in high school not wanting to date a girl, just because she is is “too opinionated” — which is ignorant male code for, “I can’t handle being in a real relationship where the other person expresses themselves… she has her own mind and it scares me”. 

Women endure being disappointed by men when dating, degraded, disregarded and devalued by many men in relationships. They are discriminated against in the workplace, passed over for promotions, not included on work teams or big projects because she is labelled ‘difficult’ and on and on — and yet aren’t supposed to express anger? Are we for real, here?

So, over time, what do you think happens? Well, women become conditioned to see the appropriate use of anger and their FULL voice as something that comes with consequences they must carefully consider.

And yet, in my work with clients we CAN re-align this. We CAN reframe the meaning of those early interactions to create the understanding that there is NOTHING wrong with YOU when you have a healthy functioning righteous indignation that stands up for you. We do deep work to feee the voice and give back those fear that belong to OTHERS, belong to those who worry they aren’t “able to handle her”. 

We do not allow the insecurities of OTHERS to dictate which emotions are allowed.

We can ALSO find the way to create safety INTERNALLY to have permission to fully express. To connect with our anger and FEEL it — REALLY hear what it is trying to tell us, and most of all what it NEEDS from us.

Anger is a call to ACTION.

Anger is the form that self-love takes when we experience lack of love for long enough, or harshly enough, that we will no longer stand for it. 

Anger is the first step to feeling empowered to CHANGE that and create that love, respect and treatment we deserve.

So BE angry.

BE connected with what is UNDERNEATH that anger.

TAKE action, guided by that initial anger and transmute it to something positive for yourself and the world.

But… Above all, STOP listening to those who try to steal, silence or soften your voice by making you wrong for your feelings.

Your feelings are YOURS.

So is your voice.

USE them.

Tags: anger, angry, assertive, authentic, barry paul price, Empowerment, expression, fear, feelings, fully expressed, healthy relationship, healthy relationships, life coaching, love, metoo, opinionated, powerful woman, powerful women, relationship expert, relationships, relationships., self-expression, silenced, speak up, stand up, strong woman, timesup, voice, women in the workplace, women's empowerment, women's march, women's voices