How to Deal With Repressed Anger

Matt was shocked. His relationship with her fiancée had come crashing down around him, and he couldn’t help but feel that he had played a significant part in that. Whenever a conflict arose in their relationship, Matt would find himself not saying exactly what he thought or expressing any disappointment he felt.

Tammy had her issues, no doubt, but she was always willing to listen and hear him out. It’s just that Matt struggled to say what was on his mind, and instead responded with sarcasm and found himself saying the opposite of what he thought and felt. Sometimes, he would wait for ages before he responded to Tammy’s texts because he wanted her to understand how it felt to be left hanging.

If she asked him what was wrong, he would insist that everything was fine. After a long while of trying to deal with the issues in their relationship, Tammy decided that maybe they weren’t right for each other, and she broke things off.

Great people can find themselves in situations similar to Tammy and Matt. For a variety of reasons, people avoid conflict in subtle ways, and they struggle to share their emotions of anger, disappointment, and frustration. What is often at work in those situations is repressed anger.

There is a difference between suppressing your anger, which is a conscious choice to not express one’s anger, and repressing it, which is unconscious. However, underlying both is the reality of anger that isn’t expressed well.

Regardless of whether you are suppressing your anger or repressing it, doing so can contribute to mental health challenges such as depression and anxiety. Avoiding or denying your feelings of anger will have an impact on your relationships because it leads you to engage in ultimately self-sabotaging behaviors that undermine relational health, as happened with Matt and Tammy.

Instead of pushing down your feelings and leaving them unexpressed, it is better by far to process and express feelings such as anger in healthy ways to avoid negatively impacting your relationships, career, family, and mental and physical well-being.

The roots of repressed anger

Why do people avoid expressing emotions such as anger and frustration? For many Christians, a faulty understanding of what the Bible says about anger is at the root of repressed anger. The Bible cautions people against anger because even the most righteous anger can easily turn sinful, but that does not mean there is no room to express anger in measured and constructive ways.

When a person sees anger as something that is always sinful or something that always needs to be hidden away and replaced by a picture of restraint and calm, it lays the foundation for repressed anger.

For other people, childhood family experiences may be part of the issue. If a person was raised in a family where uncontrolled anger led to abuse of various kinds, then in an attempt to not repeat those behaviors, they may decide to sublimate their feelings of anger and not express them altogether. They may feel that opening that door can lead to catastrophe, and so they opt to keep a tight lid on their anger for the sake of their loved ones.

Social conditioning, whether through your family or community may also contribute to a jaundiced understanding of anger. One may have grown up in a situation where having personal boundaries and asserting them wasn’t encouraged, and so justifiably feeling angry when another person oversteps your boundaries was considered inappropriate.

Like any other emotion, anger is never morally neutral. It may be either righteous or sinful, depending on a variety of factors such as its cause, degree, object, or whether it is out of control (to name a few). However, just as thinking of it as morally neutral can end up excusing sin, thinking of it as always sinful, can often lead to unhealthy behaviors concerning anger, such as repressing it.

As with other emotions, anger can serve a useful function in your life, moving you to take positive action to remedy a situation, such as when you witness injustice. Anger is a powerful emotion, however, and that is where caution is needed. It must always be carefully evaluated and handled with care.

Fire can be dangerous but avoiding it altogether may be irrational if we deprive ourselves of a helpful tool with which to make delicious meals and keep ourselves warm. Instead of ditching it wholesale, it is better to evaluate each fire separately and learn how to use it safely, and know what to do if it gets out of control.

How it affects you and others

If anger is seen as something that is always bad and thus to be avoided, it opens the door to unhealthy ways of dealing with it. When you’re angry, that anger often has to go somewhere and do something.

People who repress anger often feel they have only two choices of what to do with their anger – either blow up at another person and hurt them or keep it to themselves. There is a place and time to keep our anger to ourselves, but to do so consistently out of fear of uncontrolled anger indicates a problem with anger.

There is a third option available – express that anger in a calm, clear, and constructive manner. Instead of hiding what you feel, say it out loud. When anger is repressed, it doesn’t disappear. When a person internalizes their anger, their bodies and minds often pay the cost. Repressed anger can affect thinking and behavior patterns.

That inwardly directed anger results in a variety of physical maladies as those emotions turn into bodily pain and physical ailments such as heart problems, high blood pressure, digestive problems, and issues with your skin. Additionally, no matter how much you try to keep a tight lid on it, repressed anger often finds ways to leak into relationships in disruptive and violent ways.

Some of the ways that repressed anger can affect you and the people around you include:

• Passive aggressive behavior toward others, which can make you hard to be around.
• Mental health issues such as depression, paranoia, and intense anxiety.
• Feeling insecure in your relationships because you’re afraid that if you express your anger, you’ll lose the relationship.
• Physical ailments such as headaches and digestive issues.
• Co-dependency and other unhealthy relationship patterns, including the desire to control others and their behavior.
• Lethargy.
• Self-sabotaging behaviors that disrupt relationships.
• Depression or dysthymia.
• Lingering feelings of sadness without clear reasons.
• Feeling emotionally numb.
• Having a harsh inner critic who speaks negatively in your life.
• Having unreasonably high and unrelenting standards.
• Lack of motivation, chronic procrastination.
• Urges to hurt your
• Broken relationships, affairs, and divorce.
• Inability to stand up for yourself, allowing others to take advantage of
• Inability to relax or have fun in life.
• Confused sense of who you are as a person.
• Being abused or used by others due to an inability to assert your boundaries.
• The tendency to judge others harshly, which may make it hard for people to open up to you.
• Alienation and social isolation from others.
• Sudden anger outbursts that take people by
• Lack of satisfaction in your relationships and friendships.

From this list, it’s clear that repressed anger has many drawbacks for your health as well as in your relationships with others. It is important to address repressed anger and learn how to express anger well.

Addressing repressed anger

God created people as amazingly complex beings (Genesis 1:26-27, Psalms 8 and 139), and part of that complexity is our emotional makeup. Anger is an important emotion that allows human beings to fully mirror and image the God who created us.

Instead of disowning our anger and repressing it, becoming more like Jesus is about being moved by what moves God’s heart, and responding in ways that bring spiritual and mental health. Anger can be useful to help us navigate our physical and relational spaces. If we understand the nature of our anger and respond appropriately, it can help.

Unrighteous anger must be suppressed, repented of, and abandoned. Instead of repressing or suppressing righteous anger, however, one must learn to express it appropriately, or it will cause other issues in one’s relationships and be ultimately counterproductive. Instead of aggressively or destructively expressing anger, one can express it constructively and assertively.

Being assertive is about expressing your needs, preferences, and feelings calmly and clearly. By being assertive, you are reinstating your boundaries and allowing the people around you to know how best to love you and meet your needs, just as it’s important to love others in ways that honor their individuality.

Christian counseling can help you deal with unhealthy ways of handling anger. Your counselor can help you cultivate a deeper awareness of your emotions, including what triggers your anger, and what godly anger looks like. Through exercises, or by asking you to journal and pay attention to your responses to everyday life, your counselor can work with you to change unhealthy patterns of thinking and behavior.

For example, they can help you learn how to talk about your feelings, because being able to verbalize your feelings can help you understand yourself better, and the same goes for the loved ones who benefit from understanding what’s going on inside you. Your counselor can also teach you how to see humor in situations and diffuse anger when it’s overwhelming.

In addition, you’ll learn empathy so that you understand others’ perspectives, good listening skills to improve communication and build trust with others, and how to assert yourself without becoming hostile or defensive.

With the support of your counselor, you can learn to express anger well and cultivate healthy relationships with others and yourself. If you’re struggling with repressed anger, reach out today and make an appointment with a counselor who will journey with you toward constructive expressions of anger.