I always thought healing would feel like light: soft, gentle, almost like the scene at the end of a film where the character breathes easy, finally free. But when I started healing, it didn’t feel anything like that. It felt like fire. It felt like my chest was a furnace that had been locked for years, and the moment I cracked it open, every suppressed ember leapt out. I wasn’t peaceful. I was angry. Furious, even.
At first, I thought something was wrong with me. Who gets mad while trying to heal? Shouldn’t healing feel like forgiveness, serenity, acceptance? But the thing is, before I found any peace, I found rage. I was angry at the people who had hurt me, at the years I’d lost, at the version of myself who had swallowed her voice to survive. It came out in unexpected ways. I snapped at people who didn’t deserve it. I felt a lump in my throat every time I tried to journal. I paced the room at night as though the walls themselves had wronged me.
The hardest part was that I didn’t know where to put it. I wasn’t the type to throw plates against a wall or scream in the street. Instead, I started writing letters I knew I would never send. Letters laced with every word I had held back, every “how dare you” and “why wasn’t I enough” that had lived in my body rent-free. Sometimes I tore them up right after writing. Other times, I kept them folded in a drawer, like evidence of the storm I was weathering. Oddly, those unsent letters became proof that I was healing, not proof that I was failing.
I realize now that my anger was a form of grief. It was mourning for the childhood moments I never had, for the safe love I didn’t receive, for the boundaries that were bulldozed before I even knew what the word meant. Anger wasn’t a detour from grief, it was the doorway into it. I used to believe grief was only about crying, about sadness that curled up quietly in the corner. But grief is also rage, the kind that boils up when you realize how unfair it all was, when you finally stop excusing what hurt you and start naming it for what it was: wrong.
There were days when the anger scared me. I worried I was becoming the very thing I swore I’d never be: destructive, bitter, incapable of softness. I carried a fear of becoming my mother, whose anger had been explosive and wounding. But my therapist once told me something that stuck:
“Her anger was destructive because it was denied and uncontrolled. Yours is surfacing because it was silenced for too long.”
That difference gave me permission to feel without shame. My fury wasn’t cruelty, it was clarity.
And clarity changes things. Once I let myself feel the rage, I noticed how much smaller my tolerance for dysfunction became. Things I used to shrug off suddenly became unbearable. Manipulation, disrespect, passive-aggressive comments; I couldn’t sit quietly through them anymore. Anger sharpened my edges, but maybe those edges were boundaries finally forming. I wasn’t meaner; I was clearer. I wasn’t harder; I was stronger.
I found strange outlets for all that fire. One night, I baked bread just to punch the dough as if it were every insult I never had the courage to fight back against. Another time, I blasted music in my bedroom and danced like I was shaking off centuries of silence. Sometimes I cried mid-dance, other times I laughed, but every time I ended up feeling lighter, as if the anger had been sweated out of my pores. These rituals weren’t glamorous or polished, but they were mine. They were the small, messy ways I survived my own fury until it softened.
Looking back, I can see why so many of us confuse anger for failure in the healing process. We live in a culture that paints healing as serene: meditation cushions, scented candles, gentle yoga flows. But that’s only one face of it. The other face is raw and unruly. It’s writing with a heavy hand that almost rips the page. It’s muttering curses in the shower at people who will never hear them. It’s finally saying “enough” and meaning it.
Healing isn’t always quiet. Sometimes, it’s loud, hot, and inconvenient.
More: https://peonymagazine.com/wellness/healing-through-anger/
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