He never gets angry: where the unspoken anger hides

Marc never gets angry. That's what everyone says about him, and he's rather proud of it. Yet his dentist has just prescribed him a night guard: he clenches his teeth so hard he's wearing them down. His anger doesn't come out. It stays. The heaviest angers I meet in my practice are exactly these: silent ones, held for years by people with a reputation for calm.

Before being a frowned-upon emotion, anger is a territorial signal: a boundary has been crossed, and the body mobilises energy to defend it. Expressed cleanly, it passes in a few minutes. Swallowed, it doesn't cancel itself out: it looks for somewhere to lodge, and the rent is paid daily in muscle tension. The jaws clamp down on the words left unsaid, the neck and shoulders carry what gets absorbed without flinching, the stomach knots meal after meal, the breath turns short and high, ready to contain rather than to live. Many people discover that their legendary calm has a price: that feeling of being slightly switched off, even in the good moments.

Between keeping everything in and smashing everything up, there is a third way: discharging through the body. Try this, alone, standing up: breathe in deeply through the nose, then breathe out hard through the mouth, with a sound, like an exaggerated sigh. Ten times. Shake out your arms, loosen your jaw. It's simple, almost childlike, and it's exactly what this energy needs: movement and an exit. If the sound embarrasses you, do it in your car, one of the best free-expression studios there is.

Sometimes, today's anger is wired to yesterday's story: an old injustice, years without the right to say no. The body remembers it better than memory does. In that case, short, targeted work can defuse the charge at its source: that is the territory of brief therapy.

Keywords: repressed anger, anger in the body, repressed emotions, clenched jaws, somatisation, expressing your anger, emotional release