Anger and anxiety are often interconnected, with unprocessed anger manifesting as anxiety.
In this conversation, Dr. Sarah Michaud and I explore the intricate relationship between anger and anxiety, sharing personal experiences and insights from our professional backgrounds. We discuss how unprocessed anger can manifest as anxiety and depression, the importance of recognizing hidden anger, and the body’s response to these emotions. Our conversation also delves into practical tools for processing anger, including writing exercises and the significance of compassion in managing feelings of resentment. Ultimately, we emphasize the need for emotional awareness and the benefits of confronting and understanding one’s feelings.
Note: This blog post is the transcription of my conversation with Dr. Michaud, which can be found on my YouTube podcast channel.
The Connection Between Anger and Anxiety
Emma: Hey guys, today I’ve got another amazing video about a hidden root cause of anxiety. Sometimes what looks like anxiety is actually anger. And as I’ve explored this topic, I’ve found that it’s really relevant to me because I like to tell myself, “I’m not an angry person.” And then I look at myself and realize, “Maybe I should think about this topic, Emma.”
So today I invited the amazing, one and only, Dr. Sarah Michaud, to talk about anger as a root cause of anxiety. And she’s a psychologist, substance abuse counselor. Tons of experience. Really wonderful. Can’t wait to jump into this topic with you today. Okay. Let’s go.
Emma: I think a lot of people don’t think anger and anxiety are that connected, but are they?
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes. There’s a zillion reasons why people get anxious and depressed. But to me, anger is so significant and I’m going to give you, to start, a few examples.
Emma: Let’s hear it.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Okay. How I discovered this.
Emma: Okay.
Personal Experiences with Anger and Anxiety
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Alright. So I am in AA, in Alcoholics Anonymous. I’ve been sober for 40 years. And one of the things you do when you first get sober is you do what’s called an inventory. And I remember I saw myself as this very sweet, very nice, very kind human being. I was becoming a therapist. I was in my early twenties. I’m 65 now, so that’s a long way.
And I remember saying to my sponsor, she said, “Okay, you need to write down people you’re angry at.” And I said, “Geez, I’m not really aware of being angry at anyone.” And she said, no, really resentment is, there’s a quote in the big book of AA Resentment is the number one offender of the alcoholic. And so after a bunch of work with her, I ended up getting in touch with some feelings.
I didn’t even feel anger. I just felt kind of an irritation. Bottom line to this story is 486 resentments later, I was, “Oh my gosh, maybe I’m a little angry.” But again, the thing to me was my presentation was anxiety.
My whole life, I was a low-grade-anxiety kid because of the household, all that stuff. So when I experienced things, it was either high anxiety, medium anxiety, or low anxiety. But when I started to look at resentment and anger, anxiety started to go down. And when I process—so we could talk about how to do some of that work—when I did this process of the steps and got through a lot of those resentments, et cetera, I remember the thing was, go sit with God for an hour was the assignment and see what happens.
And I remember feeling this liberation and freedom and calmness and peace that I hadn’t felt in years. So that’s just one personal experience of being totally unaware that I had anger and resentment and feelings towards anybody in negative ways. And it was definitely in there, manifested in other ways.
P.S. It probably had a lot to do with my addiction. A couple of other examples with clients and friends. I have a really good friend who’s bipolar. We were together just recently, and I’ve heard this a zillion times before, and she was telling me how over the winter she had a hypomanic episode. And again, bipolar is a legitimate diagnosis, et cetera. We’re not saying that [it’s not].
And again, my analyst mentor in graduate school always said this question: “When did it start?”, which I love. So I said to her, “Gee, when did it start? When did the hypomanic episode begin?” And she said, “To be honest, I was at work and this coworker, I asked her a question and she dismissed me and acted as though I was invisible. “And that night I was feeling all this rage and I couldn’t sleep, and then I was obsessively thinking.” She said, “Within three days I had a hypomanic episode.” Now, I’m not saying this is cause and effect, but I’m saying correlations. So I’m saying we get this rage and if we don’t know how to process it or identify it or even experience it, it’s going to come out in some other way.
So that was one other example. I’ll just give you one last one. A client from years ago came to me for panic attacks. And again, I said, “So when did they start?” And she said, “They started like three months after I had my third child.” And I said, “Interesting.” And we looked at hormonal causes, of course. She had seen a doctor, we looked at postpartum depression.
And so we started talking about anger a little bit, and she…oh, I start crying saying this. She got in touch with the fact that she really didn’t want a third child, and she was enraged with herself and enraged with her husband and until…oh my God, I have goosebumps…and until we could get to that truth, she couldn’t really get beyond it. And literally stopped having panic attacks because of that piece of awareness. And again, there’s lots of reasons for panic. We’re just connecting the anger piece.
But to me, those examples and many more over the years just made me start really thinking about this unprocessed anger and how is it connected? What do you see or what do you hear from folks on the channel? I don’t know.
The Anxiety of Suppressing Anger Behind Kindness
Emma: Yeah, that’s so interesting. It’s such an interesting thing, and I really want to go back to that third lady because I want to know so then what? Like then what does she do? But we’ll come back to that. Yeah, because I want to talk about processing it too. But I think when you and I were talking last time, it helped me connect some dots because I think in the last 15 years, I probably had two like anxiety attacks, panic attacks—not quite a panic attack, but I get anxiety attacks.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Absolutely.
Emma: And one of them was with this situation where I was not being assertive, I was just not being assertive. And that led to me just trying to be nicer, trying to be nicer, and trying to be nicer. And I panic, like I just lost it. I could not sleep.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Reaction formation, which is Freud’s defense. Exactly what you did. You did the opposite. So some people that feel rage, like, “I’ll just get nicer and nicer.”
Emma: Oh, that’s a good point. That’s a good point. Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: So that’s what impacts the feelings of anger.
Emma: I think a lot of women, especially, are conditioned that anger’s always bad.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes.
Emma: It’s always a bad emotion. We judge that feeling.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes.
Emma: And so I think that prevents us from, and I know men too, are told not to be angry. Lots of people told not to be angry, not to show anger. But with women, especially women tend to be more anxious. Also more socially sensitive, perhaps.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes.
Emma: So if we can come to understand how to process through that anger piece, then maybe we can manage a lot of the stuff that’s showing up as anxiety, which is fascinating to me.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Absolutely. We will definitely process that.
Symptoms of Hidden Anger
Dr. Sarah Michaud: So I have a list of what I call symptoms of hidden anger.
Emma: Okay.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Because I think you’re right. We may not know we’re angry, but there are other signs that we could possibly be angry. So sleeping a lot, depression (obviously), anxiety, addictions, controlling behavior, right? We’re angry, blaming, criticizing people, focusing on others. These are going to sound strange. People with monotone voices. So people that are really–
Emma: Is that reaction formation? Like you’re trying not to express how angry you are?
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Pre-impression.
Emma: Yeah
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Rigid belief, shut down, sarcasm, lateness, busyness, avoidance, over-accommodating (the reaction formation), forgetting. I had a client once forget to pick her husband up at the airport. But it turns out he never called her while he was away. I mean it’s like…you know what I mean?
And then we’ll get into body pain: stomach aches, backaches—that’s the whole Sarno and Gabor Maté stuff. Fatigue, trouble sleeping. There’s tons of ways it manifests in our lives that if we really thought to ourselves, “Geez, am I angry about something?” That may be part of this presentation or profile.
Emma: Interesting. That’s fascinating. And I think a lot of people just think anger means you’re yelling at someone. But our brains are super smart. Like our brains are so good at avoiding, suppressing, repressing. Like we are so good at doing anything to not have feelings that are uncomfortable.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: What was the first word in that sentence you just said?
Emma: Avoiding
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Avoidance. Okay. Avoidance. Yes, absolutely. And you talk about a lot about that on your channel. Avoidance just creates the continuous cycle, right? Absolutely.
The Emotions Hiding Behind Anger
Dr. Sarah Michaud: So I look at this—and again, you might agree or disagree with this—but if you take, I learned this years ago, a pyramid, think of a pyramid.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And at the top, and this could be, we could switch places on this pyramid, but at the top is rage. So let’s say the top is rage. So we know people that are just in rage. We can see them underneath the rage. We have anger, irritation, agitation. What are some other words for that? Yeah, negativity, all that stuff. Okay, underneath that, sadness, grief, you could have anxiety in there too. Sadness and grief. Underneath that, fear. And there’s fear, and you talk about the differences between fear and anxiety; I’m using them almost the same way, very similar. But at the bottom—powerlessness. So really, so much to me of our activations in whatever way are ultimately because we’re feeling powerless over something. And there are people…and look at the way, I mean we’re not political, but look at everybody’s just angry right now. Because to me, people are afraid and people feel powerless.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And so anger becomes just the way to deal with that, rather than focusing on, “Geez, what can I control? What can’t I control?” “What am I really angry about?” is another question. I often say 99% of the times you’re angry, you’re really not angry about the present moment.
I don’t know if you believe that, but I can do an exercise with you too. We can do a couple of things around resentment and anger. Where it’s…
Anyways, there are ways to look at that. I just call them activations because I told you, I think really simply. So if I get activated and it’s much more intense than the present situation calls for, I say it’s old. And so mainly it’s old.
Emma: I buy that. Like, what makes sense in the present moment makes sense in the present moment. Otherwise it’s probably connected to something else.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: The woman at the coffee shop or whatever, it’s not about the coffee shop, right?
Emma: Yeah. And it can be because, it can be because we have certain thought patterns that are fueling it or certain judgments that are fueling it. But those are patterns that are usually built off of old hurts.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes. They’re old defenses. Exactly.
Emma: They’re old defenses.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Oh my God. And it’s so great you just said that because when I was doing this resentment work, I remember my sponsor saying, behind every resentment is an old wound. So really, if you looked at your resentments, and of course most of our resentments are towards our …
Emma: Primary caregivers, our parents.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And when I do this process with people, I say really, you need to be as specific as possible. I have them write out the specific resentment.
And for some people…I just met with someone recently who says, “Oh my God, I can’t get angry at my mother.” And her mother’s been long gone. But the belief that “I can’t do that because…” And so to work through that to get through this is about freedom. Let’s look at the reality. She’s not here. This is an old feeling state that’s causing you anxiety. But really we need to get to the hurt and the anger underneath it, which there was a lot of.
How to Process Resentment and Anger in Healthy Ways
Emma: Okay, so lemme challenge that for a second. What’s the point? What’s the point of getting to all this hurt and resentment? So let’s take, like you had 457 resentments. That lady who has an actual baby number three. That baby is in her life and it’s not going anywhere. Now she knows, “I’m actually really angry that I had this baby.”
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yeah.
Emma: Now what? Like, does that do anyone any good? What do you do with that? Wouldn’t it be better to just suppress all those feelings, Sarah?
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Number one. The first point in looking at the resentment is, and you’re exactly right, the first point is recognizing, “Oh my gosh, I am super angry.” And just bringing that to the surface to me is the first step.
So when I recognized, “Oh my God! I’m carrying around these resentments and–” listen to this. The second part of that process is “How is that resentment affecting my life?” So the second part of that process was, there was a list we were given: self-esteem, personal relations, my sex life, my sense of security in the world, my sense of security emotionally, ambitions in the world.
So we looked at this list and people can think of other ways it affects them, but so basically what we did is, first step, acknowledging the anger and the resentment. Second step was, how is this affecting me? Because I think you’re not going to change something unless you really can identify that it’s affecting your life. And to me, Emma, the most important thing is our relationships.
Emma: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: That’s where all this unconscious resentment comes out. Second piece, where is this affecting my life? Now that is a very significant statement because when I saw this, right? I’m thinking to myself, just think about this for a second. 486 resentments affecting…each one affecting how I feel about myself. So that to me was mind blowing.
Okay. Now the most important part of this exercise is this. We do what’s called the turnaround. Where the sentence is, we put the person in the category of the spiritually sick and we turn it to our own resentment. We will take a look at what is affecting me, what am I responsible for? What am I still carrying? Putting them out of our minds, meaning, I can’t control what they’re going to do. I can’t control the past. I can’t control that my dad did this to me. I can’t control that my mom did this to me. But my inventory and my responsibility is, “What can I do now?”
How can I look at this to really see that it’s really affecting my life? And we do this exercise around. You ask yourself, “What did I want in that incident?” I wanted my mother or father to be a particular way. Second question, did you have an unrealistic expectation? Did you expect them to be any different than who they were capable of being?
I had a resentment towards my mother who was an alcoholic, but really, could she be any way other than that? No. So the resentment is my responsibility. I have to accept this is what she was capable of being. The really important cognitive pieces are, “What is the lie I told myself?” “Do I make up a story about this event that caused the wound and the anger?”
And really it’s things like “Something’s wrong with me. I’m not lovable.” You try to focus on yourself, not the other person. “I’m not lovable.” “I can’t trust people.” Whatever. And then the other cognitive piece is, “What’s the truth? What’s the real truth? I’m a child of God. I didn’t cause my mother’s alcoholism.” Et cetera, et cetera.
Part three is what do you do to get what you want? And where we’re looking at here, what we’re looking at here is behaviors we do when we’re unconscious to try to get our needs met, but it never works out. Okay. Avoidance, manipulation, pouting–
Emma: Yelling, screaming.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: All of this stuff. Scream and yell. Get angry, blame. All of those. So we look at, and then the really important piece is, the second part is what’s the underlying fear that drives the resentment? So say I have a fear of not being loved, or a fear of rejection, or a fear of abandonment, or whatever. If that fear gets triggered, it’s going to cause the resentment.
So we are talking about a lot of different things, but the resentment and the anger, when that’s all repressed and I am hanging on to all that stuff, my system’s going to be anxious because I’m not going to know what’s going on. I’m just going to be operating like this. So you are right. There are ways that I have at the end, I have a list of tools that will be really helpful with anger.
Emma: Okay.
How to Express Anger in Healthy Ways
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And the other thing to say to people is this, do a little exploration of your growing up. Like how was anger expressed? Was anger expressed? Did your parents repress anger? What were the messages you got about anger? Was it okay or not okay? Was it safe to express? Were you told never to get angry? Were you told it’s dangerous? Was the house violent? I’ve had people grow up in violent households and they’re like, “Nope. Never.” Because it feels too scary.
Emma: Yeah, that’s right.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: What is your relationship to the experience of anger? Okay, go.
Emma: Okay, so that makes me wonder if it was like, I’ve got a 10-year-old that she’s like already like a teenager. Like she is so spicy sometimes, and some days she’ll be snarky and rude to me. And I’ll be like, oh my gosh, I have to teach her to be respectful.
And then other days, and then at the same time, in my thoughts, I’m like the fact that she can tell me what she actually thinks is a sign that, at least she feels like she could speak up in a way that I never could speak up.
So I’m torn between this. The ideal is I’m going to be teaching her how to disagree respectfully. That’s the ideal. She could still tell me, but I don’t see it as awful that she sometimes is really rude to me.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: I totally get that and it’s, it seems like both, right? It’s like you’re so happy that she’s speaking up, but to me it’s the way, it’s the way she’s doing it, right? As she gets older, by the way… There’s so many great books, but one is about half the stuff our adolescents say to us. It’s an exercise of not reacting and not taking seriously, because literally their job is to activate us.
Emma: Before we move into the tips, I do want to hear about somatically how anger shows up in your body? What does it look like?
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes. And also, I was going to just say to you, when your daughter is that way, what happens to you? Did you get activated?
Emma: Yeah, sometimes. Most of the time I’m pretty level, but every once in a while, oh man, she gets me and I’m just like, uhuh! You do not talk to me that way, young lady.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And our kids can just push our buttons like no other. And so often and it’s what am I enraged about? And usually it’s like feeling like I can’t control something and it’s triggering something from earlier that I can’t control.But yeah, that’s a biggie.
How Anger Shows Up in the Body with Anxiety
Dr. Sarah Michaud: The body stuff is so important. And the other reason I wanted to talk about this correlation between anxiety is anger. And I don’t know if I know you’ve talked about Bessel van der Kolk, I dunno if you’ve talked about Peter Levine and the somatic experience. Yes, you have actually.
Emma: Yeah. I have. Somatic experiencing is my favorite lens, to be honest.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Oh my gosh. We are like twins. So I talked to the first weekend of training before COVID, and I’ve done somatic experiencing work. And it’s the other proof to me about the anxiety and the anger connection, because every time I was anxious, extremely anxious, and I couldn’t figure it out myself, and I called my somatic experiencing person, when we did a session inevitably, and I am dead serious here, it was rage. It was rage. It was getting into my body.
Obviously they focus and then move to the next spot and all that stuff. And eventually it would end up in my hands and she’d be like, “What do your hands want to do?” Oh, they want to push out. They want to push out.
And literally most of my anxiety, when it got bad, was connected to past boundary violations that I was enraged about and couldn’t get angry about at the time. I’m saying that really simplistically. But yeah, so the somatic experiencing stuff, to me, so much of the presentation is about that lack of resolved rage, powerlessness combo.
Emma: So where would that show up in someone’s body? I feel like some people, like they feel a lot of tension like in their face and in their jaws, or they’ll have, like, their stomach will hurt. I don’t know. How does anger show up in the body?
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes. Anger shows up in the body in a variety of ways and I don’t know, have you, I know you know Gabor Maté, but have you ever read When The Body Says No?
Emma: I haven’t.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Okay. I am telling you, everybody, he has gotten famous like late, but in the early days, his second book was mind boggling. It’s called When The Body Says No. And basically this is a synopsis. It’s literally about codependency, I hate to say it. The inability of people to express themselves and all the physiological manifestations. Diseases. Like he literally talks about in the first three chapters, all the, I’m not an MD, but all what happens physiologically to us, when we repress and then how it manifests in different illnesses.
And hearing him recently, he literally says, when someone said to him, “What’s the most important piece of advice you could ever give?” And he says, “Saying no.” To me it’s because all of the examples he gives in that book of people’s medical problems, whether it’s headaches, stomach aches, like literal a lot of like rheumatoid arthritis and–
Emma: Inflammation.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Immune. Yeah.
Emma: Immune responses.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Suppressant illnesses. All connected to people that did extreme caretaking, didn’t express to caretakers. Weren’t allowed to be who they really are. Like all those themes of codependency, he says is really, so basically what he’s saying is you may not be in touch with it, but your body is saying no, right? So it’s saying to you, now the other person who I really like, I literally just wrote an article for this pain magazine. I’ll send it to you. It’s coming out in a couple weeks. About the correlations between codependency and pain, physical pain. And I quoted a lot of these books.
And the other guy is this Dr. John Sarno, who wrote the Mind-Body Connection, something like that. He treated Howard Stern, all these movie stars back in the day. At first it was just all backaches. And you know what his number one cause of backaches are?
Emma: What?
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Chronic anger.
Emma: Interesting.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And he swears, he’s like a psychoanalytic guy and he gives all these examples and talks about anxiety, about every physical manifestation is caused by this chronic, there’s a word he has for it, but it’s basically chronic tension. Holding chronic tension. Yeah. In all different areas of your body, and anger is the biggest culprit.
Emma: That’s so interesting. We look at activation, right? Nervous system activation.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes.
Emma: When we feel threatened, we can fight, flight, or freeze. Now, a lot of times when we talk about anxiety, we talk about flight and freeze. But we don’t talk about the fight aspect of it and how to process that. And I would say, I have not done much work in that area, so that’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re here.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Good. Because if you want to fight or you have the instinct to fight, and as a woman it’s not something maybe that comes naturally, you’re going to immediately go inward.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: You’re not going to externalize. You’re going to repress.
Emma: Yeah. And that’s going to look like depression.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Then you’ll really tap into that. Yeah. And that’s why some of the somatic work, and like you talk about exercise. I remember doing a lot of… like in the early days, my husband was a somatic worker and he did a lot of yoga poses to get in touch with running your anger and stuff like that. So definitely we have to move it through the body. You’re absolutely right.
Fear of Hurting Others and Its Roots
Emma: But it’s scary, Sarah. Let me tell you.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Let’s do this. Why is it scary to you, like you personally? What’s your first thought?
Emma: I can think of two examples and I don’t even have the words for this. I was just, I just came from pickleball and someone else came to the gym, and it is a church gym, and they had it reserved to play soccer. And I wanted to play soccer with him, and I asked him, “Can I joined you guys?” Long story short, I was reminded of when I played soccer in college, and it was like intramural stuff. It was casual soccer, recreational soccer.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes.
Emma: And people said, “Emma, you were scary because you were so competitive.” Like I would kick the ball too hard and I’d hurt people, not hurt people. But one lady, she got a red mark on her leg because I kicked the ball too hard. And another time I was playing intramural flag football. And my friend was like, “You get competitive, Emma. You get a little too intense and it’s a little scary.” And I’m like, “Okay.”
So then I go back to this repressed place. Like I’m a nice therapist who’s always peaceful. So I would say that it’s a little scary to think of myself as being competitive, like “Let’s go!” And I wanted to play soccer with them, and as I was driving home, I was thinking, “Man, I just miss that feeling of being able to be as intense as I can be.”
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes. Two things. One is it sounds like it’s a great place for you to express that aggressiveness and–
Emma: Yeah, I like being aggressive, like I actually enjoy that in soccer. But I’m absolutely not aggressive in my relationships, except for sometimes when I’m really passive aggressive.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: We didn’t get to that one. That’s what I was going to… It’s so funny, the saying like, how do you know you’re around a passive aggressive person? Everybody around them is angry.
Emma: Yeah. No. And yeah, growing up I was taught like, you don’t inconvenience people. You don’t say what you really think because it might hurt their feelings, and so I think I’m afraid of hurting other people.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes. And it’s so great though because on one hand you’re saying, the sports and the competitiveness was a way you could get that out.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: But then on the other hand, I wonder, okay, so that’s the safe place to get it out, but what’s really going on behind all that? Like where did, where’s the wound, right?
And I would say, so you’re saying to me there’s a fear of hurting people’s feelings. So the question is, when did you first have the fear of what happened? First thing.
Emma: Let’s see. I can think of probably, I was like 13. My sister said, “You’re so selfish.”
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Oh.
Emma: “You’re such a selfish person.” And then I remember pouting for a long time.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: It was your coping skill. Yes. Great.
Emma: Well, like trying to get attention, trying to get her to say sorry or something. Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: You’re trying to get a need met that you can’t get met in another way.
Emma: Yeah
Dr. Sarah Michaud: I would say it started earlier than 13. I would just guess.
Emma: Yeah. I remember being very angry at my parents during those like middle school years. Like I hated my parents, but I never told them that.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: No.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: No, but what were you angry about? If you back it up even earlier, Emma?
Emma: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Oh baby, let’s go.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: I know. Because the fear of what other people think I bet starts way earlier. Like you think about elementary school, like when did you start, did something happen in a class? Did it happen with a sibling? The selfishness thing is definitely a message. It’s oh, I can’t be selfish. Just even wanting what I want is selfish. That’s big.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: But usually it’s earlier.
Navigating Resentment and Anger in Relationships
Emma: I don’t. I don’t have any memories. Like, I think my mom was someone you did not disagree with. You don’t disagree with her. Like either you are wrong or you’re being mean if you disagree. I was not allowed to express opinions without being yes and no. Like she’s a good person now. We have a good relationship now.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: I’m sure you do. Look at what you just said.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: You said, “Oh, I have this fear of other people’s opinions.” And then later you’re like, “I guess I couldn’t express my anger to my mom because I would never be right.”
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: So what would be the consequence of that? A kid feeling completely powerless.
Emma: Yeah, lectured just lectured. Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And the only response to that is anger because there’s no place in between. It’s like it feels sad about it, I could get anxious, but really, it sounds like it’s powerlessness and anger.
And that could have been part of what was happening. The thing that I talk about a lot is the whole fear thing. And we could say anxiety. Supposedly there’s only two fears we’re born with: the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling. Physiological fears.
So to me, we don’t pop out of the womb with fears of rejection, fears of abandonment, fears of not being liked, not being loved. Like all these things happen and then this wound happens and then we behave out of those adaptations. Like you’re saying, “Geez, I couldn’t even express my opinion to my mother because I was always wrong. So how did I, what did I become? I became someone who was always accommodating and acquiescing. Or I became someone that maybe just felt angry and needed to get it out.”
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Possible.
Emma: Yeah, it’s true. It’s true. And it’s, yeah there wasn’t space to disagree. There wasn’t space to have conversations. It was just like, yeah, you’re probably wrong. Like you get lectured. And I couldn’t say that to them. Like in my teenage years, I couldn’t be like, “I don’t like how you’re doing this.” That would’ve just never gone over that well. But I don’t know.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: But you probably felt it a lot more when you got to be a teenager, thus in the hatred, right? So you couldn’t repress it. When we’re little, it seems like that’s easier to do, but we put on hormones and we’re getting bigger and blah, blah, blah.
Now it’s going to start coming out. And what’s so fascinating, and I know I’m not your therapist, but what’s so fascinating to me right now is that you’re saying this thing, right? And then we think about the last video we did when we were talking about your mother-in-law.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Getting really mad at her because of her dismissiveness. And then I think, of course, because you’re training and your anger goes way back when you think about it, someone dismissing someone saying, oh, I’m not right and taking over. And that was the exact same dynamic. Really? When do you think about it?
Emma: No, it’s true and I can definitely see, like my resentment shows up more with my mother-in-law now than with anyone else really.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes.
Emma: But I don’t, like, I also have to interact with her in ways that are more… I can’t avoid her.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yeah.
Emma: I can’t just avoid that relationship. Whereas if anyone else bugs me, I can just avoid them basically.
And my mom is funny. With adult kids she is completely hands off. She doesn’t give advice. Like, not hands off. She loves being involved in our lives and helping and playing with her grandkids. But she doesn’t give advice and she doesn’t tell us what to do and she doesn’t… She treats her adult kids very much, like, just lets them make their own choices. And have their path.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Nice.
Emma: Yeah. Which is why I think now when my mother-in-law comes in and tells me what to do, I get a little bit like huffy
Dr. Sarah Michaud: That old activation. Yes.
Emma: Good point. Good point.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes. Old activation.
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Letting Go: Processing Resentment and Anger
Emma: Okay, so let’s say it’s old activation. What do I do now? Okay, I really couldn’t say what I wanted to say. I wasn’t saying no. My body wants to say no. So then it shows up in all this passive aggressiveness towards my mother-in-law because I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but I’m still mad. So how do we process anger?
Dr. Sarah Michaud: A bunch of things we could talk about at some other point, or maybe I’ll send you the sheet or maybe we’ll do one episode about literally walking through a resentment and seeing how we can come out the other side and get to the underlying fear.
But one thing I talk about, it’s always being able to identify a lot of anger towards one person. And you’ve probably heard this. This is not to be mailed, but you write an anger letter and what you start with is you use whatever language you want to use and you just write very specifically and as long as possible, all the things you’re angry at, and you get the anger out first.
Because really what happens is once you start getting to the bottom of the anger, you recognize the sadness and the loss. And so what you do is you write the anger letter towards the person. And then you say what you’re sad about. And then you say, geez, this is what I’d really want in a relationship.
Okay, so you write an anger letter and you get to the bottom where you really identify the sadness. Okay. The other thing we discussed already is doing your exploration around your beliefs, around anger in your family and what is hard for you around expressing it. The other tool that I find really helpful is this, and I even do this myself.
When I’m feeling either anxious or I can’t identify something, I write across, and this is going to sound so simple, but it works. Writing across the top of a piece of paper what am I angry about, sad about, or scared about. And you just free write for 10 minutes. And I am telling you, Emma, so often when I’ve done that exercise, I get to what’s underneath the underneath.
So I might feel angry, but I really get to the bottom line process of it, which is really helpful.
How to Release Anger in Healthy Ways
Emma: Okay. So because, yeah, because we don’t want to just be like, okay, if you’re mad, you should just express that anger like that. I think that’s a very simple approach that leads to… there’s evidence going to rage rooms just makes people more ragey, right? So we find what’s underneath, we say maybe what was underneath mine was like, “Oh, I was afraid I wouldn’t be listened to”, which is “Oh, I was afraid I wasn’t a good person, or wasn’t valuable” or something like that. So then what? So I’ve got this fear of oh, I’m not good enough, I’m not powerful enough, whatever. And then what?
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Okay, so then I see, and I have the insight that oh my God, I remember having this insight about a fear. All these relationships I had with men I was always feeling like a victim. And really what I saw is I had this fear from very young about not feeling loved because my mom was unavailable.
And so I think what happens is when you recognize the earlier fear that’s connected to your present resentment, you have this… This is what happened to me. It opens up this awareness of, my gosh, I’m literally operating in the present and projecting on all my relationships a fear that has nothing to do with Tom, my boyfriend.
You know what I’m saying? So you get some spaciousness around the anger and it helps to alleviate some of the energy around it. Where you get, I do think awareness, acceptance, getting some spaciousness.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Because you’re right, anger can feel really big. And that’s why it’s important to look at what is getting activated. So getting the awareness, obviously writing can help, but you’re absolutely right. I don’t feel like you… It’s not about getting angry at the people in your life, because that is not appropriate.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Feeling anger is okay. Expressing anger in writing or exercise or soccer or calling your best friend and venting or, you know what, screaming in your car is a good one. You know when you’re driving and you’re just like, you’ve had it and you’re screaming.
So yes, definitely getting out the physiological piece is great. But to me, what really reduces and you get the “ahh” is when you get to the underlying fear and then really the sadness because really what was there for me is the wound that I didn’t feel loved.
Emma: So what do you do with the wound then? Is this something where you’re like, okay, at least now that I’ve named it and I’m clear about it, it’s not going to fuel all this false superficial anger. At least we’re going to get rid of all that suffering, right? Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Like all this extra stuff we add on top of our primary emotion.
So now we’re back to the primary emotion. We’re like, I feel sad. Or like that lady who they don’t want to have a baby: “Oh, I’m actually really scared because I have this human I want to love and I wish I didn’t.”
These are some serious, or oh, I’m afraid I’m not afraid I’m not a good enough person. These are like big emotions, intense emotions. And then it’s now what?
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes. And this is going to sound so simple, and I’m sure you talk about this on your channel all the time, is like owning the emotion, letting it filter through and not letting it get stuck.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And watching the cognitions because it’s not really the emotion, it’s what we make up about the emotion.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: If I feel the wound and I’m in a therapy session and I have some tears, I can move through that and leave and go play pickleball. If I have the wound but I start telling myself, “Oh, it’s not okay to feel this way. I shouldn’t feel this way. I can’t believe I’m wounded.” And you make up a drama about–
Emma: Yeah, you’re just piling up all this stuff on top of a feeling. That’s pretty unmanageable. But when we just sit with the core feeling, it’s actually we’re very capable of having that feeling.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And it passes. Energy passes. It’s that saying, I know this sounds simple: what we resist persists. When we resist something, it continues.
Emma: And it spreads the hurt everywhere. It spreads the hurt to my partner. It spreads the hurt to my kids.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes.
Emma: Go ahead.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: I was just going to say, God is in the pause. God is in the pause or pause, pray, and proceed. Really pressing that big pause button is a tool. If you’re feeling the activation, the thing is, what can I do now to not to zip it for now, to be honest, to take care of myself to have… The other thing is, a really good tool is compassion. And I know this sounds crazy, but one tool that’s really helped me with anger towards others, like especially what’s happened during COVID and all this stuff, is remembering, having compassion for that human being and saying, “They have a history. They have wounds. They hurt.” In fact, they are me and I am them. We’re all the same. And so when I can get to the compassion and remember that nothing is personal, which is hard for people to get. Something your mother said isn’t personal. It’s really not. It’s about mom’s wounds.
Emma: Yeah. And her mom. And her mom. And her mom. And her mom.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Exactly. Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
Accepting Anger: Being Okay With the Feeling
Emma: That’s good stuff. Okay, we only have 10 minutes left because I do have another call right after this. What else do you want to make sure people think about, know about, or aware of when it comes to processing resentment and anger?
Dr. Sarah Michaud: I think the most important thing is saying to yourself, it’s not going to kill you. Anger doesn’t kill us. It’s what we do with the anger that kills us, right? Shooting dope or running up. So it’s the experience of anger. It’s really practicing, just working with it and recognizing that having the feeling of anger is okay. You don’t need to do anything immediately about it. And I think people have such terror around just experiencing it. So that’s one thing.
And also saying to yourself, and I really believe this, the more comfortable you get with the anger, the less depressed you’ll be and the less anxious you’ll be. And that is key. That is really key. Yeah, a lot to say about that, but internalized anger can just affect depression and anxiety and like we’re saying with this Gabor Maté stuff and affects our bodies and our wellbeing in huge ways.
Emma: I’ve seen that. Yeah. And it’s so interesting to me when we frame resentment as essentially like a lack of assertiveness, a lack of ability to say no, it opens up some real options to solve it, which is like being assertive. And being assertive isn’t just telling other people what they have to do, telling other people. It’s being really clear on what’s in your locus of control and what’s not. And allowing it, letting what you can’t control go and taking action on what you can change.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes, clarity is key and you just said it. The thing with it is, and there’s so often angry people or anxious people, it’s all externally focused like they’re doing this to me, and this goes back to the codependency stuff where you start blaming and it’s the thing about anger and really mental health recovery is I am responsible. It’s gotta be about me and owning it and what can I do about it?
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Rather than so and so is not going to change my husband, whom I’m resentful at. I can make requests, but ultimately I need to resolve the resentments. I can’t base my happiness on someone else changing or else I’ll be unhappy for a long time. Yeah.
Emma: That’s right. That’s good stuff. I love it.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: I know. The other tool is there’s something I call fancy resentments, which is right outta the big book of AA, but so often our resentments are like made up. Like they’re not even based on reality.
Emma: Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Be careful about that. You’ve had this experience where say, you call someone and they don’t call you back right away. And the next thing you know you’re in a rage and you’re like, “I can’t believe that.” And you get all spiraled in this anger and then the person calls you 15 minutes later and says, “Oh my God! My dog got out.” And you’re like, hm, no anger.
Emma: Yeah. So we create all these imaginary windmills in our brain, like all these imaginary things that we’re fighting.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes.
Emma: That people are so mean or so unthoughtful. And it’s oh, we actually have no idea what’s going on.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: We have no idea what’s going on.
The Fear and Anxiety Beneath Anger
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And the other really brilliant thing I heard recently from Gabor (someone actually told me this recently, which I thought was great) is we talk so much about fears or anxieties and all that stuff, and he said, “Is it really the fear of abandonment that’s running you or the fear of feelings when you’re abandoned?” And really when you think about that, the fears, like we do a lot of that. Oh, I have a fear of rejection. I have a fear of this. Isn’t it all just fear of experiencing my own feelings in a sense?
Emma: Yes. That’s on point. Yeah, it is. I’m just afraid of feeling sad. I’m just afraid of feeling angry. I’m just afraid of feeling rejected. Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes. So that’s, so the more comfortable, and you talk about this a lot, and I say this pausing, setting timers so you can check in with yourself, how am I feeling right now because the other thing is resentment, when you repress it, then it can manifest two weeks later and you’re screaming at your husband or your wife. Try to check in daily with, “Geez, did I get upset today? Did I get angry today? Am I harboring a resentment?” Doing daily check-ins really helps also.
Emma: Yeah, I love it. So do you have a writing exercise you’d recommend? Is it just the letter? Write the letter, don’t send it. Get down to the bottom of the letter, find out what’s the real sadness.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: And writing across about, you know, afraid, angry, or sad. And also there’s a whole process with resentment that’s possible, but it’s really looking at “Who am I resenting? What are the effects?” And then turning it around and saying, “Geez, what did I want from this person? What are the behaviors I keep doing when I’m mad that don’t work? And what do I really need?” The mantra from codependency recovery: what do I want? What do I need?
And looking at that underlying fear, that fuels the resentment. If you can identify that stuff, it’s like I say to clients, sometimes, and we’ll wrap up with this. When a client says, either, “I don’t know,” or “I don’t care.” These kinds of terms are just, “I don’t want to really get in touch with what is happening.”
Emma: Like, “I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to. If we talk about that, the cat’s out of the bag.”
Dr. Sarah Michaud: That’s right. That’s right.
Emma: And it’s hard to chase that.
How to Understand and Accept Your Emotional Landscape
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yes. Getting comfortable with whatever your emotional landscape is right now, that’s the key.
Emma: Yeah. And the way to do that is to practice sitting with it. You can do that with mindfulness. You can talk about it, you can write about it, you can pray about it. How do we get comfortable? Just get better at sitting with our feelings.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Yeah, knowing that they’re like waves. They’re not going to kill us.
They come and go. How often do you wake up in a certain mood? Half an hour later you’re feeling different. Half an hour later you’re feeling, it’s so really ridiculous in a way to get attached to any of it. That’s where the Buddhism stuff comes in. The non attachment and the mindfulness is so key because… Yeah, you know what I’m saying.
Emma: I know what you’re saying. Okay. It has been lovely having you on again, as always. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: All right, my friend.
Emma: Hey, tell everyone where they can find you.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: So DrSarahMichaud.com. [I’m] not a huge social media person, but I do have a little YouTube channel called Leaving Crazy Town, and we talk about anger, resentment on that channel. And there’s a podcast also. So those are the places to find me. And I write articles for a magazine called The Sober Curator.
Emma: Love it. Okay. Thank you for taking time. Lovely to see you always.
Dr. Sarah Michaud: Alright, bye sweetie. Bye.
