In this episode of the Being Well Podcast, Forrest and associate therapist Elizabeth Ferreira talk about healthy (and unhealthy) anger. They challenge the common framing of anger as a “secondary emotion,” and explore why anger matters, how it relates to trauma, and what it can tell us about our wants and needs. They discuss how to access healthy protest and work with less healthy forms of anger like explosive rage, repression, defensiveness, passive aggression, and righteousness. Elizabeth shares insights from both her personal experience as someone with CPTSD and clinical practice.
Key Topics
- 0:00: Introduction: Why anger matters, and why it’s misunderstood
- 3:32: How trauma shapes our relationship to anger
- 5:40: Bypassing anger in therapy
- 9:04: What happens when anger is suppressed
- 12:29: Reclaiming anger: submit, explode, or something else
- 15:45: Anger as a signal of wants and needs
- 16:20: Boundaries, protest, and complex trauma
- 25:01: When CPTSD makes it hard to know what you want
- 30:06: Dissociation, structural trauma, and accessing anger
- 35:04: Why we need others to co-regulate big emotions
- 43:20: Emotional responsibility, self-awareness, and repair
- 53:26: Reconnecting with wants and needs through play
Forrest is now writing on Substack, check out his work there.
