What men are taught to do with anger

A man in my Thursday group once described his anger as the only emotion that ever felt like his own.

Sadness never felt safe to claim growing up. Fear definitely didn't. Anger was the one feeling that was allowed, the one that didn't get him laughed at or shut down, so it became the place every other feeling went to hide. Disappointment turned into anger. Fear turned into anger. Even grief, when it had nowhere else to go, came out as anger.

This is more common than people think. Most men I sit with in groups were handed two options for what to do with anger: swallow it, or use it.

Swallowing it means it shows up somewhere else, in the body, in shortened patience with their kids, in a distance from their partner neither of them can quite name. Using it means turning it outward, letting it become the thing that protects them from ever feeling what's underneath it.

Boys rarely get handed a third option. Somebody needs to sit a boy down and say, this anger is information; it's pointing at a boundary that's been crossed or a need that isn't being met, and he's allowed to listen to it without drowning in it or aiming it at someone.

I found a version of that third option in my early 20s, sitting in a circle of men in the UK, watching someone get angry in real time while the room stayed steady. Nobody told him to calm down. Nobody matched his intensity.

The group stayed with him, and somewhere underneath the heat, he found what the anger had been protecting: a grief he hadn't let himself feel in years.

I facilitate groups now where this happens on a regular basis. A man arrives carrying something sharp, and the room doesn't ask him to soften it before he's let in. The room holds it, and in the holding, the man usually finds the door underneath the anger.

What strikes me most is how rarely anger is the problem itself.

It's almost always the messenger, and most men were never taught to read the message, only to suppress it or hand it to someone else.

If you want to learn what that third option looks like, I run a group every Thursday evening, and we have two open spots. Book a free call here to see if it’s a fit for you!