When Pat Willard was six, her older cousins wouldn't let her bring together in their game. She pitched a fit, and someone snapped a photo of the moment: She'southward screaming—face flushed, eyes closed—and her father has his arms and legs wrapped around her, holding her and then she won't injure herself.

"I was this little spitfire with an Irish atmosphere," says Willard, now 47, and director of communications at the City Academy of New York. "But tantrums didn't fit well with the good-girl thing. They were not genteel." Instead, her female parent's silent fury became her model for anger. When her mom got mad, she turned expressionless repose, not speaking for days. "She would not say why she was aroused," says Willard. "But the house got black."

So Willard learned, as endless women accept, to hide her atmosphere. By the time she was in her 30s, she had high blood pressure, headaches, rashes, depression, difficulty parenting two young sons, and a troubled marriage. But it never occurred to her to think of herself as angry. Rather, she thought she was a bad mom and a stifled wife. Low, not anger, was the red flag that hustled her into therapy.

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Willard's story isn't unusual: Many women, different nigh men, tend to express their anger indirectly, research finds, and the result tin be depression, heart disease, or an before death, regardless of the cause. Unfortunately, blowing upwards has health consequences besides. Then what's a pissed-off woman to practise? If you lot larn to release hostility in a controlled and effective mode, you volition add years—and satisfaction—to your life.

Squashing Emotion

Why practice women struggle with acrimony? Many learned to bury feelings from their mothers and grandmothers, whose silences protected marriages that were their livelihoods. They couldn't risk beliefs that might get them booted out of the house. As Willard'south mother believed, anger turned you into a fishmonger screaming in the streets.

"Feeling the emotion meant they'd exist tempted to show it," says Deborah L. Cox, PhD, an acquaintance professor of counseling at Missouri Country University and coauthor of The Anger Advantage. Many simply stopped experiencing acrimony as anger: It became depression or frustration, emotions safer to express.

Although younger women may believe they're comfy beingness believing, when it comes to anger, they still struggle, says psychologist Sandra Thomas, PhD, chair of the PhD program in nursing at the Academy of Tennessee, where she has been studying women and anger for 15 years. "A college woman, for example, may be freer with profanity, simply she is notwithstanding reluctant to tell her boyfriend she's aroused if she thinks an outburst will drive him abroad," says Thomas.

Paying Anger's Price

But hiding anger may be far more costly than losing a relationship: Last year, a study by Cox and others revealed that women who deal with acrimony indirectly or attempt to suppress information technology are—as Willard was—more likely to experience depression, anxiety, and physical complaints than women who are more directly.

Such suppression may fifty-fifty be mortiferous. Last Feb, Wisconsin epidemiologist Elaine D. Eaker, ScD, and colleagues from Boston University appear the findings of a decadelong report of 1,500 married women. Those who suppressed feelings of any kind—acrimony, depression, frustration—during conflicts with their spouses were four times more than likely to die of all causes during the 10-year follow-upward than those who spoke up. "Being quiet may or may not protect your marriage," says Eaker, "but you sure aren't doing your health whatsoever good past being silent."

Eaker'southward research comes on the heels of other studies linking suppressed acrimony to cardiac problems, high blood pressure, headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, and cancer. In a notable study from 2003, researchers at Columbia Academy did emotional screenings on more than 300 middle-aged women with coronary heart affliction: l% were angry and 37% were depressed.

Overeating, drinking, and smoking may exist linked to acrimony that women shove nether the carpet. Cox's research has also turned up evidence of suppression in those who abuse alcohol. True to form, Willard's female parent drifted into alcoholism every bit her aroused silences escalated over the years. A 2003 British study constitute that women with eating disorders tended to squelch anger. Kathy Parks, a 40-twelvemonth-old financial planner in Knoxville, TN, recalls that in her youth, she stuffed down her rage by overeating. "That's why I weighed 200 pounds in high schoolhouse," she says. "I felt frustrated and hopeless."

Women choking back fury are often the ones tossing and turning at night, as well, ruminating over what they wish they'd said during an incident, stoking the internal fires. "Anger is an energy," says Thomas. "If it's non expressed, your heart charge per unit and blood force per unit area rise; your stomach acids churn." Acrimony triggers a fight-or-flight reaction: Adrenaline and other stress hormones rise, breathing rate increases, and muscles tighten. Your trunk revs up, and when anger is chronic, information technology stays revved.

Finding Hidden Rage

"Anger's shadows are everywhere," says Cox. "If you don't call back you are angry, look at other parts of your life." Do you eat or drinkable likewise much and then regret it? Are you a perfectionist who has to be on summit of things, who has no other life simply looking perfect, beingness just-right thin, and working hard without ever relaxing? And how's your sex life? Is sex painful?

A 2002 study past Sally Stabb, PhD, an associate professor of counseling psychology at Texas Adult female's University and co-author with Cox of The Anger Reward, found that women who repress their anger have more critical feelings about their bodies and more negative physical experiences—like pain—during sex.

Simply the biggest inkling to subconscious acrimony in women is often depression, says psychologist Dana Jack, EdD, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Fairhaven College/ Western Washington University and writer of Behind the Mask: Destruction and Creativity in Women's Assailment.

"If a adult female is unaware of her anger or thinks it's bad, she tin can bladder from acrimony straight to depression," Jack says. "I oft propose to women that every time they come across their mood plummet, they chart what happened just earlier, and it'southward commonly that they got aroused. But nosotros feel like we're forbidden to experience that, so instead we get depressed."

Even if yous blow up from time to time, you can't assume that you lot're not a suppressor. Cox and her colleagues divide suppressors into 4 types:

Container She knows she's angry just chooses to hold information technology in and hopes it will blow over. Most of united states are containers at least some of the fourth dimension.

Internalizer She blames herself for whatsoever happens to her, arresting the anger she really feels about other people. She's often total of self-loathing.

Segmenter She denies her anger in part because she finds it an ugly trait. She tends to be passive-aggressive, another way women reroute or disguise anger, says Jack. "For case, you lot say you'll do something and then not do it. Or yous may switch targets, feeling fury at your married man but getting mad at your kids instead." This is the type that most alarms Cox, who notes, "If you don't even realize you're aroused, information technology's very difficult to practice something virtually it."

Externalizer She contains her anger until she simply explodes, commonly at people who are less powerful than she is. "Some women swing from silence to ambitious acrimony," says Jack. "But just acting out doesn't assistance. That creates guilt and shame and reinforces the notion that anger is bad."

Actually, this aggressive, explosive anger—throwing things, screaming—usually causes more than frustration, says Jack. "It's indirect because yous're not talking nearly the problem that caused the anger. And exploding can make a woman experience more powerless considering it rarely changes anything." In Cox's study, externalizers had the almost physical symptoms, including headaches, breadbasket problems, and upper respiratory infections.

"But at that place is no 1 pure type," says Thomas. "Y'all may exist a woman who explodes at habitation merely never at work. Or one who could never show anger to your mother just can to your kids." Parks, for example, ever saw herself as someone who had difficulty hiding her emotions. "If I'm upset, it's evident," she says. Yet she wrapped anger in sarcastic comments that never improved her relationships with others. Another conceal: turning the acrimony against yourself. "You're a safe target," says Jack.

Releasing the Beast

Aiding the states in all this subterfuge is defoliation almost acrimony itself. "Many women call up acrimony is a bad thing, and if they are angry, something is wrong with them," says psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller, MD, director of the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at the Stone Center in Wellesley, MA, where she researches women and anger. "But anger is an emotional reaction indicating that something is wrong and that something needs to be done."

In fact, women's anger usually centers on their most intimate relationships--their husbands, their mothers, their best friends, says Thomas, who has interviewed both men and women extensively about their anger. "Anger for women is intermingled with hurt and pain because they cannot understand how a person they are close to could carry a sure way. We never, always interviewed a adult female who didn't mention her partner. Never." Yet men tend to focus on other parts of their lives, like cars and politics, she says. They tell stories of vehicles that are lemons, or computers that don't work, or politicians who are louses.

A woman's focus on intimate relationships may also increase her vulnerability to acrimony'southward ravages. Co-ordinate to Timothy Westward. Smith, PhD, a psychologist studying anger, marriage, and center wellness at the Academy of Utah, angry women married to aroused husbands face a twofold hit. He'south found that not only does their own acrimony raise eye rate and claret pressure, merely their angry spouses also upwards their stress, increasing heart take chances even more than.

These aren't happy facts for long-suffering women—they may make our blood boil a chip more than. Only we don't have to rid ourselves of anger. That'south just not going to happen, nor would we want it to. "Anger can be a healing forcefulness," says Jack. "And learning to express information technology appropriately can be positively transforming. It can give you lot backbone. Or space in your relationship for your feelings. Or it can assist you go out. The goal is to use anger constructively."

The first pace toward using anger well is to appraise how y'all deal with information technology now. After all, nosotros could all benefit from understanding and managing our anger improve. Simply that takes a scrap of introspection and do. Below are suggestions that tin assist you go started. You may also desire to consider seeing a therapist if yous take symptoms that are possibly related to suppressed anger, such as depression, headaches, stomachaches, or recurrent colds, or if you lot feel hopeless or isolated.

Embracing Your Fury

Examine your anger roots.You can't learn to express anger until you know how you experience it now and where that style originated. Ask yourself how your parents got angry. Were you allowed to lose your temper, or were you punished for information technology? Once Willard understood that her own silence, ill wellness, and human relationship woes were the legacy of her mother'southward anger, it also became clearer what patterns she had to interruption. "I had to learn to say how I felt," she says.

Try a practice session.If you're a suppressor, chances are that expressing your acrimony feels pretty awkward. Jack suggests practicing with friends before you lot speak with the person you're mad at.

Share the acrimony.Talk near the acrimony yous feel, with the goal of solving a specific trouble. If you're aroused with your spouse or someone close to you lot, talk calmly with that person near your pattern of anger. "Wait at how anger works in your relationship," says Jack. "If you have a married man who is going to escalate the anger, tell him that his acrimony silences y'all, that you can't communicate your feelings because yous know he'll go ballistic."

Willard would go and then angry that she couldn't speak. "But my hubby, who had gone into therapy, too, helped me find a vocabulary," she says. "He would sit downward with me and say, 'Let's get through the situation.' We started going back and along most the words, talking about how you lot share your displeasure."

Put pen to paper. Writing about your anger helps you acknowledge and begin to understand it, says James Westward. Pennebaker, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. "Inquire yourself in writing what makes you angry in a certain situation or toward a certain person. That process helps undermine the anger both psychologically and physiologically." Thomas besides suggests that women keep a journal, reflecting on incidents they feel aroused about. "Women often get confused during an angry episode because it's so sad and they detect themselves thinking afterward, What started that? But if y'all keep a tape for a month of angry incidents with a specific person, for example, yous will begin to see recurring themes. Once you've calmed down, you can talk to that person about the anger in a clearer way."

Managing the Argument

Calm your body."If you're aware you're angry, stop and ask, What do I need to do most this?" advises Stabb. "Taking time to calm down is important because it gives you fourth dimension to process the information your emotions are telling you."

Stick to specifics.Instead of beginning past hurling accusations and cries of "You always do this," talk only about the specific incident that angered you lot, suggests Thomas. "Let's say your husband is 45 minutes belatedly to meet you lot. Begin past maxim, 'We were supposed to meet at 7 and you came at 7:45. I'm really angry and I want to talk to you about this.' Then state a effect: 'Next fourth dimension, I won't wait.' State the acrimony clearly and make sure you follow through."

Learn to listen.Part of processing acrimony is being able to heed to another person'southward feelings equally well as expressing your own, says Stabb. "You can admit his acrimony without agreeing past saying something like, 'I know that you have a dissimilar betoken of view from mine, merely this is my signal of view and this is why I feel angry.'" Acknowledging another's anger makes it more probable he'll accept yours.

Take an anger suspension.Don't expect to overhaul a situation or your anger all at in one case, says Miller. "If you experience, for example, that your spouse begins to hear you, then at least something is moving. Talk for 20 minutes and and then take a pause."

Ultimately, such practices work. As Willard found words for her acrimony, her depression lifted, her wellness problems abated, her self-esteem rose, and her marriage righted itself. She still has enough of anger, just she reacts differently. Recently, she left work depressed about the disrespect she felt from i of her immature male employees. But that evening she thought about how to handle the situation, wrote down the points she wanted to make, and then scheduled an early-forenoon meeting with him. "We still need to work on things, simply it was the beginning of his agreement that I'm the boss. And I'g happy about that. Here I am in my late 40s, and I've finally grown upwards."

A 24-hour interval in Acrimony Hell

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Solution Centre-of-the-night ruminations hit when you're non only angry but unhappy with the way you're handling a state of affairs. So you relive a scene, seething anew each time. Next fourth dimension, get upwardly and write about information technology. People who toss and plow are well-nigh probable to benefit by exploring the outcome in writing. Inquire, Why am I feeling the mode I am? What is it virtually this situation and this person that'south getting to me? What is it nigh me that made me then aroused about this? That defuses the rage.