As humans, we are complicated, emotional creatures.
We have an emotion for everything.
We can feel joy, happiness, sadness, loneliness, regret, guilt, embarrassment, etc.
But anger can be quite problematic, especially if it goes into the area of repressed anger.
Repressed anger is basically unresolved anger that we’ve never dealt with in our lives.
Maybe somebody in your past hurt you or treated you unfairly, and you’ve never let go of the anger you felt toward them for it.
Oftentimes, this happens subconsciously.
We hold on to anger—not because we intentionally do so, but because it’s sometimes difficult to let it go when we’re not really focused on doing so.
And that’s really the answer to the question.
To let go of repressed anger, you need to find a way to figure out where that anger is coming from, identify what situations it stems from, and then find a way within yourself to let those things go, forgive the past, and move on.
So let’s break that down a little bit.
1. Identify The Anger
When anger shows its ugly head in your emotions in the present day, it’s generally either coming from a situation happening right now, or a situation that happened earlier in life that we haven’t dealt with yet.
Here’s the thing about repressed anger. Current situations can actually aggravate it and cause it to flare up—and this is usually the first indicator that something may be going wrong.
If you get angry about something and think to yourself:
“Wow, why did I get angry about that? There was really no reason to be angry.”
Then what you may be dealing with is a situation where a present circumstance irritated a past wound and caused that repressed anger to flare up.
2. Identify The Source
When you have repressed anger buried within your psyche, the first thing you need to do is learn where it came from.
This can be difficult to do.
However, the best clues to follow are the clues that your emotions and feelings are leaving behind as you experience different negative emotions.
For example, the last time you felt like you got angry out of nowhere—what specific feelings and/or memories popped into your mind that helped to contribute to the anger?
Answering this question can give you clues about where the anger may have come from, which can help you to isolate it and identify it.
3. Let It Go
Letting go of repressed anger isn’t easy. But once you identify the source, it’s really important that you spend some time contemplating it.
You may need to forgive other people who wronged you in the past.
You may need to forgive yourself for things that you did before you knew better.
If you want to move on from your anger and truly find peace with it, you’ll need to just accept that bad things happen—and that you have the power to forgive, forget, and move on.
It’s not easy.
But this is the process you’ll need to deploy if you want to get over it and move on to live a happier life from here on out.
