Anger has been bubbling up for me lately in situations that were not right, where I could no longer stay silent.
Anger has always been a motivating factor for me.
I was raised to tolerate things that I probably should not have tolerated, and it was only when the line was clearly crossed that anger would flood over me and motivate me to make things right.
Anger has given me the courage to do hard things, like legally challenging a developer who disregarded my property line in his development plans, having courageous conversations with important people in my life, and, in some cases, drawing clear boundaries with those who could not respect my time, emotions, energy, or mental health.
While often vilified, anger can serve as a catalyst for positive change if mobilized in healthy and productive ways. Essential oils can play a decisive role in helping to fuel transformation through anger.
What is Anger?
Anger is an emotion characterized by a strong feeling of displeasure and antagonism toward someone or something that does not align with your internal values.
All emotions—including anger—are body-based signals to pay attention and notice if action needs to be taken. Anger is always a symptom of something deeper that needs to be addressed.
Anger is the emotional response that moves through you when experiencing a perceived injustice, betrayal, or violation.
If you learn to mobilize your anger in healthy ways (i.e., not projecting or repelling it), anger can empower you with the courage required to address the underlying root cause of the anger and change your situation (instead of continuing to tolerate something that makes you angry because it does not feel right to you).
Anger is a natural source of energy for the fight for justice. It brings you the energy, intensity, focus, and motivation to act by expressing thoughts and feelings that may be difficult to share or motivating you to find solutions to situations or problems you can no longer tolerate or ignore.
Symptoms of Anger
Anger can manifest in many ways, including physical, behavioral, and emotional symptoms.
Physical Symptoms
Anger can trigger your “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system, resulting in physical symptoms like:
- Increased heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration
- Sweating or shaking
- Tightness in the chest
- Tense or clenched muscles
- Upset stomach
- Headaches or tension in your head or eyes
- Dizziness
- Clenching fists
- Grinding your teeth
- Shaking or trembling
Emotional Symptoms
Anger can cause emotional symptoms, prompting feelings like:
- Feeling abandoned or afraid
- Feeling disrespected or humiliated
- Feeling tense, nervous, or unable to relax
- Feeling easily irritated or resentful towards other people or situations
- Feeling like you can’t control yourself or your actions
- Feeling guilty
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Feeling jealous or rejected
Positive Aspects of Anger
Anger can be a transformative force. Anger serves as a messenger that something isn’t right and fuels you with the courage and motivation to make it right, bringing you the courage to change yourself and your world.
Interestingly, the word “courage” can be roughly translated to rage “of the heart”- with “Cour” translating to heart (Coeur) both in Latin and French and “rage” as the second part of the equation.
You may recall that emotions are energy in motion that prompt and organize you for action. The emotion of anger is highly motivating and hard to ignore. When channeled toward a positive outcome, anger can serve as a driving force to spark necessary transformation.
Research found that anger could be used “as motivation to intensify drive and determination to successfully reach a specific goal,” specifically in relation to more challenging tasks.
Anger can motivate you to:
- Face and overcome fears and obstacles: These may get in the way of your goals.
- Improve performance: In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, participants who were angry performed better on challenging tasks than those who felt other emotions.
- Self-advocate: Anger can be a powerful source of moral courage and a way to stand up for what’s right.
- Overcome fear: Anger can help people overcome fear and take risks.
- Communicating boundaries: If your boundaries are broken (through the insensitivity of others or in any other way), anger comes forward to restore your sense of strength and separateness.
- Energizing: Anger can energize people and stimulate them to work for change.
- Enhance Focus: Anger brings you a lot of intensity and focus.
- Feel and process deeper emotions: You may prefer to avoid them as emotions feel challenging to experience.
- Reveal your Longings: help you recognize that you want something different than what is happening.
- Helps you create change in your life: Face feelings that may be too risky or scary to acknowledge.
Anger in any form—frustration, resentment, rage—tells you that you cannot continue to tolerate what you’ve been tolerating. You may need something more, deserve something better, or desire something healthier. If you listen to your anger, it can help you to change patterns that are not serving you well.
Unhealthy Responses to Anger
If you mobilize your anger in healthy ways, it can help you make a change, set some boundaries, and even risk the loss of your relationship to demand change. Anger may be your body’s way of telling you how your sense of dignity is suffering because of the compromises you are making. Or perhaps the anger is about recognizing the extent to which you have lost your voice and sense of self.
Your anger or frustration may also result from feeling stagnant or stuck in your current situation.
Unhealthy responses to anger include:
Explosive anger: Out-of-control anger where your temper may hijack your better judgment.
Explosive anger correlates with under-regulated top-down management from the higher brain (especially the pre-frontal cortex, which bears the burden of regulating the amygdala).
Repressed Anger: Repressed anger refers to anger that is unintentionally or unconsciously avoided, denied, pushed down, or not expressed, often out of fear or shame or an attempt to avoid uncomfortable feelings related to stress, conflict, and tension.
You may repress, compartmentalize, or dissociate, so you do not need to feel angry or offend anyone. You may instead rely on pleasing or placating, which can lead to self-sacrifice, self-sabotage, or self-blame. Unlike suppressed anger—where you purposely avoid expressing anger you are aware of experiencing, you may not even be consciously aware of your repressed anger—until it rears its ugly head.
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Repressed Anger
Essential Oils for Anger
Essential oils can be powerful tools to help dissipate some of the energy of anger.
Your sense of smell links directly to the emotional control center of your brain, known as the amygdala, where emotions and emotional memories are stored. Your sense of smell is the only one of your five senses directly linked to this unconscious area of your brain, known as your limbic lobe, making sense of smell and the tool of essential oils the most direct path to healing emotions like blame, shame, and guilt.
Essential oils inhaled through the nasal passageways enable immediate access to the regions of the brain that house these intense emotions like anger and rage so we can integrate and release them.
The word “emotion” can be translated as “energy in motion.” Emotion is the experience of energy moving through our bodies. This emotional energy works at a higher speed than thought. Essential oils can help us clear the energy residue of blame so it doesn’t remain in our thought patterns, negatively impacting our energy field or health.
Essential oils can help anger move through your body. As that energy opens up and flows, it is easier to unpack the message in your anger. It can be helpful to inhale an essential oil, then as you exhale, ask yourself:
- What am I so angry about?
- What is my anger trying to tell me?
- What does my anger want me to do or to stop doing?
- What do I value?
- What must be protected and restored?
These questions help you positively focus your anger so it can move through you more quickly, circumventing any need for internal or external violence. you can it more easily move through you, circumventing any need for internal or external violence.
Anger that we don’t process and release can get stored in the liver, according to Chinese medicine. I believe anger can be the most intense and damaging of all the repressed emotions because of its intensity. The more we try to suppress it, the more it rears its ugly head in ways that undermine our health, growth, and personal relationships.
Energetically, your liver maintains harmony and the smooth movement of energy (known as chi) throughout the body, including the smooth transition between feelings and emotions as situations change around us. This liver energy supports your drive, planning, endurance, perseverance, quick, clear intellect, ambition, patience, and organizational abilities.
When your liver energy is balanced, you probably feel kind, benevolent, compassionate, and generous. When your liver is physically or energetically congested or stagnant, you might experience intense feelings of angry outbursts, irritability, resentment, frustration, rage, impatience, jealousy, or even depression.
You might also feel the need to control yourself and others, which might present an attachment to strong opinions or be power-hungry or over-ambitious. You seek power so that nobody has power over you. Control dynamics also play out, such as blame, shame, and guilt.
Your liver energy works in conjunction with your gallbladder energy. If gallbladder energy is stuck, it can back up into the liver, causing energetic congestion, manifesting as rage, anger, or frustration.
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Anger Management
Liver Support™ helps support the release of anger, including frequent irritation, impatience, resentment or frustration, being critical of yourself or others, control issues, an inability to express your feelings, feelings of not feeling heard, not feeling loved, not being recognized or appreciated.
Formulated to help move through and release anger and negative emotions attached to traumatic experiences from the cells of the liver to promote optimal healing. The oils in this blend assist the body in recognizing, working through, and releasing the anger, fear, or frustration caused by traumatic experiences so they don’t overwhelm you.
It allows you to gently release negative emotions, including repressed anger, which can create stuck energy and impede an organ’s healing ability.
Place the bottle under your nose and breathe deeply, fully inhaling the oil for 3–7 breaths. It helps you breathe into and work through the emotion. You can also apply it around the ankles, as this is often an area where we hold resistance to moving forward in life and block the ability to receive joy and pleasure. Start at the back of the ankle and apply under the ankle bone around to the front and back under the other ankle bone while allowing yourself to release challenging emotions. For more tips on detoxifying emotions, read this article.
READ THIS NEXT: Physical and Emotional Support for Your Liver
Featured Oils:
References:
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/essential-oils-for-courageous-conversations/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/supporting-personal-boundaries-with-essential-oils/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/how-to-detoxify-emotions/
- https://www.success.com/anger-as-motivation/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/9-essential-oils-for-stagnation/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/essential-oils-for-repressed-anger/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/essential-oils-for-blame/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/5-essential-oils-for-anger-management/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/introducing-emotion-balance-blends/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/physical-and-emotional-support-for-your-liver/
