the news broke your heart. let yourself be angry.

There are weeks when something happens in the world and it follows my clients into the room.

Not as a topic exactly. More as a weather system. A heaviness that was already there before they sat down, already present in how they held themselves, already audible in the first few words they said. And then, when we got to it, something broke open.

This has been one of those weeks.

I’m not going to name the specific story. You probably know which one I mean. And if it wasn’t this one, there will be another one. There is always another one. That’s part of what makes this kind of rage so exhausting to carry. It’s not new. It’s the same wound, opened again, by something that was supposed to be unthinkable and turned out, once again, not to be.

———————

What I noticed, sitting with my clients this week, is that the rage came first.

Clean and hot and entirely appropriate. The kind of anger that knows exactly what it’s responding to, that doesn’t need to be examined or reframed or managed. It just needed to be felt. To be allowed to exist without immediately being talked down from.

I didn’t try to talk them down from it.

What I’ve learnt, over years of sitting with people in moments like this, is that the impulse to move someone quickly through anger and into something softer is not always kindness. Sometimes it’s discomfort with the anger itself. A quiet wish for things to be more comfortable in the room. And anger this legitimate, this clear-eyed, this grounded in something real, doesn’t deserve to be rushed past.

So I sat with them in it. And I let it breathe.

———————

And then, reliably, something shifted.

Not away from the anger. But underneath it. The rage, when it was finally allowed to exist fully, revealed what was underneath it: a grief so old and so familiar it barely needed naming. A hopelessness that arrived not as weakness but as exhaustion. The particular heaviness of having felt this before. Of knowing you will feel it again.

I told them that was fair.

I didn’t try to fix the hopelessness or argue them out of it or remind them of progress or silver linings. I just sat with them in it, because some things deserve to be sat with. Because rushing past hopelessness before it’s been fully acknowledged is its own kind of violence, a small one, but still.

———————

Here is what I want to say about anger, and I want to say it plainly:

Anger is not the problem.

Anger is not something to be managed or minimized or moved through as quickly as possible on the way to something more palatable. Anger, especially this kind of anger, is information. It is the psyche’s way of saying: something important has been violated. A boundary has been crossed. A value has been desecrated. Something that matters to you has been treated as though it doesn’t.

Anger tells us what we care about. It shows us where our values live. It is, when we let it exist fully rather than suppressing it or performing it or immediately converting it into something more socially acceptable, one of the clearest signals we have about who we are and what we stand for.

And here is the thing about hopelessness: it arrives when the anger has nowhere to go.

When we feel the rage and then immediately talk ourselves out of it, or when someone else talks us out of it, or when the culture around us communicates that our anger is too much, too loud, too inconvenient, too much of a problem. When the anger gets suppressed or bypassed or spiritually bypassed into something like acceptance before we’ve actually felt it. That’s when it collapses into hopelessness. Because the energy of the anger, which was always trying to move toward something, got blocked. And blocked energy, in my experience, almost always becomes depression, or numbness, or that particular exhausted flatness that looks like being fine from the outside.

———————

What I told my clients, at some point in those sessions, is this:

The anger you feel is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that something is working correctly. That you are a person who knows when a line has been crossed. That you have values you are unwilling to quietly abandon. That you are paying attention when paying attention is painful.

In a world that has a thousand ways of encouraging women in particular to swallow their anger, to soften it, to make it more manageable for the people around them, the capacity to feel it fully and to let it exist without immediately converting it into something else is an act of genuine self-respect.

I’m not saying anger alone is enough. It isn’t. The work of turning anger into something that creates change, in your own life or in the world around you, is longer and harder and more complicated than one therapy session or one blog post can hold.

But it starts with letting the anger breathe. With not running from it. With sitting in it long enough to feel what it’s telling you, to understand what it’s protecting, to recognize it as the part of you that knows your own worth and refuses, even now, to stop knowing it.

That refusal is where the power lives.

Not in the hopelessness, though the hopelessness is real and it deserves its time. But in what the anger is capable of, when we stop treating it as something to be managed and start treating it as something to be listened to.

———————

If these past couple of weeks have been hard, if something in the news has followed you into your own room and sat with you in the dark, I want you to know that what you’re feeling is not an overreaction.

It is a response. A completely appropriate, completely human response to something that deserved to be responded to.

You don’t have to be okay about it yet.

And the anger you feel, if you let it, will tell you exactly what you value and exactly what you’re still capable of protecting.