Women and Anger: What Do We Do With It?

Content note: This post includes discussion of sexual assault, sexual harassment, self-harm, and violence against women and other marginalized communities.

Sometimes I wonder how many of us women have a complicated relationship with anger.

Anger is human. We all experience it. But I wonder if many of us, particularly those who grew up being taught to be a "good girl," learned that certain expressions of anger weren't really okay.

Be patient.

Be understanding.

Be kind.

Keep the peace.

Smile.

Don't be mad.

Don't yell.

Don't make that face.

Don't be difficult.

Don't be dramatic.

Don't be too much.

Maybe we didn't learn that anger itself was wrong. Maybe we learned that some ways of expressing it weren't okay.

Maybe we learned to worry about how we'd be perceived if we expressed it fully. Would we be difficult? Dramatic? Aggressive? Too much?

And I wonder if that conditioning affects not only how we respond to our own anger, but how we respond to other women's anger, too.

Do we judge ourselves when we express it?

And do we judge other women when they express theirs?

Maybe we've learned to be wary of women who are angry. To see them as difficult, dramatic, aggressive, or too much.

And maybe we've learned to turn some of that judgment inward, too.

Maybe things are changing. I hope women are feeling more free to be angry, to speak up, and to name what isn't okay. And yet, even when we consciously believe anger is valid, perhaps some of those old messages still live beneath the surface.

I know they do in me.

Sometimes we know exactly why we're angry.

And sometimes we don't.

Sometimes we blame the hormones.

Sometimes we tell ourselves we're overreacting. That we're being too sensitive, too emotional, too much.

And yes, our bodies can influence how intensely we experience things.

But what if “it's my hormones” doesn't have to mean, “there's nothing here I need to listen to”?

What if we could be curious about both?

What's happening in my body? And what's happening in my life?

Maybe the answer isn't always one or the other.

I've been thinking about this because anger is something I've personally been exploring for a few years. And I'm still learning how to listen to it.

I sometimes don't know whether I'm responding to something happening right now, like perimenopause, something that happened a long time ago, something I'm carrying from somewhere else, or simply a nervous system that's had enough.

And perhaps I don't always need to figure that out immediately.

Maybe I can start by listening.

What is this trying to tell me?

What matters here?

What needs to change?

For me, some of those questions take me into places that are difficult to look at.

I've experienced sexual assault and sexual harassment. Some of it happened when I was very young, and some when I was in my teens and twenties. I don't want to go into the details here. But I also don't want to minimize them.

They happened.

They mattered.

And I know something about what it can feel like when something is done to you that should never have happened.

I never reported any of the incidents.

When I was very young, I tried to communicate about some of what had happened, but I didn't yet have the words or the ability to fully explain what I was experiencing in a way that could be understood.

Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that speaking up didn't necessarily help.

When I was around 14 or 15, I watched a strong and courageous friend speak out about being raped by a guy at our school. I watched what she had to endure afterwards, on top of what had already happened to her.

I remember it. And I wonder what I took in from watching her.

Maybe I learned that speaking up could come with a cost. Maybe I learned that some things were safer to carry privately.

I don't always know what happened to my anger at the time. But looking back, I can see how much of what I was carrying got turned inward.

Self-harm.

Self-blame.

Self-hate.

Depression.

Perfectionism.

A whole host of ways of trying to manage feelings I didn't know what to do with.

And then there is everything beyond our own lives.

Women being abused and killed by intimate partners or former partners.

Women being sexually assaulted.

Children being harmed.

Trans women facing violence and discrimination.

Indigenous women experiencing disproportionately high levels of violence.

There is so much suffering in the world.

Sometimes I take it all in and think:

How are we supposed to hold all of this?

I don't just carry my own story. I carry knowing this, too. And the numbers behind it are part of why.

Sexual violence, in particular, is far more widespread than police statistics alone can show. Statistics Canada estimated that approximately 940,000 sexual assaults occurred in 2019, but only 6% were reported to police.

And there are many reasons people don't report. In a survey of survivors conducted by the Office of the Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime, 93% of survivors who had not reported said they feared they would not be believed.

How much, then, is carried privately?

How much is minimized?

How much never enters the numbers we see?

Sometimes the more we see, the more there is to be angry about.

And sometimes it feels like too much.

Maybe we're not meant to carry all of it.

There are things we cannot fix. People we cannot save. Injustices we cannot undo.

But I don't think that means we have to stop caring. Or stop being angry.

And I don't think anger itself is the problem.

Perhaps the question is what we do with it.

Because anger can tell us:

This matters.

This isn't okay.

Something needs to change.

Sometimes that change begins in our own lives.

With a boundary.

A conversation.

A no.

Leaving something that is hurting us. Finally saying something we've been afraid to say.

And sometimes it reaches further.

Speaking up. Standing beside someone. Organizing. Advocating. Raising our children differently. Changing something in our families, workplaces, or communities.

And sometimes we don't know what to do yet.

Anger can point us toward action, but it doesn't require immediate action. We can feel it. Listen to it. Let ourselves understand what it's trying to tell us before deciding what, if anything, we want to do with it.

There is also a difference between feeling rage and causing harm.

We can feel something intensely without acting on it in ways that cause harm.

Maybe we need more spaces where women can tell the truth about what makes them angry without immediately having to make it smaller, nicer, or more comfortable for everyone else.

For now, I mostly scream and yell in my car. Not in traffic, where someone might mistake it for road rage, but somewhere quiet where I can let myself say the things I didn't say at the time.

This hurt me.

I am angry.

I am not willing to accept this anymore.

And then perhaps we can get curious about what's underneath it.

Maybe anger isn't always something we need to overcome.

Maybe sometimes it is something we need to hear.

Not because every feeling is a command to act, or because anger always tells us exactly what to do. It often doesn't. When we're really in the thick of it, anger can make it harder to think clearly.

But perhaps it can tell us something important.

That we have been hurt.

That something is unjust.

That we care deeply.

And perhaps we can learn to hold anger alongside our compassion, our tenderness, our grief, our love, our hope.

We don't have to become hard in order to be strong.

We don't have to lose our compassion in order to have boundaries.

We don't have to choose between softness and power.

Maybe we can be both.

We can't change everything that is wrong in the world.

I wish we could.

But perhaps we don't need to have the power to fix everything in order to have some power. We can choose what we will tolerate, when to speak, when to act, and who we stand beside.

And we can choose not to abandon ourselves in the process.

Maybe that's where some of the hope lives.

Not in believing everything will be okay.

Not in pretending the world isn't painful or unjust.

But in remembering that we still have choices within it.

Maybe we can start by listening to it.

What is this trying to tell me?

What matters here?

What do I want to do with what I know?

Perhaps that is part of reclaiming our relationship with anger.

Not becoming angrier. Not glorifying rage. Not letting it consume us. But no longer being afraid of it.

We can be compassionate and still say no. We can be loving and still be angry. We can be tender and still be fierce.

We can feel deeply without losing ourselves.

And perhaps, sometimes, anger is simply asking us to pay attention.

This matters.

You matter.

And maybe what we do next is up to us.

Sources & further reading

Statistics Canada. Criminal justice outcomes of sexual assault in Canada, 2015 to 2019. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.943665/publication.html

Office of the Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime. Reporting to Police and Investigations. https://www.canada.ca/en/office-federal-ombudsperson-victims-crime/sissa-essas/reporting.html

Statistics Canada. Homicide in Canada, 2024. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2025060-eng.htm

Statistics Canada. Intimate partner violence. https://www.canada.ca/en/women-gender-equality/gender-based-violence/intimate-partner-violence.html