You’re not broken. You’re blocked.
Anger is protective energy. It protects you and your loved ones.
When someone crosses a boundary, or disrespects you anger shows up to protect you.
But sometimes you can’t be angry, and you have to stuff it. This probably happened a lot when you were young.
Anger is a natural response to a threat, but a bigger threat might require us to prevent any anger from surfacing. We stuff it down, and .. then what?
What happens when you stuff it down
When I was a kid, I got so angry at my dad that I grabbed an aluminum baseball bat and beat a spot on the pine tree in our backyard. Twenty or thirty hard hits, maybe two minutes, until my hands hurt from the reverberation.
The bark came off. Sap sealed the wound. That mark stayed visible for years.
The tree could handle it. But that anger? It didn’t go away just because I hit a tree.
Here’s what I’ve learned since then: when you resist or suppress an emotion, it doesn’t leave. It gets trapped. It intensifies. It waits.
And it keeps sending the same message, louder each time, until you finally listen — or it explodes.
So what do you actually do with it?
More recently, I smashed a nearly new box of tissues on my desk. Soft cardboard, easy to clean up. Something inside me shifted.
That’s not a joke. That’s a real thing that works.
The most important rule I’ve found: express anger in a way that causes no harm to any sentient being — human, animal, or otherwise.
Punch a pillow. Rip paper. Scream underwater. Even visualizing screaming has helped me process it.
But the real shift starts simpler than that.
“Breathe, brother.”
My friend texted me from a train in Tokyo. Someone had elbowed him hard in the ribs, blocked him, acted like an asshole. He wanted to knock the guy’s head off.
I was also on a train. I couldn’t take a call. Talking on Japanese trains is frowned upon.
I texted back: “Breathe, brother.”
I worried it might sound dismissive.
But later he told me those two words really helped. We’d done a lot of inner work together in our men’s group in Japan. When he read my message, he could hear my voice in his head. That memory helped him tune into a more grounded part of himself.
He remembered he had a choice.
The 90-second window
Here’s something most people don’t know: the physiological lifespan of an emotion in your body is about 90 seconds.
That’s research from neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor.
The emotion fires. Your brain releases chemicals — adrenaline, cortisol — your heart races, your chest tightens, your jaw locks.
If you actually feel it — without resisting, without adding stories about why you’re right or replaying what happened — the chemistry clears in about a minute and a half.
We keep emotions alive by fighting them or feeding them with thoughts.
Ninety seconds of actually feeling it? That’s often enough.
The anger isn’t the problem
Anger is a messenger. It showed up because something matters to you.
But if you’ve been stuffing it down for years, it’s not just anger anymore. There’s probably grief back there too. And fear. And loneliness.
Anger is just the one that’s allowed out. It’s the bodyguard standing in front of everything else you haven’t let yourself feel.
Want to see what’s underneath?
I built a quick self-check — 10 questions, takes two minutes. Nothing stored. No email required. Just for you.
Why I know this stuff
I spent decades saying “I’m fine.”
Meanwhile I was carrying anger I couldn’t name, grief I’d postponed since my Granddad died, and shame from things that happened when I was ten.
I didn’t know any of that at the time. I just knew something was off.
I established a men’s group in Tokyo just so I could talk about stuff. That turned into ManKind Project Japan — I’ve been facilitating men’s circles for over a decade now, in Tokyo and online.
I also wrote a book about all of this. It’s called I’M FINE! It’s the story of how I went from “everything’s fine” to actually being fine.
If any of this sounds familiar and you want to talk about it, I do free discovery calls.