Photo by Daniel Lerman on Unsplash
Someone cuts in front of you in traffic and your whole body goes hot. Your kid spills a drink and you hear yourself shouting before you’ve decided to. A colleague sends a slightly off email and you’re furious for the rest of the day. Afterwards you’re embarrassed, because it was nothing. So why are you so angry? You don’t feel like an angry person. You just seem to be one, more and more.
One of my earliest memories is sitting in the back of a daycare in Dublin with my sister as the room went dark. All the other children had been picked up hours earlier. We were the last two left. The woman who ran it had gone into the next room to have dinner with her family, and I remember hearing the forks hitting the plates, smelling their food, and feeling my stomach twist. We sat there quietly, not wanting to cause any trouble.
And who was I supposed to be angry with? My mother was doing everything she possibly could. She worked all day and rushed across the city to collect us. I couldn’t be angry with her. And my dad was definitely not a safe person to be angry with in the few periods he was around. So the anger had nowhere to go. It landed in me.
By my twenties it had found plenty of places to go. I took pride in my ability to eviscerate people with angry words when I was triggered. I was in love with my protector parts. It took me years to see that the boy in the dark daycare was the one doing the talking.
Before I explain any of it, try something. Read the next sentence slowly, let the out-breath go, and notice what happens in your body as you read it. Your anger is allowed to be here. Don’t argue with it and don’t agree with it. Just notice where it lands, the jaw, the hands, the chest, and whether something in you loosens or braces against being told it’s okay. Stay with that one more breath. That’s the place we’ll work from.
What’s really going on
If something loosened just then, or something bristled, “don’t tell me my anger is fine, you don’t know what I’m dealing with,” notice both. Both are welcome.
Anger itself isn’t the problem. It’s one of the small set of feelings we’re born with, wired in alongside fear, distress, interest and joy. It’s meant to tell you something isn’t right and give you the energy to deal with it. The trouble starts when it can’t go where it was headed, so it goes everywhere else.
And very often, what’s underneath the anger is shame. Donald Nathanson, building on the work of Silvan Tomkins, mapped the four directions we run when shame hits, and he called it the Compass of Shame: attack self, attack other, withdraw, avoid. Anger is the attack other direction. “How dare you.” “You’re the problem.” Always being right. It’s armour. It’s easier to be furious with someone than to feel the drop in your belly that says you’re not enough.
Nathanson also explained why it’s so out of proportion. When a moment hurts, your nervous system doesn’t only register the moment. It runs back through every old script where you felt that way before. So the present moment brings two units of pain, but you’ve two hundred stored, and they multiply. That’s why a spilled drink can feel like an outrage. You’re not dramatic. Your body is remembering.
So if you’re angry all the time, you make sense. Some part of you is still sitting in a dark room somewhere, with nobody safe to be angry at, and it’s been waiting a long time to be heard.
Need to talk this through right now? Figlet is an AI coach that’s there at 2 in the morning, or right now. It runs this loop with you on the Self ground.
The loop, on your situation
The practice I use is one I learned from my teacher Aftab Omer, reflexive participation: what am I noticing now, how am I affected, and what creative action is being called for? Run it on one recent moment when the heat took over.
Get ground in your body first
Feel your feet on the floor. Let one breath out slowly, longer than the one that came in. Unclench your jaw. Look around and name three things you can see. You don’t have to do anything with the anger yet.
What happened
Just the facts, present tense. “My partner says ‘we’re late again.’ I snap at her in front of the kids.” No case for the prosecution or the defence.
Where it lands in the body
Go to the second before you snapped. Where did it start? Heat in the face? A clench in the fists or the chest? A squeeze in the gut that came first, before the heat? That squeeze is often the shame, and the heat is the protector arriving to cover it. Stay with it for one breath. And now what do you notice?
Who’s driving
Name the part that took the wheel. The Prosecutor who has to win the argument. The one who’d rather be wronged than be ashamed. The one who shouts first because being shouted at was worse. Then ask what it’s guarding. Usually a younger, softer feeling: hurt, scared, left out, not taken seriously.
Trace it
Only as far as today needs. Who in your family was allowed to be angry, and who wasn’t? Was your anger punished, ignored, or the only feeling that got a reaction? Then widen it. When the cost of living jumps, research finds people get more distressed, and mostly in the active kinds, anxiety and anger. You might be living inside a system that makes you surge and then tells you it’s your temper.
Feel it and tell someone
What isn’t expressed gets enacted. Shouting at the driver is enactment, it’s acting the anger out on the world. Expression is different. It needs a container and it tells the truth: “I was furious just now, and underneath it I felt like I didn’t matter.” Say that to someone it affects, after you’ve cooled. Shame feeds on aloneness. The antidote is company.
One creative action
Every hard feeling has somewhere it’s trying to go. Anger is trying to become fierceness: clean, steady, protective energy in the service of something you care about. So ask what your anger was protecting, and do one thing for that directly. Ask for the help. Hold the boundary calmly. That’s anger arriving where it was headed.
One thing to do tonight
Try what I once did with a group in training. I played my own symptom. I let the angry part speak in the first person and stopped trying to be reasonable. My angry yelling turned, quite quickly, into pleading to be heard. And then into something I didn’t expect: “I don’t want to help.” So tonight, give your anger a voice for two minutes, on paper or out loud somewhere private. Let it start with “I’m angry because” and keep going until the tone changes. Notice what’s underneath when it does.
Would therapy help with this?
Coaching is how we go from where you are now to where you want to go, and we only address the past when it emerges in the present. If your anger is a short fuse, snapping at the people you love, or stewing for hours, coaching is the right size. You work on the moments as they happen.
But if your anger is frightening the people around you, if you’ve hurt someone or broken things, or if you’re scared of what you might do, please talk to a licensed therapist where you live, and soon. If anyone is in danger, call emergency services first. And if the anger came on suddenly, alongside changes in sleep, pain, hormones or your health, see a doctor too. Your body might be telling you something that isn’t about the past at all.
The path
What I’ve just walked you through is the Empathi Method. For an individual, it’s built on my Proof of Work of Being Human protocol: building sovereign ground inside yourself. When the ground holds, your anger doesn’t have to keep standing guard. It gets to become what it was always meant to be: strength in the service of what you love.
There are two ways to keep going. You can start Figlet Life Coaching tonight, on the Self ground, and it’ll help you catch the moment the heat rises, find the feeling underneath, and say it instead of spraying it. Or you can get on the list for the book and the live program with me, where we do this work together.
Figs O’SullivanFiglet Life Coaching
Get help now
Figlet is an AI coach, there at 2 in the morning or right now. It runs this loop with you on your actual situation, as often as you need. It’s coaching, not therapy. The list hears first about the book and the next live program with me.
Proof of Work, Greenleaf Book Group Press, February 2027. Not sure which ground is hurting? Take the two-minute Ground Check.
And the next time you snap, and you will, that’s not proof you’re hopeless. It’s your next chance to notice, repair, and begin again.
I go deeper into this in my book, Proof of Work (Greenleaf Book Group Press, February 2027).
Common questions
Why am I so angry all the time for no reason?
There’s nearly always a reason, it’s just not the one in front of you. When old hurts never got settled, small moments set off big reactions, because your body adds the past to the present. Stress, exhaustion and a world that keeps you on edge make it worse. If it came on suddenly or with physical changes, check in with a doctor.
How do I stop being so angry?
Don’t try to stop the feeling. Slow the moment down. Ground your body, notice where the anger starts, and look for the feeling underneath it, often hurt or shame. Then express that, in words, to someone it affects, rather than acting it out. Anger that gets heard settles. Anger that gets suppressed comes back louder.
Why am I so angry at everyone?
When anger is aimed at everyone, it’s usually about something bigger than any one person. You might be carrying old anger that never had a safe target, or living under pressure that never lets up. Being furious at everybody can also be a way of not feeling how alone or unseen you are. That’s worth getting curious about, gently.
Reflexive participation, and the idea that anger can become fierceness, come from the teaching of Aftab Omer at the Institute of Imaginal Studies, where I trained.
