This week a client asked me, ‘what’s the difference between anger and rage?’
Great question!
Anger
Anger is as a primary emotion that tells you when something isn’t right. It signals violations of your boundaries, breaches of agreements, or betrayals of your core values.
Anger is often experienced in the present moment, and you can feel its primal intensity as your heart rate increases, your muscles tense, and you instinctively prepare for fight or flight.
In these moments, you generally have control over your responses, allowing you to either exit the situation or steer it towards a more favourable outcome.
Rage
Rage is similar in the sense that it tells you something’s wrong.
BUT it holds an injustice that feels stronger, deeper and has usually been rumbling for years. An ‘oppressed child’ emotion that’s been locked away in your body. Locked away because you weren’t able to understand, express or process it at the time.
Rage is also rooted in feelings of powerlessness, humiliation, shame and pain, which often makes it hard for you to engage with or overwhelms you completely.
This shame, pain and powerlessness is also experienced via collective rage. Collective rage is when we’re the victim of (and/or witness to) societal oppression, violence, corruption, war, and abuse.
What's The Difference BetweenAnger and
Rage?
Both anger and rage hold valuable wisdom. However, the wisdom contained within your rage often leads to profound transformations.
While you can learn to manage anger, rage is asking you to listen and love.
Rage is an emotion that guides you toward aspects of yourself that your family and society have outcast and ignored, aspects that are asking for validation and nurture.
Once you can trust that your rage is leading you towards love, you can harness this energy, trusting that the rage you once feared, is in fact, your wisest teacher.
Your Sacred Rage is as a messenger capable of healing and leading you back to self-acceptance, forgiveness, love, and connection.
