Are women taught to suppress anger?

Anger is one of our vital emotions. It signals injustice and provides the energy to resist or self-protect. It tells us when something isn’t right, or when harm is being done. And yet, particularly if you’re a woman, chances are you’ve learned along the way that anger is risky. That it makes you appear unattractive, difficult, irrational, or unstable. That you should swallow it, or turn it into something quieter and more acceptable. 

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. In countless ways, subtle and overt, women are taught to disconnect from their anger. To police it, disown it, or redirect it inward. 

Why it can be hard for women to be angry

From early childhood, girls are encouraged to be agreeable and accommodating. Anger, which threatens harmony and asserts a boundary, doesn’t fit easily into this expectation. You might remember moments from childhood where being cross or defiant led to a withdrawal of affection, scolding, or being told you were “too much”. Even without parental words, these moments leave an impression that it’s unsafe to be angry, because it puts connection at risk.

One of my clients described how she was constantly reminded that her parents were going through a hard time and couldn’t hear anything that might put any additional demands on them. The message was clear: swallow your anger. Expressing any sense of feeling neglected risked punitive time-outs, parental de-validation, and a terrifying sense of abandonment and lost attachment.

Those early lessons don’t fade. In adolescence, expressing anger risks being labelled oppositional or “attention-seeking”. In the workplace, assertive women are judged more harshly than assertive men. In relationships, anger can be framed as irrational or hormonal.

If you’re a mother, the stakes may be even higher; another client recalled how, during a custody dispute, expressing anger about the legal system’s failures led to her being portrayed as unstable and unfit to be a mother. “It didn’t matter that what I was angry about was real and valid,” she said. “Just the fact that I showed it made me look like the problem.”

The silent cost of suppressing anger

Anger doesn’t vanish when you suppress it. It settles into the body, the mind, and the spaces between our words. It turns into anxiety, depression, perfectionism, even illness. It can poison you with resentment or eat away at your self-worth.

You may recognise this in yourself, the way you grit your teeth through unfairness or apologise for feelings that you have every right to have. The way you say “It’s fine” - when it isn’t. Or how squashed anger re-emerges as relentless self-criticism. These are the quiet, chronic effects of anger denied.

If you’ve felt a tension between the part of you that wants to speak and the part that wants to stay safe, you’re not imagining it. These patterns are shaped by centuries of cultural conditioning that constrain women to be the relentless emotional regulators of others, at the cost of their own emotional expression. 

Anger disrupts this convenient image. It asserts a need and demands space, which makes people uncomfortable. You may have noticed how quickly women’s anger is reinterpreted: as hysteria, mental instability, irrationality. It gets pathologised, moralised, or simply mocked (“ignore her, she’s a bit cross”). Expressions of justified outrage are dismissed as overreactions. The problem becomes you, rather than the issue you're righteously protesting.

The consequences of this can run deep. Not only are you denied the legitimacy of your feelings, you may also begin to question your own judgement. “Was I overreacting?” “Maybe it wasn’t that bad.” “Maybe I should have handled it differently.” The result is a kind of internal gaslighting, where you come to doubt the validity of your instincts. You become your own oppressor.

Anger as a voice, not a flaw

What if your anger isn’t a problem to be fixed, but a message to be heard? Anger, like any emotion, serves a purpose. It tells you when something important is at stake - your safety, your dignity, your integrity. It can help you recognise injustice, whether in personal relationships, workplaces, or the world at large. So the problem isn’t the anger, it’s what we’ve been told to believe about it.

One woman spoke about how, after years of numbing herself to avoid conflict, she in therapy began to value her anger. “It gives me a sense of existence. More and more I am trying to allow it and it feels good, because it's a real experience.” Her view of anger is atypical in its positivity: “a sense of existence” is a remarkable expression of anger’s survival-enhancing function.

Another said: “I wanted to be accepted, whereas now it's recognising: do I even need that acceptance? It doesn't matter. And therefore, it's easier to have the boundary.” You might consider what your own anger has been trying to tell you. When have you silenced it, and what did that cost you? When did you listen to it, and what changed as a result?

Making space for anger

Reclaiming anger isn’t about unleashing rage, losing control, or shouting people down. It’s about making space for an empowering inner feeling. Trusting your instincts when something feels wrong and allowing yourself to use that energy to your benefit. You might even experience it as an unexpectedly calm inner power, fueling your fluency in expressing your truth. 

Start by recognising, for what it is, that tightness in your chest when someone behaves with injustice. It might mean choosing not to minimise that feeling. It might mean practising speaking when your voice is shaking. Learning to recognise and work with anger isn’t easy if it’s been buried for years. But it’s one of the most important ways to regain agency, dignity, and connection to yourself.

Anger in therapy: a safe place to begin

For some, therapy may be the first place where anger feels safe to explore. In the absence of judgement or fear of repercussions, you can begin to process those moments in which you swallowed your feelings, and what that has done to you.

Anger often arrives in therapy disguised as anxiety, depression, or resentment. As it’s unpacked, what emerges is not a volatile or dangerous emotion but a profoundly human one. A sign of what you value or what you’ve been denied.

One woman shared how, after years of feeling passive and disconnected, she finally allowed herself to feel the anger she’d suppressed towards a neglectful parent. “I could finally admit to myself that what happened had really hurt. That I was allowed to f***ing be angry about it now, in a way I wasn’t back then.” Therapy helped her to grieve a childhood of quashed feelings, and her silent outrage as an adult that this was something her parents would never acknowledge.

For you, it might be about relationships past or present. About how you’re been treated at work. About the demands on you that are unreasonable. About the relentless pressure to be easy, forgiving, attractive, “grateful”.

Your anger matters because it tells the truth about something. Ask yourself: What is it? And, where did my anger go? What have I been taught to do with it? What would it mean to bring it back into my life in a way that is to my benefit?

Reclaiming anger doesn’t mean becoming someone you’re not. It means becoming yourself. In a world that still too often tells women to stay quiet, that’s radical and necessary.