When Anger, Hate, and Rage spike, whattdowedoaboutit? Today, we cover the emotional basis of psychosomatic ailments and talk about the dangers of anger suppression - in the context of January 2026.
So, to speak to a national tragedy… we’re feeling it. And I’m sure we’ve all had a pause for silence for Alex. If not, take it now.
The times continue to be clarifying and potent for mental hygiene.
What’s reasonable to fear? What needs to be focused on? What’s real and what’s propaganda?
For years it wasn’t obvious. Which led to a lot of emotional inefficiency, self-gaslighting, other-gaslighting, and anxiety. Ruminating. Creating networks of old, unclearable, cobwebby thoughts that just had to be held onto for later validation or dismissal. Don’t say them aloud – everyone thinks you’re nuts for believing the system can be corrupted.
Well, that’s over. Anyone else experiencing laser-like focus all of a sudden? The brainfog and uncertainty of the mid 20’s has been cut apart with a hatchet.
Ahhh, that psychosis I genuinely feared I was going through and tried to suppress… Nope, was just seeing the devolvement into Nazism a bit before the gunshots started. I’m not, at all, happy about it. And, also, at least I can trust myself again.
But uh… lot of feelings, again, this week, huh?
I don’t mean to make light of what has happened (at the time of writing this, the murder of Alex Pretti – by the time it comes out, WHO KNOWS what it could be referring to).
It has, again, been a time of surprising, unpredictable, cries and complex, sudden emotions.
And I just want to mention, for no particular reason, this interesting research I saw recently.
The evolutionary logic of anger and hatred: an empirical test
They found that the function of anger is motivation to fulfill unmet needs. Unmet needs cause sadness, we transmute that to anger so that we take action. An unmet need might be, say, sense of safety. Order, ease, harmony, shared reality, hope, celebration, freedom, choice. Perhaps things that are lacking in late January, 2026.
Hate, on the other hand, functions to get someone away from you. To neutralize the threat of another person in your life. It comes from distrust. A common prerequisite is love, turned to suspicion and protective revulsion. Disgust and rage.
So
Unmet needs -> sadness -> anger
Distrust -> need for protection -> hate
Both of which are uncomfortable emotions to hang out with that can become debilitating to mind and body. Especially if they are suppressed.
In fact, one of the greatest hypotheses for psychosomatic illness and pain? It is the result of restraining expression of these functionally mobilizing emotions.
And that’s why we’re here, squeezing this episode in, today. Getting into some research after a few weeks without. (I’m clocking it, don’t worry)
Let’s talk psychosomatics.
Shoutout to sombermercy for validating that this was the next topic of focus with a timely article share on feminine rage and autoimmune disorders. Also shoutout for their patience, as that was two or three months ago. You’ve been in the world - things keep coming up. I’m writing triple-time.
I plan to do a longer dive into female physical pain, but in the context of recent events it felt pertinent to squeeze this first episode in before the rest. After this, because it’s February, we’ll be doing Dating in Dystopia! We’ll come back to psychosomas.
For now, let’s getting going.
A brief personal history to introduce our point:
In childhood I was always “healthy.” Supposedly.
I had a reproductive system birth defect that went unnoticed for a long time and I had routine, debilitating, migraines. Yes, they were probably related to emotional disordering and constant stress. But we all ignored them, I just sortof lived with chronic pain, and we’re continuing that trend today - let’s move on to the more definitive bouts of somatic symptom disordering.
Just before I turned 18, I went through intense relational distress and I believe had my first psychosomatic spell. I was baffled about my sudden intense, shooting, constant, stomach pains and inability to eat. Again, it was swept under the rug and I kept going to high school, community college, and working retail 30 hours a week in a house where my death was a nightly threat. The pain eventually went away and I was celebrated for my skeletal appearance.
At age 23 illness came back with a more complex presentation and it knocked me straight on my ass so that pushing through wasn’t an option. I was at university, overworked with 20-something scientific credit hours a semester as a transfer student, and working in a cellular biology lab 7 days a week.
But again, it was the emotional turmoil of a lost situationship that broke the camel’s back. A romantic thing that didn’t happen. And then all my friends disappearing.
This time the symptoms were: inability to digest food, random and seemingly unrelated infections that wouldn’t quit, exhaustion, brain fog, insomnia, worse migraines than ever with a vision-losing aura and disorientation, generalized continual bloating and puffiness so I felt like a sausage bursting out of its casing, a consistent malaise and disinterest in being alive – which, to be fair, I barely was under the combined influence of everything I just mentioned.
I went to the doctors. For years. And no one could give me an answer. Western medicine is not your friend if you’re a woman or have ever experienced anxiety.
With experience, I learned how to manage a lot of it, mostly through treating myself like a hothouse rose with dietary restriction and consistent activity.
But the other 50% of it?
Is mental-emotional.
And that’s why it’s so difficult.
The behaviors that keep me alive, outwardly, like working and keeping everything organized for everyone – always being vigilant and in control – my survival behaviors from a life of tomfoolery…
Actually make me sick, inwardly. In the brain and the feelings. And then in my body. So that doing the outward survival behaviors are always having the difficulty level dialed up. Causing more strain in the feelings and brain. Feeding back into physical dysfunction.
And the whole thing is infuriating, as much as it is hopeless.
But… you can’t talk about any of that. Because doctors and personal social companions hear you 5000% less if you’re not the right type of person to be expressing emotions. If you’re, subconsciously, societally, not allowed to display things like, say, anger.
This past year or two, I found myself dancing with psychosomats again.
This time, lending new evidence to the cause.
You may have recently heard the popular news – psychosomatic illness is caused by suppression of anger in women! Or, feminine rage that’s beaten out of us with societal domestication, is the cause of autoimmune disorders, heart disease, and muscular pains, to put it more accurately.
These are findings I relate to.
And looking at the last few years of upticked, mentally-based illness… and then the dramatic life-ending illness of my twenties the time before… and the stabby-feeling stomach grindings of my late teen years preceding that… and even my childhood of bed-riding migraines and phantom body pains and unknown reproductive system mutations…
Can confirm, “feminine rage with no place to go because you aren’t allowed to respond to the baloney that fills this global deli” is an accurate description of the backdrop of each round of medically mysterious physical degeneration.
But… can it be that easy?
We all just need to go to a scream room once in a while?
Let’s discuss. And open this up to all the genders. Masculine rage, allowed. And then tie this back into recent societal events and you.
Starting with some interesting points about somatic symptom disorder that will help form our argument.
This paper is called:
Emotion regulation in patients with somatic symptom and related disorders: A systematic review
First point of interest:
Emotional knowledge seems to be connected to somatic symptoms – suggesting that if we can’t represent emotions mentally, we can’t process them.
Or, simply, if we can’t characterize what the emotion is about, we can’t derive the intended meaning from it and lay it to rest. It bounces around, indefinitely, colliding with our internal biology as it pinballs around, because we can’t identify, process, and pass the thing along.
Which brings to mind an interesting cognitive psychology fact I love to revisit – we’re taught emotions. Our experience of the inside of our own body is significantly formed by the emotional spectrum we’re explicitly told about as children.
If we can’t identify a feeling – we haven’t been taught that sensation A means deep personal need B - we don’t integrate it into our experience. It’s like the emotion never happened. The need never existed. Message not received, about ourselves and our core functioning. Possibly impeding our ability to do it – to use every tool we have - for the rest of our life. Causing us to limp along, unfulfilled and/or operationally inefficient, all because we never were taught to identify enough or the right feelings.
And… perhaps, then, we get sick?
Maybe. Could be a good reason to differentiate between anger and hate, and know what each of them is used for, for instance.
But moving on.
Next interesting point: Different somatic disorders appear to be correlated to the same emotional regulation issues.
It also appears noteworthy that patients suffering from different SSD (somatic symptom disorder), such as bodily pain, fatigue, organ-specific, functional-neurological, or gastrointestinal symptoms, presented similar ER (emotional regulation) difficulties. Disturbances such as reduced emotional awareness and reflection capacity, rigid emotional attention, or aberrant autonomic activity were shared by many different diagnoses and types of SSD. Despite having distinct semiology associated with the functioning of certain organs or tissues, these disorders may have ER as a common factor,
So, I guess the good news is, identifying emotions correctly won’t help specify which symptom is related. Emotional regulation challenges cause disorders, across the board.
The old wife’s tale says that, commonly, men experience SSD in the back in response to emotional dysregulation. Women experience it in the pelvis. One, appears muscular. The other, organellar. But they may have the same cause. And that means they can be studied, vicariously, through each other.
And treated the same way. Which is a nice thought, if we could do it together.
Men, women, children may all be suffering from undiagnosable or treatable ailments in different ways, but the root of somatic suffering could be singular - emotional dysregulation.
Possibly, due to our poor emotional educations, as previously mentioned.
Possibly, due to another symptom of living in a sick society – being unable to safely express those emotions, personally or publicly.
Now… Next paper.
Anger Suppression and Subsequent Pain Behaviors among Chronic Low Back Pain Patients: Moderating Effects of Anger Regulation Style
Let’s ask the question that could simplify all psychosomatic mysteries in one miraculous swoop that hasn’t been created in the marketing department of big pharma:
Speaking of emotional dysregulation… Is SSD all about the least helpful regulation strategy of them all? Emotional suppression?
And how does this nicely relate to a topic we covered last year? Ironic cognitive control processes?
They say:
Wegner and colleagues [10–13] showed that attempts to suppress unwanted thoughts have the ironic effect of rendering these thoughts highly accessible to consciousness.
They proposed that attempts to suppress thoughts involve two processes [8]. First, an effortful “operating process” works to avoid unwanted thoughts through conscious use of distracters.
A second process, however, occurs that is less conscious and deliberate. This unconscious “monitoring process” searches for mental content that signals a failure to suppress the unwanted material.
Ironically, by searching for failures to achieve mental control, the cognitive accessibility of the undesired thoughts and feelings actually increase. Much research across a wide diversity of populations supports the ironic process model (e.g., [14–17]).
Right. So, remember from that episode, the more we attempt to shut out a thought or feeling, the more we accidentally highlight it by turning our psyche into a Where’s Waldo search for our subconscious – so part of our mind is carefully, constantly, searching and scrutinizing for what we don’t want to find. Meaning, it will eventually find it. And the experience will be exaggerated, emphasized, and filled with negativity. Up-played, rather than vanquished, as we desired.
On the same token, these authors have hypothesized a model for ironic anger and pain processes. They say:
Our ironic process model of anger suppression and pain holds that suppression of anger may render anger-related content highly accessible to conscious awareness because the monitoring process works to find more and more instances of failure to avoid or be rid of this content.
Although suppression may subdue angry feelings and behavior initially, it may in the long run paradoxically increase the cognitive accessibility of anger, in turn leading to “contamination” [18] of appraisals of subsequent pain with heightened feelings of irritation and annoyance.
They’re saying, attempts at suppressing anger, in particular, cause the individual to be MORE low-key angry. A bomb, waiting to explode. A vessel of frustration. All the energy contained and compressed inside, the person, a mere shell around the action potential.
And this exacerbates the experience of pain.
Can we agree that all the conditions just described are painful? Anger? Hate? Agitation? They’re emotions that feel physically punishing. We push them down. And later, when we feel additional pain, we also, ironically, tap into the suppressed pain we’ve been trying to disappear. Causing a much grander experience and reaction than taking those pains on one at a time.
Results of our recent studies support this model [9, 19, 20].
Findings generally show that participants instructed to suppress anger-related thoughts and feelings during anger induction reveal significantly greater pain intensity during subsequent pain induction than participants who underwent anger induction but were not instructed to suppress, both in healthy adults and chronic low back pain patients.
Per their and others research, suppressing emotional pain in the form of anger emphasizes physical pain. A result that doesn’t exist when people are allowed to have their angry feelings without mandated suppression.
So…. Is that what psychosomatic ailments are all about? We must shout our feelings from the rooftop or we make ourselves sick? And in particular, anger? ESPECIALLY when we’re told not to?
Righteous. But no, actually, that was a slight misdirect. It appears that the expression issue comes down to mismatch between personal nature and personal behavior.
They say:
it remains important for several reasons to consider the role of trait anger regulation style. This trait describes the way in which anger is typically managed by an individual and has been assessed almost exclusively with the anger-in and anger-out subscales of the Spielberger Anger Expression Inventory [21].
However, for a host of reasons, a person may not use their preferred strategy for regulating anger in any given circumstance, and so he or she may be compelled to use a different, possibly less-preferred tactic.
Brosschot and Thayer [22] have argued that the actual inhibition of anger may play a large role in producing or exacerbating physical disorder because of social norms that discourage the full expression of anger, a factor that may affect dispositional anger expressers quite dramatically.
So it’s not ONLY anger that could lead to SSD. They propose that anger is the most suppression-likely emotion because it’s not socially acceptable for so many people. It may be the most common provoker of somatic symptoms due to how much we try to stunt it instead of learning to have it healthily.
It’s a shameable emotion that we’re supposed to have “evolved past” at a certain age. Which might correspond to the onset of somatic symptoms.
And if withholding our thoughts and feelings isn’t our authentic communication style, anger is likely to create a discrepancy between what we feel and what we feel permitted to express or DO.
Remember that anger and hate are both motivators to make change. Emotional suppression comes with behavioral suppression in these cases, which might go against every visceral instinct of the individual. If the whole body and lower brain are cued up to act a certain way but the mind won’t allow it, could that cause dis-ease?
Indeed, Engebretson et al. [23] proposed a “matching” model in which adaptive responses to anger provocation would occur among people most often when they could use their preferred mode of anger regulation.
A “mismatch” would arise when, for example, habitual anger expressers are forced by circumstances—lab situations or real-life social constraints—to suppress their anger.
Habitual anger expressors, here, are called “anger-out” individuals. Whereas habitual anger suppressors are referred to as “anger-in” subjects. And this is where we get down to the root of it: nature vs. permission.
Although suppression and inhibition of strong emotions are regarded as poor tactics overall, high anger-in patients who were instructed to suppress—a match situation—appeared to benefit in that they exhibited relatively fewer subsequent pain behaviors than high anger-in patients not instructed to suppress.
These findings raise the intriguing possibility that suppression of anger per se may not necessarily be linked to negative outcomes for people with high trait anger-in.
So it is suggested that, actually, we don’t have to worry about failing to express ourselves and creating our own demise… as long as it is our nature to hold our tongue.
In fact, we may be comforted by the opportunity NOT to speak up.
Unlike high trait anger-out people, high trait anger-in people may want to avoid the many thoughts and feelings regarding how they probably should express themselves, and the thoughts and feelings of what may happen if anger is actually expressed and revealed.
Put otherwise, high trait anger-in people during anger provocation may be suppressing a wide range of thoughts and feelings, of which actually suppressing anger is but one small part.
A situation in which suppression or inhibition is actually sanctioned may reduce the pressure for high trait anger-in people to not think about how they should express but are afraid to do so, and so relieve them of one burden.
Meaning. Individuals who don’t enjoy expression are comforted – their silence validated – by the instruction to suppress their emotions. There’s no internal tension because nature is aligning with outside instruction. So the biological system isn’t perturbed, ease is maintained, symptoms aren’t provoked.
When it comes to emotional expression to prevent somatic disorders… It’s the nature of the individual that matters.
And that gives us all a lot to think about right now, in times of high emotions and consequential actions.
Let’s recap.
And get to the final, timely, point.
We learned:
We only know the emotions we’ve been taught; if we haven’t learned what a sensation means, we may be unable to process or integrate the knowledge, allowing the emotion to create a life of destruction inside of us.
Somatic symptom disorders refers to a vast spectrum of presentations; emotional dysregulation appears to be related to all of them. So accurately knowing our feelings is a big part of our bodily health.
Anger suppression, in particular, has been shown to dial up subsequent pain experiences. The other somatic symptoms are not very acutely available for study, but based on that last point, we can assume similar relationships between suppression and dis-ease.
But we’re only strained by emotional suppression if our nature is expression. If we’re anger-out folks, an anger-in strategy turns our angst against ourselves. If we’re anger-in people, anger-out behaviors aren’t relieving either. What hurts us is the “mismatch” in preferred emotional regulation strategies vs. what we feel permitted to do.
Research suggests, when we know we SHOULD speak up, but do not, it causes systemic dysfunction. So that we aren’t actually helping ourselves. We’re slowly paining and poisoning ourselves. By behaving out of alignment with our values. By allowing anger – which suggests we have unmet needs – and hate – which suggests we’re in relationship with someone unsafe – to fester. Instead of caring for ourselves and our loved ones.
Which is a poignant message for the times.
If you’re filled with anger and hate towards what’s happening lately? Express yourself, per your nature.
If you normally speak up, research suggests you will potentially face physical repercussions for staying silent.
If you prefer to stay silent, well, there are plenty of threats to support that strategy too. The first amendment was a myth. I get it.
And this information may also shine a light on all the individuals who are choosing door number two right now. (Along with the peer pressure and facades of conformity series from last year. I was uh… slightly ahead of the times, per usual, trying to warn against slipping into Nazism before the crowd was warmed up.)
In this time of mixed messages and not knowing what’s right and confusion about what to do, though…. I’m not here with any answer. That wasn’t the point of this episode. Get off your knees and fight back, stay peaceful and don’t let them incite violence to start a civil war… I don’t know what’s right.
But you do.
Act in accordance with your nature.
As if your life depended on it.
Because, even at the most psychological level, it does.
Behaving out of alignment, especially in the face of anger, rage, hate…. It appears, will cost your physical wellness. A short term comfort will lead to long term, then-unfixable, destruction.
As a child, I could say nothing to the family system that dictated my world.
As a teen, I couldn’t share my feelings about intimate friend bullying without more bullying.
As a young adult, I wasn’t able to identify to speak up against romantic narcissistic abuse.
In the last few years, I didn’t have the self-confidence to shout about what I felt coming.
And each time, I wound up sick, unable to live my life for what felt like lifetimes, in the aftermath.
What each of us is seeing, outwardly, is causing a reaction, inwardly, that we can look at or turn away from. Express or try to tamp down to keep ourselves feeling temporarily safe. But how we handle that reaction will leave a mark. Potentially a health- or comfort-debilitating one.
As if any of us needed another reason to live differently this year. To break out of old habits or patterns learned from abuse… here it is.
A sick nation – just like a sick household, a sick romantic relationship, a sick friendship – that we attempt to ignore or adapt to… will create sick minds and bodies.
Living in fear… suppressing opinions and emotions… letting them garnish more power in the system… will make the illness incurable. Individually and collectively. The problem will grow too large to be treatable with conservative methods.
(it already has, that’s the problem! Dunduntss. Sorry.)
So
If you’re normally outspoken – or once were, but beat the behavior out of yourself in the effort to self-improve – if you’ve been “taking the high road” and “not getting involved” – if you’ve been gaslighting yourself about when the correct time is to be concerned – if you’ve been recovering from an abusive relationship and trying to refind your voice….
Now’s the time.
To take back your voice
To stand up to fear
To use it for clarity
To support your health
To leverage your motherfucking rage for good.
So you can continue to support everything else that matters to you. As we watch the structures that once seemed like fortresses of safety becoming harbingers of danger.
For the past years, all we could do was wait. Quietly. Keep ourselves sane. And go about our business, trying to stay healthy.
Now, in order to be healthy – to semi-retain control of one of the only areas of life that is within our personal kingdom, our body - we have to speak up.
At least… if that is your nature.
Or you believe it may be, under all the years of trauma conditioning.
Peal back those layers. Get to the real you. Feel what your body is saying. And behave, accordingly.
Hopefully, with a prosocial, connective, purpose.
Hopefully, to support spirits and souls, not just your own. Even just by being a vestibule for their expression. An open ear in times of fear. An outlet for the words that act like poison if left alone, ignored, suppressed, in the body.
And that’s my first psychosomatic entry in this game plan for 2026.
So, speaking of holistic health…
Before I get out of here, one little announcement and invitation.
Remember, we have co-immunity in community.
Let’s get back to safe expression in like-minded groups where we can also organize, prepare, set up safety nets for supporting each other. And let our emotions ring free. Let’s use anger and hate as motivation to come together, instead of letting those feelings run a train on our biology.
This is where, I guess, I’ll easter-egg announce…
A thing I wasn’t exactly ready to do yet, but the time is nigh…
A new start with a new discord community. Led by, me.
A long conversation exists about why I exited the discord a few years ago, but I think the name of the new community says it all. It’s called “Idon’treallyliketraumaanymore.”
It’s commune time, check the link in the show notes for the link. I’ll be there. Daily. Communing in the way that is possible from the isolative mountain I call home.
Another way that I’m attempting to up my expression and save my cells.
Hail your highly motivating anger and hate.
Hail your expression. Find something to do with them.
Hail yourself.
Cheers y’all.
My thoughts and rage are with you.