Women’s Rage Is Not the Problem. Here’s What to Do With It Instead.
I was recently a guest on a podcast when the host asked me a question I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
She was talking about the women in her audience carrying a lot of rage right now. The ones watching the political landscape and feeling something that goes well beyond frustration. The ones in midlife waking up to how much they’ve given away and to whom. The ones just beginning to see the patterns that kept them outsourcing their sense of safety and worth to everyone around them for years — and who are, understandably, furious about it.
She asked: what should they do with all that rage? Should they go smash something?
And my first thought was: when exactly did the patriarchy decide that violence was the answer?
The Story We’ve Been Told About Women’s Rage
Somewhere along the way, we absorbed a very particular story about what anger is and what it needs. The story goes like this: anger is pressure. It builds. If it doesn’t have somewhere to go, it will explode or fester or turn inward and become depression. And the solution — the only solution — is to get it out. Release it. Discharge it with a bat or a pillow or a plate. Let it rip.
There is an entire industry built on that premise. Rage rooms. Smash therapy. Foam bats and liability waivers and sledgehammers by the hour. You pay money, you put on safety goggles, you smash things, and then presumably you drive home serene and emotionally complete, a woman transformed. For only $79 plus tax.
This story has a name in psychology. It’s called the catharsis hypothesis. And it is old. We are talking Aristotle old — as in, this idea was already ancient when people were still arguing about whether the earth was round.
In his Poetics, Aristotle argued that watching tragedy produced a katharsis in the audience — a purging, a cleansing of difficult emotion through the act of witnessing it. He was talking about art. About the alchemy of sitting in a fourth-century BCE Athenian theater, weeping at Medea, and walking out feeling lighter.
Fast forward two thousand years. Freud and Breuer pick up the concept and do something quite specific with it. In Studies on Hysteria (1895), they argue that repressed emotion is pathogenic — that it causes symptoms, and that expressing the associated emotion will discharge it and resolve the symptom. This is where the hydraulic model of emotion enters. Freud’s particular contribution is the idea that psychic energy behaves like fluid in a closed system. Pressure builds. It needs somewhere to go. The man was very into pipes, is what I’m saying.
Aristotle was writing about the transformative power of art. Freud was writing about the mechanics of repression and symptom relief. What popular psychology did was fuse these two ideas into something neither of them quite said, hand the result to wellness culture, which handed it to the rage room industry, which handed you a bat and called it healing.
The entire architecture of how we were taught to process anger was built by men analyzing either ancient plays or the hysteria of Victorian women. I’ll just leave that there.
Why Venting Your Anger Doesn’t Actually Work
Here’s the actual problem with the model they built: human nervous systems are not plumbing.
Anger is not pressure in a sealed system. It is a signal. It is information your nervous system is generating — about a boundary that was crossed, a need that went unmet, a threat that was real or perceived. Signals don’t need to be discharged. They need to be received. They need, at the most fundamental level, to be heard.
When you smash that signal into a wall, something does happen. The arousal discharges temporarily. Your heart rate comes down. You might feel briefly relieved. But the signal? Still sitting there. The information in the anger — what it was about, what it was trying to tell you — untouched. You’re back at your desk in twenty minutes and the anger is exactly where you left it. Which, honestly, is very rude of it.
The research backs this up. The most comprehensive review to date was led by Sophie Kjærvik (that’s SHARE-veek — she’s Norwegian), a communication scientist who wanted, in her words, to debunk the whole theory of expressing anger as a way of coping with it. In 2024, she and her colleagues published a meta-analytic review in Clinical Psychology Review analyzing 154 studies involving more than ten thousand participants.
What they found: activities that increase physiological arousal — hitting a bag, jogging, cycling — were generally ineffective at reducing anger, and in many cases made it worse. What actually worked was the opposite: arousal-decreasing activities. Slow breathing. Mindfulness. Stillness. The body coming down, not ramping up.
When you smash things, you’re rehearsing and intensifying the very physiological state the anger lives in. You’re practicing being angry, with your whole body, and then wondering why you still feel angry.
I’ve been saying this for a decade, in sessions, in Anchored, in every breathwork room I’ve ever held space in: catharsis is cute. Integration changes lives. And the model we’ve been handed has never been about integration — it’s been about discharge. Get it out, move on, don’t ask what it was trying to tell you.
Why This Model Particularly Fails Women
Of course you want to punch something. Of course that feels like the answer. It’s what has been modelled as the way anger works — in movies, in therapy offices, in every “just let it out” conversation you’ve ever had. When you don’t yet know how to be with yourself, when sitting with a feeling is genuinely unfamiliar and nobody ever taught you how, reaching for something loud and physical makes complete sense. That is not a character flaw. That is a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do. Nothing has gone wrong with you. The model was just always pointing you in the wrong direction.
And then there is the additional layer that women carry. Because for women, the catharsis model failing is actually the second problem. The first problem is that we were never given permission to have the anger at all.
A woman expressing anger forcefully is not neutral in this culture. She’s hysterical. She’s too much. She’s dangerous or unhinged or difficult. Women are handed the same broken instruction manual and told, simultaneously, that they cannot use it. And beyond that — many of us were never given permission to have the anger at all. We got trained out of the anger itself, long before the tool arrived.
This is a deeper conversation that lives in episodes 206, 207, and 208 of the Feminist Wellness podcast. What I’ll say here is this: the patriarchy keeps us under its control by keeping us swirling around with our un-grounded, un-processed, and frankly disrespected anger. Anger that hasn’t been honored. Anger we haven’t learned from or understood the roots of. Anger we tried to escape instead of understand.
Venting anger into a bat and a couch cushion is safe. It’s contained. It’s over in twenty minutes and everyone goes back to work. Anger that is truly felt and truly processed is dangerous to systems that depend on people not rocking the boat — because then people start asking questions about all the systems that made them so angry to begin with.
Catharsis keeps the wool over our eyes. We’re always searching for the next release instead of feeling the feeling and questioning the systems we’re living in.
What Women’s Rage Actually Needs
So if the catharsis model fails, what actually works?
Your nervous system has its own intelligence about how an emotion wants to move through. And what it reaches for is often nothing like what you’ve been told anger looks like.
A barely perceptible drop in the shoulders after a long exhale. A pressing of both palms flat on the table. A slow push of the feet into the floor that lasts maybe four seconds. A sensation of heat that moves from the chest up through the throat and then settles. A tremor in the hands so small you might think you imagined it. That small. That quiet.
And when the anger feels big and boiling and insistent, before you reach for anything — try this just once. Pause. Put your hands on your body somewhere. And ask. Not “what am I supposed to do with this” — that’s the old question, the one that sends you straight back to the foam bat. The new question is: what does my body actually want to do right now?
Maybe it wants to push. Maybe it wants to walk. Maybe it wants to make a sound or shake or cry or sit completely still with both feet on the floor. Maybe it wants something so small and specific you’d never find it on a list. Your nervous system knows. It has always known. The only thing that has ever gotten in the way of that knowing is the story that it had to look a certain way.
The Answer to Women’s Rage Isn’t Calmer. It’s Clearer.
This work isn’t sexy. There’s no boom, no bam, no moment you can point to and say: there. I fixed the anger. It’s more human than that — quieter, less photogenic, and somehow more real for it. The kind of progress that doesn’t make for a good Instagram caption.
Nobody throws you a parade for it. No one will know you did it except you and your nervous system, and your nervous system has been waiting a long time for exactly this.
For the woman lying awake at 3am replaying what’s happening in the world, feeling the rage rise in her chest with nowhere to put it — this is permission to stop trying to manage that rage and start listening to what it’s telling you about what you value and what you will not accept.
For the one in midlife who is just now realizing how much she gave away and to whom, and who is furious about it — your anger is not a problem to solve. It is a map. It is showing you exactly where you abandoned yourself and pointing you back.
For the one just beginning to see her patterns, just starting to understand what it has cost her to outsource her worth to everyone around her for years, who is scared of her own anger because she has never been allowed to have it — you are allowed to have it. You always were. And it has been waiting for you, patiently, in your body this whole time.
Your anger about the state of the world is correct. Your anger about what midlife is revealing is correct. Your anger about the years you spent making yourself small so everyone else could feel big is correct. Processed anger doesn’t dissipate. It clarifies. It becomes direction. It becomes the thing that tells you exactly where your energy belongs, what you’re willing to fight for, what you’re no longer available for.
A woman who has truly felt her anger and let it move through her on its own terms is not calmer. She’s clearer. And clarity is considerably more dangerous to broken systems than a smashed plate ever was.
If you’ve ever worked with me or sat in one of my breathwork sessions, you’ve heard me say it: catharsis is cute. Integration changes lives. And integration starts with this — with staying in the room with your anger instead of bouncing it off a wall.
The anger is not the problem. The anger is information. The anger is, in many ways, an act of love toward yourself — your system saying this matters, I matter, something here needs attending to.
You don’t have to smash anything to deserve to feel it.
Ready to Go Deeper?
If this landed somewhere in you — if you’ve spent years convinced you’re just bad at emotions, or that your anger is too much, or that you should be over it by now — there’s a path through this that doesn’t require you to break plates.
Anchored is my six-month small group coaching program where we do exactly this work: building the capacity to be with what’s actually happening in the body, rather than performing an idea of processing that was never designed for you in the first place. Get on the waitlist at beatrizalbina.com.
And if you want to go deeper on healthy anger specifically, start with the three-part podcast series: