Reclaiming Anger: Trauma, Repression, and Healthy Protest with Elizabeth Ferreira

Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson

Being Well

Health & Fitness, Education, Self-improvement, Mental Health

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Forrest and associate therapist Elizabeth Ferreira talk about healthy (and unhealthy) anger. They challenge the common framing of anger as a “secondary emotion,” and explore why anger matters, how it relates to trauma, and what it can tell us about our wants and needs. They discuss how to access healthy protest and work with less healthy forms of anger like explosive rage, repression, defensiveness, passive aggression, and righteousness. Elizabeth shares insights from both her personal experience as someone with CPTSD and her clinical practice. Key Topics: 0:00: Introduction: Why anger matters, and why it’s misunderstood 3:32: How trauma shapes our relationship to anger 5:40: Bypassing anger in therapy 9:04: What happens when anger is suppressed 12:29: Reclaiming anger: submit, explode, or something else 15:45: Anger as a signal of wants and needs 16:20: Boundaries, protest, and complex trauma 25:01: When CPTSD makes it hard to know what you want 30:06: Dissociation, structural trauma, and accessing anger 35:04: Why we need others to co-regulate big emotions 43:20: Emotional responsibility, self-awareness, and repair 53:26: Reconnecting with wants and needs through play Support the Podcast: We're now on Patreon! If you'd like to support the podcast, follow this link. Sponsors Try Daily30+, the 30+ plant prebiotic supplement from ZOE. Go to zoe.com/daily30 today, and you’ll get a free bright yellow ZOE tin and a magnetic scoop. Join hundreds of thousands of people who are taking charge of their health. Learn more and join Function at functionhealth.com/BEINGWELL. For a limited time, get Headspace FREE for 60 days. Go to Headspace.com/BEINGWELL60. Listen now to the Life Kit podcast from NPR. Go to Zocdoc.com/BEING to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/beingwell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show,
0:11.1	thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened to before, welcome back. I am here again for the
0:16.1	second time in just a couple of weeks with my wonderful partner, associate therapist, Elizabeth Ferreira.
0:21.9	Elizabeth, how are you doing today? I'm doing good. I'm feeling fiery. I'm feeling, I'm feeling
0:26.4	energized. You know, you can't help but kind of start to feel the energy or the force,
0:33.0	the primal force of rage as you're like talking about it. you know, it starts to embody you and I kind of
0:39.0	like it. So this is what I have been calling tentatively, get mad the episode. Love it. And it's an
0:45.4	episode that we've wanted to record for a long time. We've talked about it a lot with each other.
0:50.2	And you just have some really great takes on anger, particularly related to the clinical population
0:56.2	of people that you tend to work with, people have developmental trauma, complex PTSD, that
1:00.6	kind of thing. And so I just wanted to start by asking you, why do you think that this is such
1:04.7	an important topic for people? Well, prepare everyone. I have hot takes. I think the energy of anger, and I want to kind of
1:15.3	label it that, not just the meaning that we apply to that word, but the actual physical sensations
1:23.0	that accompany anger, those are really important forces. And when we're looking at anger through a
1:33.4	trauma-informed lens, it's not really a secondary emotion, like more psychoanalytic or
1:41.3	kind of pop-psych would say. It's's actually a primary emotion and it's something that is
1:47.1	primary because you need to have healthy protest in order to have boundaries in order to learn what
1:54.8	your wants and needs are in order to be able to protect your more vulnerable parts from other folks, to be able to
2:02.1	advocate for yourself. It's really that sensation or that energy that helps drive those
2:09.6	external impulses out in the world. Yeah, so you just said something there about anger
2:14.0	being a secondary emotion, or that's a phrase that people use a lot, if you're
2:17.5	not familiar with that, the idea that anger is a kind of protective emotion that's covering
	...

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