The Anger Mask

By Renée Bacher

March 2025

The 2024 Gallup World Happiness Report found that women expressed more negative emotions — feelings of worry, sadness and anger — than men did. This may seem surprising because expressions of negative emotions, such as anger, often are more acceptable when coming from men. But women in the U.S. have plenty of reasons to be angry, from ongoing double standards at home and in the workplace to continued pay inequity, rising intimate partner violence against women and recent bans on reproductive freedom.

“The things that women in my therapy practice report being angry about lately are broader than before,” says Lisa Henderson, LPC-MHSP, a private practitioner and strategic clinical adviser at Louisiana-based Thriveworks. “On a societal level, there’s been little to no progress on promises made to women, and in some cases things feel like they are rolling backwards, like paid family leave, affordable housing and child care.”

For many women, Henderson adds, these broader issues feel heaped on top of their responsibilities at home and at work. And despite women’s intense juggling of competing priorities, social media can make them feel as if they’re being judged as doing everything wrong.

This juggling act can lead to anger, frustration and depression in women, according to Kimberly Frazier, PhD, academic program director for clinical mental health counseling at National University in San Diego and an ACA past president. “It has become increasingly complex in the post-pandemic landscape especially, where the boundaries between work and home life have become increasingly blurred, leading to what many women describe as a state of constant overwhelm.”

Henderson sees this overwhelm in her social media algorithm, which sends her a continuous stream of memes and reels about the mental load women are living with. “We are overwhelmed not just with the doing but with the planning, decision-making and thinking ahead,” she says.

Often, women’s anger remains hidden beneath layers of societal expectations and internal pressure. This isn’t new — a 1987 paper presented at Harvard Medical School blamed women’s inhibition in expressing anger on a clash with the feminine ideal of selflessness and service to others. A March 2010 study in the Journal of Social Issues suggested women express anger less than they experience it. And a February 2023 study in the Emotion journal found gender inequality made women angry, but they were reluctant to express that anger because it may enforce gender stereotypes.

Echo Lowell, LCPC, a psychotherapist in private practice in Sweden, Maine, has observed in her practice that anger in women is often invisible and obscured by “people pleasing.”

“This masking of anger can manifest in various ways,” she says, “particularly through anxiety related to maintaining vague or permeable boundaries. There can be some deeply internalized anger in a person who is going through the world feeling undefended and as if they have little to no control over what happens to them.”

This vulnerability, combined with the social unacceptability of women expressing anger in general, can create a complex dynamic in which anger often goes unrecognized or unacknowledged, she adds.

The Post-Pandemic World

The workplace presents its own set of anger triggers for women, particularly in the post-pandemic era, with return-to-office policies becoming a significant source of frustration for some of Henderson’s clients.

“Many of my women clients are unhappy about having to go back to the office despite being productive working from home,” she says. “They feel they aren’t being given a good reason for why they have to return to the office, and it feels as if their employers don’t trust them.”

She adds that clients who have expressed this aren’t angry about returning to the office with a flexible schedule or for specific days or events; they’re upset about being distrusted and are feeling controlled without a good reason.

Henderson notes that while her male clients might find such policies annoying, they tend to approach the situation differently. “Male clients are saying, ‘This feels stupid and I’ll do it until I decide to get another job,’” she says. “This difference in response patterns reveals deeper issues about how women internalize workplace challenges and question their own worth and competence.”

Henderson is also seeing frustration among women clients in their late 20s and early 30s who are being told to practice self-care so they don’t burn out. However, the metrics for evaluating good performance on the job are not changing accordingly. “This disconnect between messaging and metrics creates a double bind where women are feeling pressured to both excel and pull back, leading to increased frustration and anger over what can feel like lip service or a trick to see who is committed versus who is doing the bare minimum,” she says.

How Anger in Women Shows Up

The way women express — or suppress — their anger varies significantly. “The most obvious is when they report having a short fuse and they’re quick to say mean things and feel remorse about it,” Henderson says. “They come to me because they’re ruining their relationships and everybody can see that. I also get the ‘silent seethers.’ They’re not saying anything, but they’re fuming on the inside.”

Some individuals resort to stonewalling and silent scorn, while others maintain a facade of pleasantness that masks their internal struggles. Henderson notes that those who maintain a pleasant exterior often have the hardest time acknowledging and embracing their anger. They carry the emotional burden alone because they don’t believe anyone else can or will help them.

The suppression of anger can lead to various health issues that many women might not initially connect to their emotional state. Lowell suspects she has seen anger in her women clients manifesting as migraines, weight gain, addictive disorders, sleep disorders and autoimmune disorders. She emphasizes the importance of identifying and working with these manifestations through approaches like the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model and parts work.

“Through this work you can get to the part that’s been holding the anger,” she says. “When you can identify that and dialogue with it from healthier parts of yourself, validating and nurturing it, often the other symptoms dissipate,” she says.

In addition to IFS, Lowell suggests various approaches to support this healing process, including meditation, mindfulness-based stress therapy, yoga, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and when possible, complementary therapies such as acupuncture, massage and energy work such as tapping.

“I won’t lie, though; it’s really tough,” she says. “When you’ve been functioning in a certain state of your nervous system for your whole life, neurons that fire together wire together. These are substantial networks, and it’s hard to unlearn some of these responses.”

Tom Kubasik, LCPC, a therapist in Portland, Maine, uses emotion-focused therapy and gestalt therapy in his practice. He brings a nuanced perspective to understanding anger itself. “Like all emotional experience, anger can be many things. Experiences of anger run the gamut from very healthy and adaptive to very unhealthy and maladaptive. The function of healthy emotions is to inform, orient and organize us. Anger, in its healthy versions, is key to both defining and defending our boundaries.”

Therapeutic Approaches

Mental health professionals are finding success with a variety of approaches to helping women express and process anger in a healthy way. Henderson emphasizes the importance of creating a safe space for anger expression.

“I’ve talked to clients and counselors alike, and on both sides of that conversation it seems some counselors are afraid of their clients’ expressing anger” in general as well as at them, she says. “I do the opposite. I invite it. I tell them, ‘It is so helpful when you get angry at me. I am the safest place for you to get angry.’”

This, she says, allows clients to practice expressing anger in a controlled environment where they can learn to understand and manage emotions more effectively.

Kubasik advocates for an emotion-focused approach that delves deeper than surface-level anger management. “From an emotion-focused therapy perspective, it’s really about trying to figure out the thing that is there but is being under-recognized,” he says. “What is the subdominant background element of the gestalt, or the whole, that could be brought to the foreground?”

He emphasizes the importance of watching for subtle cues in body language and tone that might indicate unexpressed anger. For example, someone might be weeping but also making a fist or have a new steely coldness in their voice. It’s important to observe and ask about that. “These may be cues of the present-but-as-yet-not-fully-explored emotional experience,” he says.

Henderson says the therapeutic process often involves helping women identify the root causes of their anger while challenging self-blame patterns. “There’s a lot of unpacking what they’re angry about and looking at situations and people, including themselves, in a different way,” she says. “This is really hard for a lot of women.”

Cultural Considerations

Frazier emphasizes the importance of cultural competency in addressing women’s anger. Not doing so can be alienating for clients. “Be very cognizant of culture,” she says. “Whatever interventions we choose need to be tuned in to the harmful impact of stereotypes like ‘the angry Black woman,’ for example, and counselors have to truly meet clients where they are.”

Even counselors who are the same race as their clients may not share the same cultural experiences, so they should not doubt or invalidate clients’ anger over microaggressions or incidents of racism. This cultural awareness is crucial when addressing anger in marginalized communities, where the expression of emotion carries additional weight and consequences.

Further, many women have heard the message loud and clear that being angry isn’t sexy. This may cause them to hold back on expressing it. “In our society you can be an angry teenager or an angry crone, but you can’t be an angry sexually appealing woman,” Lowell says.

This societal constraint can lead to women internalizing their anger rather than expressing it healthily. Frazier points out the gender disparity in anger expression. “Women tend to go within and internalize anger, which then can become depression, whereas it’s more accepted for men to express their anger outwardly,” she says. Male counselors should also be careful about saying something invalidating to a woman client they suspect is angry.

“The suggestion that a woman should just get over something is not going to be helpful — and even more so if you’re a man,” Lowell says.

Anger Risks

While life is arguably better for women now than it was half a century ago, being a woman is still hard. Many women have “over function” in relationships and are expected to “do it all” at home and work. At the same time, women’s health care is at risk, even beyond losing freedom over reproductive rights in many states. All of this can be enraging.

“We’re still being treated as hysterics,” Lowell says. “Our pain is minimized compared to men’s pain. Getting an [intrauterine device] is painful, and getting a mammogram is painful, but we’re supposed to suck it up and deal with it. If men are uncomfortable due to a procedure, they’re often given some pain medication.” 

Invalidating women’s experiences adds another layer to their anger, particularly when combined with broader societal concerns about health care access. The experience of having one’s physical pain dismissed or minimized can create a particularly potent form of anger that often gets redirected inward because there are not effective outlets for expression. Moreover, expressing anger can be life-threatening to women.

“One reason women may steer clear of expressing anger to men could have to do with violence,” Kubasik says. “Anger often begets anger, and things can escalate. Should a conflict between a man and woman turn violent, men generally do a lot more physical damage to women than the other way around. This is a non-trivial fear that can influence a person, whether or not they’re explicitly aware of it. I think it’s important to acknowledge this as one possible — and quite understandable — source of self-censorship.”

In situations where expressing anger is physically safe for women, however, it can be a catalyst for positive change when properly understood and channeled.

Henderson acknowledges there’s a deep investigatory process involved in looking at what may be beneath anger, whether that’s a condition such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, substance use disorder or deep sadness. “Anger often serves as a protective mechanism,” she says. “In some cases, anger may be trying to protect you from going down a path you’ve been down before, and that’s always worth exploring.”

A crucial aspect of this work involves helping women understand anger itself isn’t the problem — it’s a natural and often necessary emotional response.

“Remember that things like yelling, hitting, criticizing — these are behaviors, not emotions,” Kubasik says. “Processing our emotional experience toward its adaptive core leads to better self-understanding and, ultimately, healthier behavior.”

He emphasizes this point when discussing what he calls “creative anger,” noting it can provide “this beautiful clarity about the precise place where I am going to say no, along with the felt understanding that I have the right to say no.”

“What ‘creative anger’ creates is a boundary, and sometimes a genuinely new one,” he says. “Expressing creative anger can lead to new feelings of calm, pride, strength, competence and wholeness.”

Kubasik also points out that it may take many trials of expressing healthy anger in the therapy office before the client is ready to try it out in the world. This reframing of anger as potentially constructive rather than inherently destructive opens new possibilities for emotional expression and personal growth.

As society continues to evolve, so too must counselors’ understanding and treatment of women’s anger and the importance of viewing it not as a problem to be solved but as a signal to be understood and an energy to be channeled constructively.

“It’s OK to express yourself. It’s OK to be angry,” says Frazier, adding that counselors need to both tell this to their clients and embody it themselves. “It’s a constant learning process for everyone.”

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Cover Art: We asked our March cover artist, Alexandra Gallagher, to create an image that represents the sometimes subtle qualities of women’s anger. She used red and orange tones to symbolize anger, passion and love. The petunia, which is often linked with irritation and bitterness, symbolizes resentment. The orange lily has historical associations with negative emotions such as hatred. Finally, the wasp symbolizes hostility, anger, aggression and vengeance. Explore more of Alexandra’s work.