UnShaming Anger and Despair: A Path to Healing

Many of us are carrying repressed anger, political rage, or even despair these days. The question is: what happens to all that suppressed emotion? And what shifts when it is truly witnessed?

How Our Bodies Try to Help Us

When we’re troubled or upset, our bodies naturally bubble up with feelings and emotions. This bubbling up is an ancient, built-in attempt to heal.

But often, we clamp down — because the feelings make us feel vulnerable, or it seems pointless to express them when we feel trapped and powerless.

Why Clamping Down Backfires

This is completely understandable. But it also thwarts the purpose of emotion.

Our bubbling-up sensations are inherently relational. They’re designed to let other people into our world, to show them what our experience feels like.

That’s why, if I tell you about something painful in my past, my voice might wobble, my throat might tighten, my eyes might well up.

My emotional body wants to be witnessed.

The Natural Healing Process

This bubbling up is not random. It’s the beginning of a multi-stage healing process — part of our human birthright — that can unfold when we are witnessed with care.

Here’s how it often looks in UnShaming:

Stage 1: Compassionate Witnessing

When someone truly witnesses us, a shift begins. Our hearts soften, we feel more open, and we can access our true feelings.

This is why it feels so good to debrief with a caring friend after something painful or upsetting. (And this softening isn’t just personal — whole communities can begin to heal when they make space to witness each other’s pain).

Stage 2: Following the Somatic Footprint

But a caring friend might not be able to take us further. The next stage is to follow the somatic footprint of the anger or despair.

This means bringing exquisite attention to the felt experience of suppression:

• how it feels inside

• what the repressed impulse is like

• how it’s moving

• what it wants

  
  

This is gradual, fine-grained work: getting to know the pattern of sensations that bubble up, and how they’re being clamped down. (Sometimes the body sensations aren’t obvious or accessible — that’s okay. There are other ways to follow the experience safely with the same level of attunement).

Stage 3: Transformation

Here, the experience itself begins to change. When the deeper truth of our emotions is held through destigmatizing eyes, something new emerges — like a seed sprouting.

The lead weight in the chest, the tight ball in the stomach — these markers of buried pain — can begin to unfold as they are witnessed. They shift from static, painful feelings into a living process.

And this transformation sometimes goes even further — awakening a shamanic, creative capacity we humans have carried as long as we’ve been alive. We can imaginatively take on the qualities of other beings, creatures, objects, and natural forms — something indigenous cultures have honored and practiced for millennia. In UnShaming, through trauma-informed witnessing, we create conditions for this creative power to awaken.

People find themselves speaking in voices of wisdom, compassion, or guidance — shape-shifting into powerful versions of themselves right in the Zoom room. I’ve seen transformations ranging from dramatic (a volcanic protector) to subtle as a whisper (a compassionate inner voice).

They’re all profoundly moving because they reveal the heart’s natural ability to care for itself.

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Why Anger and Despair Healing Matters Now

Your anger and despair, caged in the body, may have been trying all along to grow your spirit — to connect you with a more powerful version of yourself, walking your true path.

That’s why it’s important not to treat mental health symptoms as “waste” to be discarded. That’s why our collective rage and despair in this moment of history matter so deeply.

Instead of discarding these struggles, UnShaming invites us to listen to them with care. When we do, even our hardest emotions reveal themselves as guides — carrying seeds of wisdom and transformation that not only help us feel more whole and alive as individuals, but also strengthen the communities and movements we belong to, which urgently need your voice and your contributions.

Want to Go Deeper?

If this resonates with you, I’d love to explore it together — you can book an UnShaming session.

Because anger and despair don’t have to stay suppressed — they can become powerful allies on the path of healing.

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