Resentment, Rage, and Anger After Divorce: How to Deal and Getting Over It

Anger, resentment, and rage are some of the biggest issues for women to work through after marriage struggles and divorce. Many therapists’ offices don’t go far enough in addressing anger. So I’m here today to say enough of all that. Let’s understand anger better, let’s do better, and let’s dig deeper.

Think about the depths of your anger.

How do you respond to yourself when you’re experiencing that level of rage? What do you do with that feeling? And how often do you feel relief from it in a truly meaningful, sustainable way?

I would argue not very often.

The reason resentment exists is because we don’t fully process anger. For women, there are very few socially acceptable places for us to release these feelings so it comes out in unexpected places or on our kids.

Dealing with Anger After Divorce Through EMDR

We, women, work so hard to intellectualize and to spiritually bypass our anger. When I get angry and feel rage, I often try to coach myself out of it. I tell myself, “I shouldn’t be feeling this way. It’s a low vibe, and it will take away from my intentional manifesting. It’s not spiritually aligned. It’s not what God wants for me.” As someone who has suffered from Good Girl Syndrome, I’ve felt a lot of anger. EMDR therapy and a well-prescribed homeopathic remedy released all that rage from my mind and body.

Getting Over Anger After Divorce With Homeopathy

EMDR therapy greatly reduced the amount of anger and resentment that I felt over the years, but there was still some left. What truly removed the anger from me was a homeopathic remedy.

Why is this emotion so hard to get out of?

To truly process emotion, we have to express it fully. When we are repressing, suppressing, bypassing, or intellectualizing anger or rage, it stays with us. It leaves little stuck pockets of energy in our cellular memory.

The question is: How do we women fully process anger or rage if we feel resistance to going there? It’s rare for folks to show up to therapy fully expressing rage to me. If women do start to get angry in a session, they often start apologizing.

EMDR functions best when we are embodying the emotion that we are trying to process.

I want to ask you this: How comfortable are you going to your therapist’s office and feeling rage? Are you willing to go there? I know this is easier said than done. I would have a hard time showing up at my therapist’s office and trying to get angry.

Emotional Healing with Homeopathy

I want you to think about when a child has a temper tantrum. Nobody teaches little kids to have temper tantrums. It’s a full-blown embodied expression of this larger-than-life emotion. Now, I don’t know about you, but I feel that a lot of people in my generation had parents who dismissed our feelings.

As a result, I don’t squash my kid’s feelings, and I never talked her out of tantrums or meltdowns. I’ve always done my best job to hold space for her when she’s having really big feelings. But think about how ingrained it is in you not to have big emotional moments like that.

Creating Rage Consciously as Positive Anger Relief

How much ‘Good Girl’ programming disallows us to fully lean into our tempers? We, women, get intimidated by our own anger and by other people’s rage because we have become so disconnected from a healthy expression of temper tantrums.

We feel ashamed of feeling anger after divorce because we explode on somebody we love very much, such as our kids. Women are deeply afraid of men (and specifically dangerous men) who have rage and who have hurt people with it. As we don’t have a good practice of dealing with anger within ourselves, we end up observing it in society in these unhealthy ways. Anger, rage, and tempers become very intimidating.

Tools to Create Anger Relief

This is a conversation to reshape our relationship with these types of big feelings.

There are plenty of ways that we women can stop tempers being stuck inside of us and process it out of our bodies. When this happens, we can start responding to it differently in real-time.

EFT Tapping and EMDR Therapy

EFT tapping and EMDR are incredibly useful tools for managing anger and releasing stored negative energy.

If you feel triggered or go into fight mode, try the ‘Butterfly Tapping’ technique to move through and process the emotion. However, you must embrace the full expression of your anger when you’re doing EFT tapping or EMDR Therapy; otherwise, you won’t experience the full result.

Journaling and Physical Movement

Immersive journaling creates a space specifically for you to process anger or rage after divorce.

You intentionally start journaling about the things that make you the angriest or the most triggered, and then you start stomping your feet or pounding your chest.

There are many embodiment practices that help us get it out, and at the end of a session like this, you will feel exhausted, your throat will feel raw, and you will feel very depleted.

Much like children who need to take a nap after a temper tantrum, this practice encourages you to release all the energy, soothe, rebuild, and get back out into the world.

When you have a healthy flow with your emotions, you don’t get stuck or bogged down. You can carry on with life without it becoming stored in your body.

Nervous System Regulation

There is an unhelpful discussion around trauma that labels experiences as ‘big traumas’ or ‘little traumas,’ which are supposedly less impactful to us. However, our nervous system doesn’t differentiate between these. Our responses to ‘little traumas’ can be the same as a ‘big trauma,’ which is why regulating your nervous system is so important. These huge emotional responses to ‘little traumas’ are the result of unprocessed emotions that have built up over a lifetime, where we become more sensitive and less regulated.

During a fight, flight, or freeze situation, you can retrain your nervous system to react differently. Taking deep breaths, walking outside, or taking a cold shower will shock your nervous system out of its trauma response.

Creating an Anger Energy Practice to Release It

I am advocating for you to lose your shit a little on a regular basis, but in a way that is planned.

When you get completely overwhelmed by co-parenting, single parenting, or recovering from past traumas, you can create an anger release and let it go. Scream into a pillow, take a boxing class, or sing loudly to your favorite angsty song. Find a way to get it out.

Co-Parenting & Single Parenting: Practicing Anger Release with Your Kids

I want you to commit to doing the crazy thing. I recorded a video of my daughter and I doing this together. We were moaning, growling, and moving our bodies and our arms in a way that was intentionally getting intense emotions out of our bodies. My daughter is eight, and she got such a kick out of doing this with me. It’s a game changer when we women teach our kids these tools. They will have a very different lived experience from many of us.

It is intimidating to embrace anger because we don’t want to do harm to people, but we do want to find spaces and ways to get it out. So I’m telling you to embrace temper tantrums.

You Are Designed to Feel Anger: Practice It

Catch yourself when you start intellectualizing your anger, when you’re spiritually bypassing your rage, or when you start telling yourself you shouldn’t feel that angry.

You are designed to feel anger. It is a normal, human, wonderful emotion that tells you that something is wrong in your environment, and it needs action. Play with it. Practice it.

If it feels uncomfortable, great. That means you’re doing it. If it doesn’t feel uncomfortable, you probably aren’t pushing into it hard enough. We have worked for so long to suppress this normal, healthy relationship within ourselves.

Lean into the temper tantrum and incorporate it into your parenting.

Butterfly Tapping and EFT

You can add some butterfly tapping when you feel this fully expressed, outraged temper tantrum. It will help you move through it and get to the deeper stuff that has been buried within you. It will welcome healthier, refreshed information and energy in a natural organic flow.

You can also add an EFT tapping sequence.

You would start with a karate chop on the back of your hand and then go through the eyebrows, the side of your eye, the top of your mouth, your chin, your chest, and onto the top of your head.

When you’re using any of your tools in your post divorce trauma, whether it’s EFT tapping, EMDR, immersive journaling, or these other embodiment practices, notice where you are cutting yourself off before you fully get there. I hear people tell me from time to time, “I am afraid of what I’m capable of if I were to let myself fully get there. I’m afraid of what I might do.”

There’s an idea that we all have this deeply animalistic instinct inside of us, and we’re afraid of it. But that is because we don’t have a healthy relationship with it. Is this part of the reason we’re so interested in true crime and crime TV shows? I find that there are a lot of women who have very dysregulated nervous systems, who have a hard time sleeping at night, who are highly anxious, who have a lot of traumatic history, who watch a lot of crime shows, and who listen to a lot of crime podcasts. Is this part of our dysfunctional relationship with anger?  Is that a place where we have permission to be in touch with the darker sides of ourselves?

So here’s your invitation to get a little nuts, to process that anger after divorce and to start giving yourself permission to do that in bigger doses.

Have those temper tantrums, love yourself for being angry, and do not judge yourself for feeling rage.

I love you so much. Peace.