Women of a Certain Rage: The Emotion That Shall Not Be Named

There is a unique kind of anger that lives in women in midlife.

Not the clean, momentary flash of frustration that passes quickly and feels socially acceptable to mention. More akin to a slow-burning, bone-deep fury that has been building for decades.

"I bit my tongue for years because I didn't want to offend anyone," one woman told me, settling into her chair at the start of our conversation.

She is not even close to being alone in that.

As a therapist who specializes in working with women in midlife, it’s striking how little anger and rage is openly talked about. So many women carry an enormous rage, day in and day out, without ever being able to express it.

There is a prohibition against women being angry. It's pathologized. Called instability, irrationality, being difficult. "There is not a woman alive who does not understand that women's anger is openly reviled," writes Soraya Chemaly in Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger.

And so women go quiet, or they try to.

"I both want people to know it's hard and also desperately want to hide it," one woman told me, "because there is shame attached to it."

They manage and suppress and white-knuckle through. All the while, their anger lives on, rooting more deeply inside.

Where It Comes From

For most women, this anger builds over a lifetime, fed by many tributaries. The list of reasons to be angry, genuinely and legitimately angry, is long.

There is the relentless invisible labor. The appointments scheduled, feelings processed, households held together, all done without acknowledgment.

One woman described it with an exhaustion that needed no elaboration: "I do all the laundry. I do all the dishes. I clean the entire house. I keep the schedules." When she raises it with her husband, his response is that she just needs to ask. "I shouldn't have to ask," she said. "You live in this house. You can see when things need to be done."

That particular exchange will be familiar to a lot of women. The asking is its own labor. And by the time they're asking, they're already past the point of calm.

Women are socialized from girlhood to prioritize everyone else's comfort over their own truth. And they are very, very good at it. Until they’ve had enough.

One woman described watching her grandmother disappear in the giving — giving to her husband, her ten children, everyone around her — until she was in her 70s and just wanted everyone to leave her alone. "She was very resentful. She wasn't even allowed to talk about it."

That is the inheritance many women are working with.

Then there's being in the workplace, where women are paid less, promoted less, and penalized for the same directness that earns men respect. Throw in a medical system which has historically minimized women's pain, dismissed their symptoms, and treated their bodies as afterthoughts in research. Add on the current political climate — the rolling back of reproductive rights, the broad-sweeping abuse of women and children by those in power, and the culture that's made it all possible.

None of this is background noise. It settles deep in the body, and it adds up.

Why It's Showing Up Now

Perimenopause and menopause are part of it. The hormonal shifts of this transition are real and significant. Women are often navigating the most physiologically destabilizing period of their adult lives while simultaneously being told that everything they are feeling is just part of getting older. Or worse, being told by doctor after doctor that they look fine.

"Everybody says, 'You're fine. You're fine. You're fine,'" one woman told me. "I'm like, 'I'm not fine.'"

But the timing is about more than hormones. By midlife, most women are running on fumes after decades of giving far beyond what they've ever received. They have been good daughters and good partners and good mothers and good employees, often at the expense of their own needs, their own voices, their own clarity about what they want and what they are no longer willing to accept.

"We were very much taught — buckle up and just do the things," one woman said.

Midlife has a way of making the gap undeniable. There is less future available to defer things to. Parents are aging. Relationships take more than they give. And there is a moment, different for every woman but almost universal, when the math stops adding up and something underneath the surface says: enough.

"How could I not be angry?" one woman asked me. "How could we not be angry?"

You Are Not Too Much

If you are a woman in midlife carrying anger you cannot quite name or make sense of, I want you to know: you are not too much. You are not broken. You are not difficult or irrational or ungrateful for the life you have.

You are a woman who has been doing an enormous amount for a very long time — in a body that is changing, in a culture that has not adequately supported or acknowledged you, at a stage of life that strips away a lot of the coping mechanisms that used to patch things over.

Of course there is rage in that. Of course.

A Few Things to Sit With

An invitation to turn toward yourself for a moment

1. Center Your Own Experience Take a moment and notice: What are you tolerating right now? Where are you swallowing your feelings to keep the peace? You don't have to change anything. Just notice. This kind of self-witnessing, the simple act of looking at your own experience instead of past it, is where change begins.

2. Journal or Reflect on What's Fueling Your Anger Take some time, with a pen and paper, to consider what has contributed to the anger you're carrying. It’s worth writing down and really looking at. There is so much more that can be added to each woman's list than is named here. What is sitting in that pile for you? You don't have to have a tidy answer. Just let yourself look at it honestly, without rushing to resolution or forgiveness.

3. Find an Expert A licensed therapist who specializes in this work will not flinch when you say the real thing out loud. She will not minimize it, hand you a silver lining, or treat your fury like a symptom to be managed. She knows how to sit with the full weight of what you are holding, and how to help you hear what it has been saying. Your anger has been pointing somewhere this whole time. Toward yourself. Toward what you actually want. Toward the life that is still waiting for you.

You have been carrying this for too long. Anger is one of the most clarifying forces there is. It is time to stop managing it and start listening to it. Ready to do this work? Schedule a free consult.

Jen Gallagher is a licensed therapist and the owner of Jen Gallagher Counseling, LLC, a practice based in Michigan, centered in supporting women in midlife as they stop managing their anger and start listening to it. She offers in-person and statewide online therapy. Learn more at jengallaghercounseling.com.