I grew up in a house where anger was not permitted. Not my parents' anger - that was available in abundance. Mine. A child's anger was reframed as rudeness, irrationality, a phase to be corrected. I learned to translate every instance of anger into sadness, which was more acceptable, and then to present the sadness as the original feeling. By adulthood I had become so skilled at this translation that I had lost access to the original.

I discovered this in therapy in my early thirties when a therapist said you seem sad about that and I started to say yes and something stopped me. What I felt, actually, was not sad. What I felt was furious. I had been furious for years without knowing it, because knowing it would have required a pathway that was closed before I had the language for what I was feeling.

Anger, I've since learned, is a sense of boundary violation. It is the feeling that tells you something was wrong, something was unfair, something was taken. Without access to anger, I had no reliable way to know when I'd been wronged. I accommodated. I adapted. I made excuses for people who didn't deserve them. I collapsed inward under pressures I should have pushed back against.

I'm still learning to feel it without immediately translating. It's loud. It's uncomfortable. It tells me things about past events that I would have preferred not to know. But it is mine - a signal that was there the whole time, waiting for the permission that came very late.

Were you taught that some feelings were unacceptable? What did you do with them, and where are they now?