BONUS EPI: Honoring Sacred Rage

We go deeper into sacred rage and why the urge to keep listening can be your nervous system signaling readiness, not rumination. I share concrete ways to release anger safely, especially when the person who harmed you is still in your life and confrontation is not possible or not safe. 

Work With Me Individually 

I offer trauma-informed services for high-achieving women navigating:

• Complex trauma
• Late-diagnosed ADHD or autism
• Nervous system dysregulation
• Relational pattern healing

If you’d prefer one-on-one support, book a free 15-minute consultation here:
http://linktr.ee/EmpoweringWellnessHub

Good Music for Healing

🎵 **Divine Woman Playlist (Apple Music):** https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/divine-woman/pl.u-leyl096uMoD885j

Episodes Mentioned in this Episode

Your Freeze Response Was Survival Not Consent

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/19054178-your-freeze-response-was-survival-not-consent

Honoring the Losses & Heaviness after Sexual Trauma

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/19093408-honoring-the-losses-heaviness-after-sexual-trauma

Your Body Is Protecting You From Stillness

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/19127184-your-body-is-protecting-you-from-stillness

A Survivor’s Story of Sexual Trauma

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/19164045-a-survivor-s-story-of-sexual-trauma

What If Being the Common Denominator Isn’t a Bad Thing?

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/17305987-bonus-epi-what-if-being-the-common-denominator-isn-t-a-bad-thing

You’re not alone. 

We’re healing together.

Transcript

Bonus Episode And Nervous System Readiness

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey there. Welcome back to the Awaken Heart, a podcast for healing women. I'm Autumn. I am here with you alongside you as a neurodivergent trauma-experienced woman who has also had to heal from trauma, sexual trauma, life trauma. You're listening to the bonus episode of the rage season that we had this past Wednesday, the Sacred Rage. And if you're here, that means something. You finished the main episode and you want more. I want you to notice that. Please don't skip past it. That instinct, that need to go deeper, that's not rumination. That's not obsessing. That's your nervous system saying that it's ready. It's ready to heal. There's more here, and your nervous system wants it. So it's a really beautiful sign of where you are. So this is the episode for anyone who is looking for more. We're not going to recap the main episode. If you haven't listened to it yet, I will link it in the show notes so you can start there. If you are new to the podcast, we are in season two, healing from sexual trauma. So before the rage season, there is the numb season. So if you find yourself in the numb face, feeling numb, feeling stuck, please I will link those in the show notes as well. Start with the numb and meet me here. But this is the bonus episode. This is the deep relay or the honoring the sacred rage. Because in the main episode, Wednesday's episode, I lit a match. We named the Sacred Rage. I gave you permission, if not commanding you, to feel it. We talked about where it came from and how to channel it. So I want to go a little bit deeper and say a little bit more that maybe I didn't say that was a little bit more complicated and needed some nuances.

When The Person Is Still Around

SPEAKER_01 2:01

So I gave you some tools for channeling range in the first episode, like screaming into pillows, punching mattresses, journaling, unsent letters. And all those tools are real and they work. But there's some specific situations that didn't get enough space. And I'm gonna talk about them today. So, like, what do you do when the person you're furious at is still in your life? Or the person who harmed you or is harming you is still in your life. This can happen a lot. They're not always safely in your past. Sometimes it's a parent who you're still in contact with. Maybe it's not fully no contact. Maybe you're somewhere in the middle still navigating holidays and family gatherings. Maybe it's a family member everyone else thinks is wonderful, who has this whole reputation and you're sitting there holding what you know while everyone else toasts to them at dinner or some shit like that. Maybe someone who doesn't know that you know, maybe you recently pieced together what actually happened and they have no idea and you're just carrying it silently. Or maybe you just haven't been able to leave yet. And I want to say absolutely zero, zero, zero shame about that. Leaving is complicated. Leaving is dangerous. The research on trauma bonding, on why people stay is absolutely clear. Not leaving is not weakness. It is survival in an incredibly complex and often dangerous situation. So you're holding live, active, burning rage inside your body while you sit across from this person, while you see their name on your phone, while everyone around you acts like everything's fine. Your nervous system is being asked to do something incredibly hard, contain fire in a paper bag. What the fuck? While functioning normally while keeping you safe. What? That's wild. And you know, on top of that, you have the neurodivergent layer. Masking is already costing you everything. You're spending an enormous amount of energy managing how you appear, how you come across, what you let show. Adding the weight of contained rage on top of masking is fucking exhausting in a way that's just almost incredibly hard to explain to people who don't live it. It's it's just, there's just no, it's there's sometimes no words to explain, especially if you have RSD, rejection, sensitive dysphoria, which means the fear of their reaction is real and physical, not just anxiety. The thought of expressing anger and having it met with dismissal, punishment, or having it turn back on you isn't just scary. It's almost physically unbearable. So of course you contain it. Of course you can taint it. Most of us were explicitly taught that our anger was too much or it makes us crazy long before trauma even began. We were the kids who felt things too big, who reacted too strongly, who were told we were too dramatic. So we learned to hide it perfectly. We learned to smile and nod while everything in us was screaming like, shut the fuck up, get the fuck away from me, you're an idiot. Maybe not those words. And the hypervigilance, right? The thing that kept you safe as a kid, the constant scanning of the room, the reading everyone's moods, knowing exactly when the energy shifted, that hypervigilance makes contained rage even harder. Because you're acutely, exhaustingly aware of every microexpression, every shift in tone. You're tracking everything while trying to hold everything together inside. So, what can you do with that? I'm going back to some of the stuff I listed

The Unsent Letter And Closure Rituals

SPEAKER_01 6:00

a little bit earlier. The unsent letter, but go further than you think you're allowed. You've probably heard, uh you've heard it if you've listened to the previous episode of the unsent letter. Like, write it, don't send it. And that's solid, solid advice. Like, yes, do it. But I want to push you just a little bit further if you would like. Write the letter you would never ever send. Say the things you would never say out loud. Be ugly, be specific, be cruel if you want to be cruel on paper. Call them exactly what you think they are. Say exactly what you wish had happened differently. Say exactly what you wish you could say to their face. Don't edit it, don't soften it, don't make it fair or balanced. This letter is not for anyone but yourself. It's not for anyone to read, it's not for anyone to receive. It is for you to get it out of your body and onto paper. And then this next part really matters because I want you to complete this ritual. Burn it, rip it into confetti, bury it, flush it. Something physical needs to happen, something intentional, something that signals to your nervous system this is done now. This energy has been released. Your nervous system needs a completion signal. It's been holding an open loop for a long time, and the ritual can close it. There's like this, I've seen this technique in the yoga world and in the mental health world, but it's kind of like where you open your palms, like you're gonna fill your both of your hands up with water and splash your face. You open your palms and you imagine your worry. This is just another thing to do. And you imagine your worry, your concern, your fear, whatever it is, something that's consuming you. Put it in your palm. Imagine it in your palm. And then I just want you to set it aside. Depending on how big it is, how heavy it is, you can set it right next to you and say, Hey, I'm gonna put you down for right now, and then I'll come back to you in 20 minutes and I'll deal with you, right? Or you can put that thing outside the door, close the door and tell them you'll come back in 20 minutes. This isn't about writing a letter. This is about, hey, if it gets too heavy, set it aside, come back to it. Get it outside of you, imagine it outside of you, and then bring it back in when you want to deal with it. When not when you want to deal with it, when you want to work through it, when you want to do some heal healing work. Physical release, I re I will repeat this, it really works. Picking up a mattress and putting it against the wall, or just kneeling on your mattress and punching it. Ice smashing, put some ice in a cup or a bowl and go outside, find some concrete and just smash some ice. These aren't just symbolic movements. Rage is stored in the body as unfinished movement. When something threatening or violating happens or has happened, your body had an impulse to fight, flee, do something. And that impulse got stopped. It

Rage Lives In The Body

SPEAKER_01 9:29

got suppressed. Most likely because it wasn't safe to act. Maybe because you froze, maybe because you were a child and had no options. But that incomplete action is still living in your tissue, and physical release is literally finishing what your nervous system started. It's not a metaphor, it's physiology. So when you punch the mattress, you're not just venting, you're completing a motor pattern your body has been holding for months or years or decades. There's a gap between there's there's a little bit of grief when it comes to that gap between what you can do and what you wish you could do, between the conversation you deserve to have and the conversation that's actually safe or possible. And pretending that that gap isn't real or pushing yourself toward confrontation that isn't safe is not the answer. Sometimes the work is making peace with the fact that you will not get the confrontation. You will not get the acknowledgement, you will not get the apology. And you might never get to say directly to their face what you need to say. And the grief of that is its own thing. The rage about not being able to express the rage in its own layer is like, is like its own layer. You're not weak for not confronting them. You're not failing your healing by staying silent in a room where speaking isn't safe. This is you being strategic. You're reading the situation clearly, and you're protecting you. Numero uno. There's a difference between expressing rage and acting on it. You can fully, completely process and release your rage without ever having a confrontation. A confrontation. It is not required for healing. Wednesday's episode touched a bit about rage

The Grief Of No Confrontation

SPEAKER_01 11:35

at yourself. Self-rage. The anger at yourself for not leaving sooner, for believing you deserved it, for staying.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

It's a little bit of ground to cover there.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Because for a lot of women, especially us neurodivergent women, especially women who've been told they're the problem for most of their lives, self-rage is the deepest layer. And it can do the most damage if it goes unnamed. Rage has a target. It moves outward. It has energy and direction. But when the rage turns inward, when you're angry at yourself, it doesn't behave like regular anger. It loses momentum, it curls back on itself. And for trauma survivors, especially those who were already told we were the problem, self-directed rage almost always collapses into shame. It sounds like why didn't I leave sooner? How did I not see it? Why did I keep going back? Why did I let it happen? What's wrong with me? And those questions feel like they're looking for answers, but they're not really questions. They're accusations and they're aimed at the wrong fucking person. I can remember parts of my healing when I was mad at myself. I was mad at the trust that I put in people. I was mad at the faith that I gave to people that didn't deserve it. I was mad at the benefit of the doubts, the so many benefits of a doubt when someone clearly was showing me who they were. I was like, Autumn, what the fuck? Why did you stay? So I get the anger. I get the anger. Why did I keep going back to people that consistently proved that they were just not good people for me? So of course that went toward me. What's wrong with me? It goes back to that I'm the common denominator. So it must be me. I've done an episode on that. I will link it in the show notes. It's worth the listen because even though you're the common denominator, even though you're the common denominator denominator, that does not mean you are at fault. There's so much more to it. So self-rage is grief in disguise. Please hear this. You're not actually furious at yourself. You're heartbroken for the version of you who didn't know yet. Who stayed because she thought that's

Self Rage Turns Into Shame

SPEAKER_01 14:31

what love looked like. Who went silent because silence was the only option she could find. Who believed them when they said she was too much, too needy, too dramatic, imagining things. She wasn't weak. She was surviving in real time with the information and resources she had in the environment she was in. But many of us were never taught to trust our own perception. We were gaslit about our own experiences so consistently, told we were overreacting, misreading, being too sensitive, that we lost the ability to recognize harm when it was happening in real time. When your baseline growing up was your perceptions are wrong, you're too much, your reactions are disproportionate. Then when something genuinely harmful was happening, of course you second guessed yourself. Of course, you talked yourself out of what you were sensing. Of course, you fucking stayed. What looks like not leaving or not fighting back from the outside was, and in most cases, a freeze response. A nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do when they calculate that fighting or fleeing isn't survivable. You don't freeze because you are weak. You freeze because your nervous system is trying to keep you alive. And that is not something to be ashamed of. So please write them down, journal about them, or just give them some thought. What did I actually know then? Not what I know now. Looking back with everything I've learned since, none of that.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

But what did I actually have access to then? What resources did I have?

SPEAKER_01 17:05

Financial, emotional, relational?

SPEAKER_00 17:08

What did I actually have available to me?

SPEAKER_01 17:15

Who taught me that treatment like that was normal or acceptable or what love looked like? Where did my patterns for relationships come from? What would I say to a close friend who came to me with this exact story? The last one, this one, normally cracks it open because most of us would never say to someone we love, you should have known better. Why didn't you leave sooner? What's wrong with you? We would hold them with incredible tenderness. We would tell them that they did that, that they did what they could. We would tell them they deserved better and that none of it was their fault. And you deserve that same tenderness from yourself.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

It starts here.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

And let's redirect this rage where it actually belongs. Point it outward to your abuser, to the people who didn't protect you, to the adults in your life who normalized it or looked the other way or told you that you were the problem, to the culture that told you to be small and quiet and grateful, to the systems that failed you.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

That's where the rage belongs. You were never the right target.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

And I'm not saying go out and attack these people. Go back to the last episode, please, and listen to about sacred rage and how to exercise it. But this is about creating new, creating advocacy, creating help for yourself, creating boundaries, creating joy.

Redirecting Anger Toward The Right Targets

SPEAKER_01 19:05

So what about some shadow work, right? This is a piece that I like to bring to the bonus episode. It gets described a lot of mist in a lot of mystical language, but I want to bring it back to something concrete. Shadow work is simply this. Shadow work is the parts of yourself that you learned that weren't acceptable. The parts of you that were told to hide, suppress, deny, perform away. The parts that got you punished or rejected or abandoned when they showed

Shadow Work And Buried Anger

SPEAKER_01 19:45

up. You didn't get rid of those parts. You can't get rid of them. You buried them and they're still there running the show from underground, shaping your behavior, your choices, your relationships in ways you can't always see because they're operating below the surface. So shadow work is the process of becoming conscious of what's underground. Not to fix it, not to eliminate it, but to see it. To say, aha, there it is. I didn't know that was there. Now I do. That's it.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

That's that's that's shadow work.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

So I'm trying to think of the next step to go as far as shadow work. Because we learned very early that your anger was dangerous, not neutral, but dangerous. Maybe your anger made people hurt you more. Maybe it got you punished. It was the thing that somehow always got turned into evidence that you were the problem. So you buried it. Buried it. You buried it. You became the good girl, the peacekeeper, the one who smoothed things over, the one who swallowed everything and kept the peace and made herself small enough to be safe. And that was incredibly intelligent. That was your nervous system correctly reading the environment and adapting and adapting. That was survival. But the rage didn't disappear. It went underground. And from underground, it shaped everything. Who you allowed into your life.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

Often people who mirrored what you learned to tolerate. It shaped how you tolerated before reaching your breaking point.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

How you talked to yourself, often with the same cruelty, your rage would have directed outward, turned inward instead.

SPEAKER_00 21:56

Why you sometimes couldn't leave because leaving felt like

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Making yourself a target for the very thing you spent your life trying to avoid? Maybe you kept finding yourself in similar dynamics.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Not because you're broken, but because your underground rage was running a familiar script. Why you sometimes exploded over things that seemed small and then felt the crushing shame after it. So like things happen.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Meltdowns, emotional flashback, your body remembers something, your conscious mind hasn't caught up to yet. You find yourself disproportionately angry at your partner, a friend, a therapist, people who are actually safe. Safe people are often the only ones it feels survivable to be angry at. The people who actually hurt you, the rage at them feels too dangerous, too big, too risky. So it gets displaced onto the people you actually trust. Not a character flaw. It's a human, very understandable nervous system response. Sometimes we go silent for days, self-sabotage, perfectionism as a form of control, people pleasing that has an edge of resentment underneath it, procrastination, checking out. These are all shadow rage finding indirect exits. Because direct exit was never safe. This is not about performing anger or forcing yourself to be more openly aggressive, because that is not the goal. The goal is consciousness. The goal is being able to say, Oh, that's shadow rage. I recognize you now. I see where you're coming from.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

So here are some questions.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Where do I feel anger that I immediately suppress, explain away, or talk myself out of? I don't even care if you feel like it's the smallest shit. I want you to answer this question. Where do I feel anger that I'm immediately immediately suppress, explain away, or talk myself out of?

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Who am I not allowed to be angry at?

SPEAKER_01 24:32

And what's the rule I'm following that says I can't? Who am I not allowed to be angry at?

SPEAKER_00 24:40

And what's the rule I'm following that says I can't?

SPEAKER_01 24:46

What do I do with anger when I can't express it?

SPEAKER_00 24:51

What does it turn into? Where does it go in my body or in my behavior? What do I do with anger when I can't express it? What does it turn into? Where does it go in my body or in my behavior? Last one.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

What's the oldest anger I'm still carrying? When did I first learn that my rage wasn't safe? What's the oldest anger I'm still carrying? When did I first learn that my rage wasn't safe? I don't want you to rush to answer these. Doesn't need to be fixed. I just want it to be seen. That's the work of just seeing it, acknowledging it, and saying, yes, this is here. When you bring the buried rage into conscious awareness, when you say yes, I'm furious that fury is valid and I've been hiding it underground because that's what I learned to do, it stops running you from underground. You get to choose what to do with it instead of it choosing for you. The meltdowns become more understandable. The emotional flashbacks have more context. The displacement onto safe people starts to loosen because you can start redirecting the anger towards its actual sources. This is how sacred rage becomes a tool instead of a symptom.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

And this is one of the most significant things that can happen in your healing.

Moving Through Rage Versus Getting Stuck

SPEAKER_00 26:44

This rage season is a season.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

You will not be this angry forever. You are moving through something, not building a permanent home here. But sometimes, without realizing it, we can set up camp. So what does it look like when you're moving through? The anger has a target, a story, a reason. You can name what you're angry about and why. It comes in waves, intense when it comes, but it subsides and it's not constant. You can still access other emotional states. You can still laugh, you can still feel tenderness, you can still find moments of peace or joy. You're taking action, even small steps. Something is moving in your life, even incrementally. And the rage feels alive, like it's going somewhere, like it has a direction and momentum. So signs that you're, those were signs that you're moving through. So signs that you might be stuck. Everything makes you angry and you don't know why. It's generalized, unfocused, without a clear story. You feel righteous about the anger, but nothing in your life is actually changing. You're using rage to stay away from grief. The fury is easier than the sadness underneath it. And so you stay in the anger because the softer, harder feelings feel more dangerous. You're exhausted by it, but you can't let it go. There's a quality of being trapped in it rather than moving through it. And maybe the anger has started to feel like identity, like who you are rather than what you're going through. Getting stuck in rage can look different for us. It often looks like hyperfocus on the injustice, researching obsessively, replaying conversations and scenarios, building the case, going over and over the evidence for why what happened was wrong, why they were wrong, why you should have, what you should have said. Your brain is doing what neurodivergent brains do. It's trying to solve something, it's trying to find the answer that will make this feel resolved. But this isn't a problem that can be solved by thinking. It's not a logic puzzle, it's a grief process. And the more you try to think your way through it, the more you stay in the cognitive loop rather than dropping into the feeling underneath. That's not weakness, that's your nervous system trying to find safety through understanding. It's an incredibly intelligent strategy for a brain that processes the world the way ours does. But at some point, understanding has to give way to feeling. The analysis has to pause long enough to let the grief come through.

What Helps When Rage Feels Trapped

SPEAKER_01 29:32

So, what do you do if you're stuck? First thing I want to say is you're not broken. You're not broken. You're not broken. Stuck rage is almost always unprocessed grief asking for a different door. So, what tends to help? Somatic work, getting out of the cognitive loop and into the body. Working with a somatic therapist or even just doing intentional body-based movement can help shift what thinking can't reach. Next, get yourself a trauma-informed therapist who won't tell you to calm down or move on. Someone who can hold the rage with you and help you find what's underneath. And thirdly, find a community of women who understand. Women who've been in the rage season and have come out on the other side. Community doesn't fix it, but it reminds you that you're not alone in it and that there is another side. Name it. Don't shame yourself for it. You're at a threshold that's a hard, that's hard to cross alone.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

That's not weakness, that's human.

Next Week Rage At The Body

SPEAKER_01 30:44

The fact that you're here, that you came to this bonus episode tells me something about you. You're not looking for the easy path. You're not trying to skip to the peaceful part. You're willing to go into the fire. This is courage.

SPEAKER_00 30:59

This is what healing looks like.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

Next episode, we're gonna look at next week is the rage at the body. Why didn't you fight back? Why you had responses that confuse you or hurt you, or that you're still making sense of. So it's gonna be a tender one. And it's gonna be a rageful one. I'll bring both. Until then, feel all of it, the fury and the grief underneath it, the rage at them, and the compassion for her, for the version of you who did the best she could with what she had. You're allowed to hold all of it at once. Take the gentlest possible care of your awakened heart. I'll see you soon.