Why Repressed Anger Comes Up While Healing Trauma

Picture a plastic baseball bat, a pile of pillows, and someone swinging until the breath runs out. That is the popular image of anger work, and in this 55-minute conversation Irene Lyon and her longtime student and friend Donnie Hill take it apart. The subject is what surfaces once a person has built enough nervous system capacity to finally feel what they have been holding. Repressed survival energy, including anger, resentment, frustration and grief, can rise during healing not because the work has gone wrong but because there is finally room for it. Lyon and Hill cover why this happens, why moving the body is not the same as processing stored experience, where healthy aggression ends and rage or annihilation energy begins, and how to direct this energy so it does not spill onto the people around you.

Why isn't hitting a bag enough to release anger?

Lyon opens the video by naming the cliché outright: the bat, the mannequin, the scream. She does not dismiss it. "That all might be true," she says, but she adds that in Smart Body Smart Mind, the curriculum she has run since 2015, students learn that the physical gesture is only part of the picture. The punch, the kick, the scratch or the scream are what she calls stored procedural memories, patterns the body learned long before there were words for them. Moving them out matters. But the motion alone is not enough.

The missing piece is connection. An action that is not tied to the lived experience that created it can feel hollow, or can leave the system more activated than before. A person who was harmed and then dismissed may have learned, in the body, that their response is wrong or dangerous. Simply handing them a bat does not undo that lesson. The body needs to recognize what the movement is for.

Lyon gives a concrete case from her own practice, anonymized and drawn from a training demonstration. A person had a serious accident in which they were not at fault. Over time the aftermath became a cascade of illness, disrupted sleep and intrusive thoughts, the kind of picture Lyon says would be recognized as complex PTSD. Then came a medical situation that felt, in her words, "dehumanizing." The person was far from their country of origin and could not easily speak the language. Lyon could see the anger. But she was clear that you cannot ask someone in that moment to growl or punch the air, because the gesture has no connection to what happened to them. The energy needs a route that the person's own story can open.

Why does anger come back online once you start healing?

Hill opens the conversation with the observation that prompted it. Over the past couple of months, he says, "the anger is coming back online." He describes working with Lyon since around 2020 and 2021, moving through Smart Body Smart Mind, the Science Intuitive Educator course and a beta certification, and then discovering that the deeper he went into nervous system work, the more emotion began to arrive. "Now all of this anger and resentment and frustration and grief are just starting to bubble up to the surface," he says.

Lyon's explanation rests on an image she returns to throughout the conversation: the swimming pool full of beach balls. Each ball is a stressor, an event or a held experience pushed under the water. A small pool can only hold so many before it overflows. Healing does two things at once. It grows the capacity of the pool, and it lets the actual balls rise and be dealt with. The catch is that growth in capacity brings the balls up sooner than you might expect, because the pool can now hold them without drowning.

Hill ties this directly to his own life. For several years he has been caregiving for his mother, his father and his sister, and he describes the experience as bringing childhood material to the surface. Some of it, he says, concerns whether his mother will be there and how to mend or clean up that relationship. Some concerns his family in general, and some is simply older. He credits the last six or seven years of capacity-building with making room for all of it. "I have a bigger swimming pool," is the idea he returns to.

Why don't we talk about this stage of healing more openly?

One of the most useful points in the conversation is about normalization. Hill describes a stretch of about three weeks when he felt "bitter and resentful and pissy," and he was at home caregiving while it happened. He wanted not to feel that way, and he felt it anyway. Lyon responds that this experience is rarely named in healing culture. People are rarely told that doing this work may bring up anger, resentment, bitterness, grief or disappointment, and that these emotions tend to arrive precisely because earlier there was no space or permission to feel them.

Lyon then describes the cultural and personal scripts that make anger hard to let in at all. She names a stance she calls "playing no victim" versus "playing too much victim." Many people swing between them. On one side is the belief that they have to accept what happened and move on, and that anger means they are a bad or mean person. On the other is a sense that feeling anger toward a parent, a classmate, a bully or their circumstances is simply not allowed. Hill names this exactly: he had the sense that he could not be angry at his parents, at his circumstances, or at the people who had hurt him. Then, he says, he realized he was, in fact, angry.

"Now I'm like, wait a minute, no, I'm just really pissed." (Donnie Hill, describing his own realization during the conversation)

The point is not to celebrate anger for its own sake. It is to recognize that anger is survival energy, often laid down very early, and that it was never a character flaw. Lyon is careful about this. Anger, she says, is "not just about getting mad." It can be a deeply protective response that begins in infancy, long before a child has any language for what is happening.

What separates healthy aggression from rage and annihilation?

Lyon draws distinctions the popular conversation often blurs. Healthy aggression is energy that can be used with a clear target and a clear boundary. Rage is a more overwhelming, less contained state. The video devotes a major section to what Lyon calls annihilation energy, a more extreme form in which the impulse is not simply to push back but to erase or destroy. She places this alongside a discussion of sadism and of the moment when a person can harm others. Her point is that these states are different things, and that treating them as one undifferentiated "anger" is part of why people either suppress everything or act out in ways they later regret.

Hill's own metaphor captures the practical stakes. He describes wanting the energy to be productive rather than feeling "like Godzilla all the time," destroying buildings and relationships as he moves through his day. Lyon agrees that the goal is to unravel the pattern and direct the energy. That means distinguishing what is being felt, what it is connected to, and how much of it the present situation can actually hold.

How do you direct anger without letting it run the day?

The video's later sections move from naming the emotion to working with the body that holds it. The chapter markers point to discussion of bracing patterns, cultural differences in how anger is expressed, and what Lyon calls life force, the vitality that becomes available when stored tension begins to release. Lyon also points to the diaphragm and to the way tightness in the body can keep a person locked in the same defensive posture long after the original threat has passed. In her framing, bracing is itself a stored pattern, and loosening it is part of how the held energy gets to move.

Several threads from the conversation suggest a practical approach. Give the emotion a place to be felt rather than a demand that it be discharged on cue. Connect any physical expression to the experience it belongs to, not to a generic script. Expect that the work may need more than one conversation, because the material returns in layers as capacity grows. And recognize that surfacing anger is often evidence of progress, a sign that the pool is finally large enough to hold what was pushed beneath it.

Where to go from here

If this conversation names something you have been living with, the video itself is the fullest source, and Lyon and Hill speak with more nuance and humor than any summary can capture. Lyon's playlist, "The Importance of Anger and Healthy Aggression," gathers related material on the same themes. Her newsletter at irenelyon.com offers weekly educational pieces and updates. For a structured starting point, her Smart Body Smart Mind Foundations course, available at smartbodysmartmind.com, is the first step in her online curriculum, and she notes that a monthly membership is open to people who have completed Foundations or the 21 Day Tune-Up. Hill's own coaching work can be explored through his Linktree, and the 2024 interview between the two, on spasmodic dysphonia and human expression, is a useful companion for anyone interested in how the body carries what the voice cannot say.