What Rage Is Trying to Tell Us
“Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.”
I recently came across this quote by Cormac McCarthy from his novel Stella Maris while doomscrolling.
Yes, even therapists doomscroll.
With social media increasingly replacing the third spaces (Prithviraj, 2024) where we once gathered, connected, and decompressed, stepping away can be particularly difficult. This is especially true during periods of heightened social and political stress, when our phones provide an unending stream of information, outrage, crisis, and commentary (Neely, 2026). The world can feel impossible to look away from. Sometimes, looking away can even feel like an act of indifference.
Over time, I have come to recognize that while I specialize in working with members of LGBTQIA+ communities, Kink communities, and Consensually Non-Monogamous communities, a deeper throughline in my clinical work is the experience of ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief.
So, when I see the word "grief", I pay attention. But for the purposes of this post, I want to focus on the other emotion in McCarthy's quote:
RAGE.
Rage Is Not the Problem
I have come to think of rage as an amplified experience of anger, often accompanied by anxiety.
Anger can mobilize us in response to injustice. It can tell us that something matters, that a boundary has been crossed, or that something needs to change.
Anxiety can mobilize us in a different way. It encourages us to anticipate what might happen next, prepare ourselves, make plans, and protect ourselves.
When these experiences intensify, they can become rage: a powerful combination of activation, urgency, fear, and a profound sense that something must be done.
And, frankly, there is a lot to be angry about right now.
Anger is already heavily stigmatized within our culture. I have always found it curious that we have anger management classes, but we do not generally offer classes for managing sadness, anxiety, joy, or grief. We tend to treat anger as though the emotion itself is the problem.
Clinically, I often find myself working hard to help clients make contact with their anger. It is rarely comfortable. Anger is activating. It asks something of us. It can bring us into contact with injustice, helplessness, betrayal, fear, and powerlessness.
Sometimes, when anger does not feel safe to express outwardly, it boomerangs inward. We become angry at ourselves for having the feeling. We become ashamed of our intensity. We turn the anger into self-criticism.
And, of course, there is a legitimate concern about anger escalating into aggression or violence. But feeling anger is not the same thing as acting aggressively. We can acknowledge anger without allowing it to dictate our behavior. We can feel rage without becoming violent.
In fact, I would argue that learning to tolerate and move through the intensity of anger can actually help us become less afraid of it. When we allow ourselves to experience anger, understand what it is communicating, and find healthy ways to move that activation through our bodies, we create more choice about what happens next.
And choice matters.
There Is a Lot to Be Angry About
Lately, I have found myself sitting with more and more clients who are filled with rage. And that makes sense.
We are living through a period of profound social and political stress. We are witnessing ongoing global crises, increasing political polarization, attacks on marginalized communities, frustration with political inaction, and the repeated experience of watching people in positions of power make decisions that feel deeply disconnected from the realities of the people they govern.
For many of my clients, particularly those whose identities and communities are directly impacted by political and social decisions, these are not abstract issues.
• They are personal.
• They are about safety.
• They are about belonging.
• They are about whether the people and institutions that are supposed to protect them actually will.
Anger and rage, in this context, are not necessarily signs that something is wrong with us. Sometimes, they are appropriate responses to what is happening around us.
The goal of therapy is not always to make the anger go away. Sometimes, the goal is to help someone listen to it:
• What is the anger telling you?
• What does it care about?
• What boundary has been crossed?
• What feels threatened?
• What do you wish you could change?
And perhaps most importantly:
What can you do with all of this energy?
Moving Rage Through the Body
When clients are experiencing significant anger or rage, I often encourage them to experiment with intentional, embodied ways of processing that activation outside of our sessions.
Some strategies I have recommended include:
Write it out, then destroy it
Write the uncensored version; the thing you cannot or will not say out loud. It does not have to be reasonable, diplomatic, or intended for anyone else. When you are done, rip it up, shred it, or throw it away.
Anger walks
Go for a walk with the specific intention of allowing yourself to feel angry. You do not have to make it productive or solve anything. Walk, breathe, swear under your breath if that is your thing, and let your body move.
Safe venting
Vent in therapy or with someone you trust who has the capacity to listen without immediately trying to fix, minimize, or redirect your experience. This can be especially useful when the anger needs to be heard and witnessed, rather than simply discharged.
Boxing or other physically demanding movement
Boxing classes, running, weightlifting, dancing, or other forms of intense physical activity can provide a way to work with the urgency and physiological activation that often accompanies anger. These options require more energy, access, or planning, but can be useful when anger feels particularly physical.
Rage rooms
For some people, a rage room can provide a structured environment for physically expressing intense activation. This generally requires the most planning, money, and access. As with any strategy, the goal is not to rehearse violence, but to experiment with safely moving intense energy through the body. Click here for locations in Denver.
The important distinction is that these strategies are not about getting rid of anger as quickly as possible. They are about making room for it without letting it make all of our decisions for us.
Rage and Agency
This brings me back to McCarthy's quote:
“Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.”
I am not sure I completely agree with the first sentence. Sometimes we rage about things that cannot be fixed. Sometimes rage is the first stage of realizing that something is deeply unjust, even when we do not yet know what to do about it. But I do find something useful in the distinction.
Rage contains energy. It says:
• This matters.
• I do not accept this.
• Something needs to change.
• Grief says something different:
• Something has been lost.
And sometimes, we need to know which one we are experiencing. If something can be changed, perhaps our rage can help us identify where to put our energy. If something cannot be changed, perhaps our rage eventually needs somewhere else to go: toward grief, mourning, acceptance, or simply acknowledging the limits of our control.
Neither response is weakness. And neither requires us to stop caring. Perhaps the work is not to become less angry. Perhaps the work is to become more skillful with our anger:
• To let it inform us without consuming us.
• To let it move through us without moving us toward harm.
• To listen to what it is protecting.
And, when possible, to transform some of that enormous energy into action, advocacy, boundaries, connection, or change.
Because sometimes rage is telling us that something matters deeply. And sometimes the most courageous thing we can do with that rage is figure out what comes next.
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