Similarly, anger unexperienced seems larger than it is.
It’s kind of like the monster under the bed. When you get down on your knees and look it straight in the eyes you realize it was actually just a crumpled up t-shirt.
When we stop ourselves from feeling our anger (or for that matter any emotion) there is a distorting effect that occurs. It seems unmanageable. It seems bigger, uglier, more daunting than we think we can handle. Have you ever had the thought, once you finally acknowledge an upset, "oh, that wasn’t as bad as I expected?"
Feeling our anger is distinct from expressing it. Once we allow ourselves to feel it, we can determine whether it is suitable to express it. The point here is that when we leave it unrecognized and keep turning our back on it, we create a self-fulfilling narrative that we aren’t actually strong enough or wise enough to deal with whatever it is.
The protective part of us wants to keep us from feeling anything unpleasant, and in doing so we actually amplify our perception of how unpleasant it is. When you build a big wall with spikes on the top and barbed wire surrounding it, the instinct is to think there is something pretty bad in there.
Emotions are almost never as big and bad as we think they are. We can feel our anger and sadness and become that much more resilient for it.
To right-sizing our perception
