When You’re Angry: How Art Therapy Can Help
The poet Leopold Schefer wrote that truth is fire and that to tell the truth is to glow and to burn. Klimt wrote those words across one of his early drawings, giving them a place to burn on the page.
Maybe you’re only reading this because someone you love asked you to. Perhaps they’ve said something has to change, or that they can’t keep doing this. Part of you may want to close this page. That’s alright. However, there may be another part of you that wants to meet this side of yourself, to understand why things have become so difficult. You can bring both parts with you.
“I want to be better. I don’t want to be so cruel.”
I hear something like this often, though rarely at first. People don’t tend to arrive saying they’re angry. The anger comes later, when it feels safe enough. Often anger isn’t really about the cup left on the side. Many of the people I work with are angry with ghosts: parents who have died, family who caused harm, adults who couldn’t be adults, so the child had to be. It can feel mad to be furious with people who can’t hear you any more, so the anger goes underground and comes out sideways.
In my room, anger is usually embarrassed. It might come as a wall of silence, or a throw that stops itself halfway. Sometimes it comes at me. Some people can’t find the word for it, or can’t reach it at all. I sit with them so they can listen to themselves, hear what they’re carrying and find out what it is and why the weight feels so heavy.
I understand the hesitation. Admitting you’re struggling can feel like admitting something is wrong with you. There’s often a fear that if you start looking, you’ll open a vault you can’t close again. Therapy can also feel like an indulgence, time and money that ought to go on something more important.
The psychologist Carol Tavris suggested that working with anger means working with the mind, the body and behaviour: noticing what sets it off, calming down enough to think and finding new ways to respond. These all matter, but they rely on being able to explain, in words, why you get angry. For many people, that’s exactly what’s hard.
Art therapy offers another way in. Making something slows you down, so you can reflect rather than react. It’s less threatening than looking someone in the eye and it draws on more than language alone, helping creativity, words and memory connect.
The materials offer a boundary. The paper has edges and the clay has weight, so the anger has somewhere to go without things getting out of control. It can be hit and pressed and pounded and the clay doesn’t mind.
On one page you can hold feelings that contradict each other: the rage and the love, wanting them back and wanting them gone. Seeing them side by side helps build an observer self, a part of you that can step back and look rather than be swept along.
Over time the images collect, holding the work even on the days you can’t reach it yourself. There’s no right or wrong way to do any of this. For people who have spent their lives trying to get it right, that can be a relief in itself.
You don’t need to know where your anger comes from before you get in touch and you don’t need to have it under control. You just don’t have to be alone with it in the dark.
If you’d like to explore this further, I’d be very happy to hear from you. I see people for 50-minute sessions, in person, in Berkhamsted.
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