What Happened When My Client Finally Felt Her Rage (And Why It Matters for All of Us)

I’m coaching a woman right now who is intelligent, articulate, and dedicated to her inner work – and as we discovered today, was carrying unprocessed rage from childhood.

She understands her childhood patterns, can articulate them with ease, and she can track them back to inciting incidents.

Today, I led her into a process to feel what was underneath it all. At almost every step of the way, her Mind stepped in to analyze, explain and explore what was happening, why it was happening and where it was coming from. 

Each time, I would acknowledge the thoughts and her mind’s desire to protect her from feeling, and then I would invite her to return to directly felt experience in the body.

And she did.

Over and over again, as we got deeper and deeper through the layers, moving through irritation, weariness, sadness, loneliness, fear, panic and finally – finally! into terror, humiliation and rage.

That was the root – what is called a samskara in Tantra. 

That was what her mind had been protecting her from for decades, because understanding a pattern is not the same as dissolving the root of the pattern. 

She was so courageous – choosing to feel terror, choosing to feel humiliation, and choosing to feel rage.

And as she felt it, I got a flash of Donald Trump.

I’d watched a clip of him last night at a sports game in Miami, the crowd booing so loudly that he couldn’t be heard as he spoke.

I’d watched him appear to ignore the crowd and talk louder.

I’d watched the set of his jaw, the energy that moved through him, the intense shutdown of the emotional experience.

I don’t know Donald’s childhood history, but I’m pretty sure that he’s carrying a shit ton of unprocessed terror, humiliation and rage. I felt it in this client session.

When the client emerged, feeling lighter, feeling the release, we debriefed the session.

I mentioned the flash of Trump that I’d had, and how when one of us has the courage to fully meet our emotional experience and alchemize it, it weakens that aspect in the collective field. 

The client – who’s American, responded.

‘I’ve been watching everything going on, particularly in Minnesota, and I’ve been feeling so helpless and powerless to do anything. But this is part of it, isn’t it?’

Yup – it is part of it. 

How we show up as (apparent) individuals matters because it ALL influences the collective.

Every time another human has the courage to meet terror and digest it, without inflicting it upon the Other as projection, scapegoating, or violence, they’re doing the work for all of us.

Jung understood this when he wrote that the psychological rule says we cannot change anything unless we accept it – and that condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

When we metabolize our own unprocessed rage instead of weaponizing it, when we alchemize our humiliation instead of performing dominance to mask it, we’re literally changing the field we all swim in.

This is how individual transformation becomes collective healing, one courageous act of feeling at a time.

The moment we match their rage with unprocessed rage, their dehumanization with our own dehumanization, we’ve lost – we’re just recycling the same trauma through different bodies.

As Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that, and hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

This client didn’t bypass her rage or transcend it prematurely – she went all the way down into it, felt it fully, and let it move through, ending with a shaking practice in front of photos of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.

That’s what allowed it to alchemize, and that’s the kind of inner work that actually shifts what’s possible in the outer world.

May we ALL feel safe enough to alchemize our unprocessed emotional residue. 
With love and gratitude to this client, for allowing the sharing of her experience.

✨ Be the Light • Hold the Dark ✨