Suppressed aggression

There were about twelve people sitting at the table. Someone made a remark about me that made everyone laugh, and I laughed too. The comment was harmless—or at least that’s what I wanted to believe. While I was laughing—essentially at myself—I was bending a fork under the table. It was a cheap fork that bent easily, and by the time dessert arrived, it looked absolutely grotesque. I slipped it into my bag so no one would see. I carried it all the way home. Then I threw it in the trash bin by the building entrance, like a piece of incriminating evidence.

A part of me spent the whole evening explaining things to me: don’t ruin everyone’s celebration, he didn’t mean any harm, you’re an adult, after all. The living part explained nothing. It simply bent metal, because it had been given nothing else to do.

What is suppressed aggression?

Look at a two-year-old child pulling someone else’s toy car toward himself on the playground. He doesn’t ask for permission, doesn’t choose his words carefully, and doesn’t consider whether it’s convenient for those around him. He simply wants something specific and moves forward to get it. That is aggression in its purest form. Not shouting. Not a blow, but a movement toward what one wants.

Aggression is the means by which a person takes what they need. It is how they set a boundary. It is saying, “This doesn’t work for me.” It is walking away from a conversation where they are being humiliated. It is asking to be paid for their work and stating the amount without looking down. It is saying no to someone who asks in a pitiful voice.

Suppressed aggression is a force that lacks cruelty. It is important to realize that aggression does not simply dissolve or vanish just because we ignore it or fail to think about it. It is forced to find another outlet—and that outlet is always worse than a direct one.

How We Were Taught Not to Get Angry

I am about nine years old, and I have to do something I don’t want to do. I say I don’t want to, but no one listens; instead, they keep trying to persuade me and force me. Eventually, I get angry and start snapping back. In response, I’m told that my behavior is shameful and ungrateful. And I realize I’ve done something wrong—perhaps even something irreparable.

I don’t remember exactly what I said back then. I remember the tone of the reply I got, and how I sat in the room for forty minutes afterward, trying to figure out how to fix the situation. That is how it takes shape. Not through prohibition, but through the price you pay. You are deprived of love because of your anger—not for long, just for an hour or an evening, but that is enough. Ultimately, you draw the only available conclusion: getting angry is dangerous, because it causes love to be withdrawn.

As a person grows up, the prohibition remains in place. It simply stops being something imposed by an outsider and becomes part of oneself. It is no longer Mom saying, “Don’t embarrass me—aren’t you ashamed?”—now, I say it to myself, a split second before I even open my mouth.

How suppressed aggression manifests itself

The body speaks first. A clenched jaw, a back that won’t let go, gastritis, headaches that strike precisely on weekends, that perpetual “stiff neck” from a draft. The body cannot lie about the fact that a person has been holding something in all week long.

Then comes sarcasm. A joke with a hidden barb—the kind followed by, “Oh, come on, I was only kidding.” It is aggression leaking out through a crack; the main door is shut, yet the feeling still needs a way out. Then there is the lateness and forgetfulness regarding the very places one doesn’t want to go. Agreements that lead to nothing: “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do it”—yet nothing gets done, not in a week, not in a month. Then come the misplaced outbursts. You bottle it up at work for six months, only to scream at your child at home over spilled juice—followed by two hours of shame.

Then, everything turns inward. This is the least visible yet most costly part. A person who cannot get angry at others directs that anger at themselves—and does so without mercy. That inner voice tearing you apart at three in the morning is neither conscience nor high standards; it is your own aggression, denied an outward outlet and left with only one available target.

And in the end, a flat “I don’t want anything” sets in. It is neither fatigue nor depression, but indifference—total apathy. Because a single lid presses down on everything alive at once: when you suppress anger, your interest, desire, and appetite for life get stifled along with it. You cannot suppress anger in isolation from all other emotions.

How does suppressed aggression differ from passive aggression?

They are constantly confused, but the difference is simple.

Suppressed aggression is about what happens internally. The person does not realize they are angry; they genuinely believe everything is fine—they just have a headache and, for some reason, no desire to live. Passive aggression is about what happens externally. The anger does find a way out, but via a roundabout route—through silence, a broken promise, sarcasm, or lateness.

Passive aggression is usually the way suppressed emotion finds its way out. The first is the cause; the second is the symptom.

The price of suppressed aggression

I won’t sugarcoat this. The risk is living a life where you never once said out loud what you wanted, only to wonder at the end why things didn’t turn out the way they should have. Not because of bad luck. But because no one around you had any idea.

A second risk involves relationships where so much has gone unsaid that, one day, it all comes pouring out—far out of proportion to the trigger. People don’t break up over a dirty cup; they break up over seven years of silence that finally spilled over because of that dirty cup.

And the third—the quietest one. We rarely get angry at someone we depend on. We get angry at someone who depends on us. A child receives what a boss didn’t—and receives it regularly.

What happens with this in therapy?

For me, it didn’t start with learning to say no. That came much later—and was the hardest part of all. At first, I simply began to notice the fork. Not stopping myself from bending it—just noticing that I was doing it. Noticing that right then, in that very second, something was happening inside me—something called anger, not fatigue or a headache.

It turned out I had no words for it at all. I could say “I’m upset,” “I’m uncomfortable,” or “it’s a bit unpleasant”—all those vague, hollow phrases that mean nothing. I only managed to say “I’m angry” in my therapist’s office on about the third attempt, and it was physically difficult for me.

Then came the first “no.” A small, safe one—not said to a boss or a mother-in-law. Yet I didn’t feel strong. I felt like a rude, ill-mannered person, and I spent three days processing it. That’s how it goes. It doesn’t happen through confidence, but through a process of internal adjustment. It takes time for the psyche to rewire itself, until what once felt unsafe—saying “no”—becomes a matter of habit and routine.

I am a Gestalt therapist working online in Russian and Ukrainian. Aggression, boundaries, and the right to say “no” are the themes clients most frequently bring to me—though they usually phrase them differently: “I’m exhausted,” “I snap at my children,” or “everyone uses me.”

I’m not the sort of person who will teach you how to express anger correctly, following a set of instructions. I’m the sort of person who used to carry a bent fork in her bag. If you recognize yourself in that, we can talk about it.

P.S. By the way, I shouldn’t have thrown away that fork. I should have kept it. It was the first object in years that honestly told me what was happening to me—before I even realized it myself.

P.P.S. From now on, I’ll be writing stories—things I see during sessions. Not symptoms or diagnoses, but scenes.