What If Emotional Regulation Is Actually Self-Suppression?

A provocation on anger, suppression, and the inherited operating system

As one learns to listen to the sensations of the body, presence to one’s feelings and emotions in the moment becomes more accessible. Instead of suppressing, you now feel anger well up like a wave crashing ashore.

Then the judgement creeps in – you’re so emotional, why are you angry, it’s not that serious – moments begin to replay. Scenes from a distant or not so past, the conditioning – the socialized mind.

The thoughts slowly trigger feelings of shame, maybe anxiety, pummeling into a downward spiral of feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness.

Someone else’s shortcoming, insecurity, or calculated attack - quickly becomes internalized, worn as an oppressive armor.

The Triple Jeopardy

Anger is a sacred gift we’ve been socialized to suppress, manage, control, or, unabashedly, without consequences, express.

A core human emotion that we haven’t been taught to honor, or get curious about.

Maybe it’s time we treat her as a dear friend with information that we may not want to hear, but because we know she has our best interest at hand - are willing to listen to.

Feedback, data, that with proper nurturing can become a source of power, a tool for alchemy.

Instead, we take this sacred tool for alchemy and use it as a tool of harm to ourselves and others.

A core disease of the inherited operating system.

Instead, what replaces this misinterpreted data is shame at best; at worst, a complete disconnection from the present, where all power lives. Often both.

It’s a sort of triple jeopardy - you don’t get to be with what is, the missed opportunity of a powerful healing and evolutionary tonic, and to hammer the nail into the coffin – the internalization (or externalization, depending on the side of the coin you live on) of poison to the soul of humanity.

What most people think of as emotional regulation is the mastery of one of the operating system’s most powerful cocktails - spiritual bypassing, rimmed along the suppression/oppression continuum, spiked with that 160 proof mind control.

Three Costumes of the Same Wound

And this is in best case scenario. Many don’t even have access to this toxic form of self-mastery. For this lot, their fate is left to the diabolical forces of manipulation.

I’ve come to realize that the trope of the angry black woman is – while quite malicious as a stereotype, quite actually a spell aiming to disconnect and disembody the Black woman from her righteous rage and sacred anger.

While a seemingly more advantageous stance - the tears of white fragility - anger cosplayed as fear or sadness - replaces anger with victimhood and powerlessness that only deepens the trench of neuroticism, incessant anxiety, and pill-popping.

Climbing the disillusioned hierarchy of this viral-fueled operating system - a seemingly more powerful play - the rage of entitled and wounded masculinity, where anger cosplays as dominance and power. This move — replacing anger with potentially the deepest wound of them all — loss of identity without a subject to oppress, zero source without a subject to siphon.

Thus deepening the trench of the very misplaced rage projected on the first lot.

And what we see play out on the world stage — violence as the only means to exist, and the instinct to consume every energy-giving and sustaining thing on this planet.

The Original Sin

And we come to see a vicious cycle to extract life from everything that gives life itself.

Fueled, at each level, by the original sin – separation from self.