Feminine Rage Is Not the Problem. Suppressing It Is.

There is a version of a woman most of us have seen. Tight jaw. Clipped responses. A bitterness that has settled into the lines of her face over decades. She is not dramatic. She is not difficult. She is just someone who was never given permission to be angry, and so the anger went somewhere else.

It went into her body. Into her relationships. Into the slow, quiet erosion of her aliveness.

On a recent episode of Sex Ritual Radio on KXFM, I sat down with Sarah Lane, founder of Rage Retreats and creator of a somatic modality called Breath Twerk, to have one of the most honest conversations I have recorded about feminine anger. What it actually is, why we suppress it, what it costs us, and what becomes possible when we finally let it move.

What Rage Actually Is

Sarah defines rage as energy. Specifically, as emotion in motion, and emotion that is trying to go somewhere.

That distinction matters. Because rage and aggression are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the primary reasons women stay silent.

Aggression is what happens when anger gets picked up and thrown at someone else. It becomes a weapon. It causes harm. Rage, on its own, is simply a force. Like fire. The same fire that burns down a city can warm your hands at a bonfire. The same fire that destroys can be channeled into art, into advocacy, into decisive action, into change.

The problem is not the fire. The problem is that most women were never taught how to work with it. They were taught to put it out.

How the Good Girl Gets Made

From the time we are small, girls are socialized away from anger. Tantrums are punished. Raised voices are met with shame. The message, delivered early and often, is: be pleasant. Be manageable. Be liked.

Boys are given a different set of rules. They are allowed to be angry but not sad. Girls are allowed to be sad but not angry. And so two generations of people grow up with half of their emotional range available to them, and they bring those incomplete selves into relationships, into beds, into boardrooms, into their own inner lives.

The woman who has never been allowed to rage does not stop feeling it. She turns it inward. It becomes passive aggression, chronic people pleasing, bitterness, physical tension held in the jaw, the hips, the pelvic floor. It becomes the inability to orgasm because surrender requires safety and safety requires authenticity, and authenticity requires being allowed to feel the full range of what you actually feel.

Sarah put it simply: shame is what keeps it hidden. And the thing underneath the shame is almost always a combination of rage and grief that have never been given air.

What Happens at a Rage Retreat

Sarah created Rage Retreats as a space for women to alchemize anger into power and purpose. Not to perform rage. Not to wallow in it. But to let it move through the body with intention and support, and see what is on the other side.

The retreat includes physical expression of anger, screaming, pillow punching, movement, sound, and it is held by facilitators who are trauma informed and nervous system educated. Nothing is forced. Everything is titrated to what each woman can actually hold in that moment.

What consistently happens after the rage ritual, Sarah told me, is pleasure. Not manufactured pleasure. A genuine opening. When anger that has been stored in the womb space and the body for years finally moves, something else becomes available. A wellspring of sensation, of aliveness, of capacity that was always there, just buried.

This is why the retreat includes Breath Twerk at the end of the rage work. Combining breathwork with the spiral, undulating movements of twerking activates the lower chakras, the root, sacral, and solar plexus, where rage tends to live. The body begins to remember what it feels like to be free in itself.

Rage in Spiritual Communities

I want to name something that bothers me, and that I think Sarah named beautifully.

The spiritual community is not always a safe place for rage. There is a particular brand of spiritual bypassing that turns anger into a personal failing. You are triggered because you have not done your healing. This is just your wound. Alchemize your own energy. Hold space.

That language can be useful. It can also be weaponized. When a facilitator uses spiritual framing to shut down legitimate anger rather than sitting with it, that is not healing. That is control. Sarah called it clearly: that is cult-like behavior, and we need to use our discernment about which spaces actually welcome our full truth and which ones only welcome the pretty, regulated parts of us.

Anger is information. It shows us where a boundary has been crossed, where something we value has been violated, where we need to use our voice. A spiritual practice that cannot make room for that information is not a complete practice. It is missing the entire lower half of the body.

Anger In or Anger Out: Which One Are You?

Sarah offered a framework that I found immediately useful.

There are two primary patterns. Anger in means you suppress and silence. You do not show your anger in the moment. You hold it, smooth it over, and it comes out later as passive aggression, physical tension, or quiet resentment. The medicine for anger in is expression. Grab a pillow. Put on music. Give the anger somewhere to go, even just for ninety seconds.

Anger out means expression comes easily, sometimes too easily. The anger moves fast and can tip into aggression before you have a chance to work with it. The medicine for anger out is breath. Coming back into the body, feet on the ground, water on the skin, slowing the fire down just enough to ask what it is actually here to tell you.

Both patterns need the same thing underneath: awareness, permission, and a safe container. What differs is the direction of the medicine.

What I Have Learned in My Own Work with Rage

I grew up with a mother who was bipolar, and one of the things that shaped me early was the sense that too much emotion was dangerous. My mother's emotional intensity was unpredictable and sometimes directed at me. So I learned to check myself. I do not hold onto things for long. I burn fast and then I let go.

But I also absorbed the message, from her and from the world, that my power was too much. That I needed to make myself smaller to be loved. I talk about sex parties and kink and taboo topics on the radio every week, and I still feel afraid sometimes to be my full, opinionated, erotic, messy self on social media.

The work is not finished. It is ongoing. And conversations like this one with Sarah are part of how I keep doing it.

A Note on Safety

If you are in a relationship with someone whose anger becomes physical or makes you feel unsafe in your body, the boundary is not six feet. The boundary is the door. No amount of rage work, breathwork, or conscious communication is a substitute for physical safety. Please get yourself to safety first. Everything else comes after.

For anyone else who is carrying anger that has had nowhere to go, this is the invitation.

Where to Find Sarah Lane

If you want to experience a Rage Retreat, visit rageretreats.com. If you want to explore Breath Twerk, her modality combining breathwork and movement, visit breathtwerk.com. You can also find her on Instagram at Sarah Lane and at Rage Retreats.

For the full conversation, including Sarah's personal story of growing up with two older brothers and an absent father, her journey from physical fighting in high school to facilitating rage rituals, and the moment she realized she was missing the entire lower half of her body in her spiritual practice, find that episode of Sex Ritual Radio on KXFM and wherever you listen to podcasts.

If rage, grief, or suppressed emotion is showing up in your intimacy and you want support working with it, that is exactly the kind of somatic and relational work I do in private coaching. Applications are open at roseheartsong.com.

Rose Heartsong is a certified intimacy coach and the host of Sex Ritual Radio. She works with couples, men, and women who are ready to stop managing themselves and start living from the full force of who they actually are. Your heartsong is waiting.