The Anger We Weren’t Allowed to Feel

Reflections from the therapy room: when people come with an internalised sense of "I am a bad person".

One of the themes that keeps resurfacing in the therapy room is how difficult it is for many people to feel angry about the needs that were not met in their childhood. Not because the pain, disappointment or anger aren’t there, but because they were never allowed to exist.

Specifically, the feeling of anger is often the most forbidden feeling in clinical work. People come extremely protective of their caregivers, not wanting to admit that they were left feeling hurt or unseen by them as children. But when a child isn’t permitted to express anger toward a caregiver, when it feels too frightening, too unsafe, too threatening to the relationship with them, that anger doesn’t disappear.

It turns inward.

It becomes guilt, shame, and often a lifelong belief that “I am the problem. This must all be my fault.”

Fairbairn captured this dynamic in his paper “The repression and return of bad objects”. He proposed that children will do almost anything to preserve the sense that their parents are good, safe, predictable figures. When the caregiving environment fails, even subtly, the child cannot risk the thought that “my parent or environment is insufficient” because often the child cannot survive that truth.

However, when the child instead thinks “I am the bad one”, they can preserve the “goodness of their objects” — meaning that they can preserve the idea that their caregivers, their environment and, therefore, the world around them are good and safe. This is far more important to a young child — accepting that the main people who care about them, and the world around them, are unfair or dangerous feels far more threatening than the idea that they have something bad in them. If they have the bad in them, they can at least feel in control if it. So, as Fairbairn puts it, “outer security is purchased at the price of inner security”.

So instead, the psyche rearranges itself to protect the attachment:

“The object (the other) cannot be bad… therefore I must be.”

This is where the anger goes, not outward, but inward, it becomes an internal critic, a sense of being too much or not enough.

What makes this particularly difficult is that many people assume they “shouldn’t” feel angry at all. Maybe this is because they feel that that they weren’t abused (with the sense of physical abuse which is easier to see and name); or because their parents were “normal”; their childhood looks fine on paper; they believe they’ve been lucky, and therefore have no entitlement to their anger.

But so much of developmental trauma is subtle, cumulative, and relational. It’s often in the chronic misattunement: the parent who loved you but wasn’t truly present, or the moments when you needed emotional validation and comfort and received silence or just practical advice instead. The feeling of being seen only in certain versions of yourself — the helpful one, the cheerful one, the competent one.

These micro-experiences rarely make it into family narratives, but they shape the architecture of the adult psyche: our patterns in relationships, our tolerances, our fears, our longing for closeness, and our dread of it.

Fairbairn would say that these unmet needs become internal objects — structures in the psyche that continue to replay old dynamics. Winnicott would add that the unthinkable becomes thinkable only when another mind is there to hold it. Fonagy perhaps would call it the restoration of reflective function: being able to understand your internal world without collapsing into it.

This is where therapy enters not as a technique, but as a relationship.

Not to assign blame, but to be able to hold and contain a truth that has remained repressed for years.

The therapy room and the relationship with the therapist can be a container for unexpressed feelings, and often the therapist’s job is to model that “there are no forbidden feelings here, all parts of you are welcome, and no matter what you say to me, I won’t collapse.”

And perhaps one of the deeper aims of therapy is to metabolise, and eventually release, the internalised bad object. To no longer carry an inherited sense of defectiveness as a way of protecting the image of a caregiver.

But this process also requires a second truth, one that is equally tender and unsettling: our parents were ordinary, imperfect human beings.

Just like we are.

Not omnipotent. Not all-knowing. Just people with their own histories, limitations, and blind spots.

For a child, this realisation is overwhelming - as often the fantasy of all-powerful caregivers is what protects them from an unbearable world.

For an adult, the same realisation can be grounding and can anchor us in reality.

In a world where no one is perfect, anger becomes permissible and is no longer a threat to attachment.

It says:

“My needs were real.”

“I deserved my needs to be met.”

“I am not bad for having feelings.”

The paradox of therapy is that only when we stop idealising our caregivers, or protecting them from our feelings, can we finally stop blaming ourselves.

Anger is not the enemy.

It is a doorway back to the self we had to leave behind in order to survive.

References:

Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1943). The repression and the return of bad objects (with special reference to the ‘war neuroses’). British Journal of Medical Psychology, 19, 327–341. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8341.1943.tb00328.x