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Last Updated on October 30, 2023 by Randy Withers, LCMHC
Anger is a valid emotion that protects the raw feelings beneath the surface of frustrating situations or misunderstandings. Exploring it helps you better understand other people’s anger, and can improve relationships with your children, friends and partner. Rage journaling allows you to express anger in a judgment-free zone to help you release stress and validate your emotions so you can deal with them more healthily.
What Is a Rage Journal?
A rage journal is a place where you can write down your thoughts and feelings when you’re feeling angry. It helps you to process feelings of rage and frustration without feeling like you have to push them down.
How Does Rage Journaling Help With Anger?
Someone may have told you being mad or expressing your frustration is inappropriate or harmful, but anger is inevitable in any relationship. Sometimes, parenting can feel frustrating because of exhaustion, overstimulation and dealing with daily demands while trying to balance your life. While you want to protect your children from the harmful effects of parental anger, you still need an outlet to release your feelings.
Rage journaling gives you the space to express yourself fully and unreservedly without the fear of ruining relationships, or affecting your children’s mental and emotional health. The practice of journaling also helps you maintain mental well-being, and develop self-compassion and self-awareness. As you journal, you’ll discover anger is a secondary emotion that can help you understand what really gets to you.
Why Should You Have a Rage Journal
When you write about your anger in a safe place, you begin to understand the emotion and how you can use it to improve situations or relationships. Letting go of anger through rage journaling:
- Validates your emotions.
- Reduces stress and anxiety.
- Improves sleep. If you’ve ever stayed up all night trying to process your anger, you know how much the emotion can affect your ability to sleep peacefully.
- Maintains physical well-being. Research shows anger connects to physical ailments like IBS, back pain and stomach issues.
- Helps you work through people-pleasing and passive-aggressive behaviors.
- Gives you the opportunity to look at things from another perspective and choose different thoughts and reactions.
- Helps you to protect your relationships and communicate more effectively with your kids or partner.
How to Start a Rage Journal
These steps will help you to find a way to rage on the page that works for you.
- Decide on the Medium
The intention of a rage journal is to release anger and frustration without fear of judgment. If you want to burn the pages or tear them out when you’re done — which can be cathartic — a spiral-bound notepad will work. You could also have a locked note in your smartphone with a password
- Write How You Want
Your journaling can be anything you want and be as explicit as you want. You can write about your anger and around it. How did a situation make you feel? Where are you feeling frustration or resentment in your body?
One journal entry could be a brain dump listing what made you angry or you could draw a rage monster. Another journal entry could be a diagram mapping your anger and the feelings behind it, or a letter to someone who frustrated you.
- Be Consistent
Think of rage journaling as a first step to understanding anger. When you review your journal entries, you can see trends and discover triggers or areas that particularly sting. This helps you get to the root cause and understand how anger protects you from feelings like fear, insecurity, guilt, heartbreak or shame.
Anger also inevitably involves other people or situations that call for a response. Once you’ve processed your feelings, you can use the clarity to communicate how you feel to your child, friend, partner or colleague. Anger can improve situations or relationships when you express it properly.
Rage Page Prompts to Get You Started
If you’re not sure where to start, here are some questions and prompts to get you writing about your frustrations:
- If anger was a person, what would they be saying right now? What would anger say about yourself and your life?
- Make a list of everything that frustrated you today.
- Rate your rage. On a scale of 1-10, how angry do you feel? What are you angry about? What happened and how did it affect you?
- Is your anger trying to protect you from another tough emotion? What other feelings can you associate with this situation?
- Try anger word association. Write the word ‘anger’ in a bubble in the middle of the page. Write some other emotions that come to mind related to the situation.
- How does this situation make you feel? What sensations are going through your body?
What Comes After the Rage?
Once you’ve written about your feelings, take a few minutes to reflect. It helps to ask yourself what you can do next. What are some trends and patterns you notice? Do you need to have a conversation with your partner or friend? Is there something you want to work on so you can react differently when you feel frustrated next time?
Final Thoughts
Rage journaling is a cathartic experience that allows you to express and explore freely so you can deal with frustrating situations healthily. It’ll also help you work through the emotions affecting relationships with your loved ones. As you release your anger, you release stress and tension from your body, and find better ways to cope.
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