Grey Hair, Pyjamas, and Righteous Anger
Why there’s a punch bag upstairs.
For most of my life, I believed anger wasn’t very becoming.
Not very Christian.
Not very kind.
Not very mature.
Anger was something to manage quietly. Internally. Preferably invisibly.
Good girls don’t explode.
Faithful women forgive quickly.
Strong people cope.
If something hurts, you deal with it in yourself.”
But trauma has a way of surfacing emotions we’ve neatly filed away.
And lately, one emotion has been knocking very loudly.
Anger.
When the Body Refuses to Stay Polite
As I’ve been working through past trauma, I’ve noticed something uncomfortable: my body has been holding a lot of unexpressed “grr.”
Racing heart.
Pounding chest.
Tingly hands.
Restless sleep.
That wired-but-exhausted feeling that leaves you shaky and brittle.
It would be easier if anger stayed in the realm of thoughts, something to journal through or pray about quietly. But my therapist reminded me:
We are whole people.
Body. Mind. Spirit.
Not everything can be processed purely in our thinking. Sometimes the body needs to move.
In Burnout, Emily and Amelia Nagoski describe how stress is a physiological cycle. If a lion attacked your village, you didn’t just sit in a circle analysing it. You ran. You fought. You killed the lion. You ate together. You buried the remains. You celebrated. The threat was gone. The stress cycle is completed.
But in modern life, our lions are different.
Systemic failures.
Relational betrayals.
Injustice.
Low-level, chronic stress that never fully resolves.
There is no lion to chase. No clear ending. And so the stress chemicals stay in the body.
And we call it anxiety.
Or insomnia.
Or “Why can’t I just cope better?”
The Punch Bag Confession
Which is how, at 55, grey-haired and supposedly sensible, I found myself ordering a blow-up punch bag.
It now lives in the room above my son’s bedroom.
There is something faintly ridiculous about being a middle-aged woman in pyjamas giving an inflatable cylinder a determined pummelling.
At one point, my 20-year-old appeared upstairs, slightly bemused:
“Mum… what are you doing?”
After a brief explanation about stress cycles and nervous systems, he and his girlfriend both had a go too! bonding. I’m calling that therapeutic family bonding.
I wasn’t hitting a person.
I wasn’t rehearsing revenge.
I was moving energy.
Letting anger have a physical expression that harmed no one.
And afterwards?
Calmer.
More grounded.
Less jarring in my own skin.
The stress cycle had moved.
Anger as Signal
For a long time, I labelled anger as “bad.” Something to get rid of quickly. Something unspiritual.
But I’m slowly learning not to label emotions as good or bad.
They are signals.
Anger says:
Something isn’t right.
A boundary was crossed.
Harm occurred.
Injustice stands.
Harriet Lerner writes,
“Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.”
That line has undone me a little.
Because if anger is a signal, then suppressing it doesn’t make me holy. It makes me disconnected.
Brené Brown says,
“We can’t selectively numb emotion. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
If I shut down anger to appear composed, I shut down joy and clarity and conviction too.
For years, I tried to move straight to forgiveness without fully acknowledging harm. But forgiveness that bypasses anger isn’t peace, it’s avoidance.
Anger doesn’t mean I’m bitter.
It means something mattered.
Jesus Wasn’t Meek and Mild
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I’ve been thinking about the story of Jesus clearing the temple.
He saw exploitation in a space meant for prayer. He saw worship corrupted and the vulnerable pushed aside. And according to John’s Gospel, he sat down and made a whip of cords before overturning the tables.
He made it.
That detail matters.
This wasn’t a temper tantrum.
It was intentional.
Purposeful.
Costly.
We’ve inherited a very polite version of Jesus. Soft-spoken. Mild. Perpetually serene.
But the Gospels show a man who confronted hypocrisy, defended the vulnerable, and embodied the full range of human emotion.
If Jesus was fully human, then anger itself cannot be sinful.
It’s what we do with it that matters.
His anger was not ego-driven.
It was protective.
Rooted in love.
And perhaps that’s the difference.
Moving Beyond Politeness
I think I am gently moving out from under the tyranny of politeness.
Not into aggression.
Not into cruelty.
But into honesty.
There is a difference between being kind and being silent.
There is a difference between being faithful and being emotionally numb.
Completing the stress cycle might look like:
A stompy walk.
A full-on game of badminton.
Crying fully.
Praying with your whole body.
Or yes, buying a blow-up punching bag and giving it a determined thump.
Anger, expressed safely, has not made me harder.
It has made me clearer.
Clearer about injustice.
Clearer about boundaries.
Clearer about what love actually protects.
Maybe anger isn’t the enemy.
Maybe unexpressed anger is.
And maybe sometimes the most spiritual thing a grey-haired woman can do is stop being polite…
and start being honest about what hurts.
And if that honesty occasionally involves pyjamas and a punch bag upstairs,
Well, perhaps that’s just one small way of letting the body finish the story the mind has been trying to carry alone.