Why women are so angry as violent prisoners: Cambridge Psychotherapist explains the real causes of your headache and stress – and how you can repair it

Sophie Bond suffered weekly migraine and was in despair by the time she started seeing me three years ago for therapy.

A human resources manager and mother of two, she feared that she was ‘getting crazy’. In meetings she would have panic attacks and to trouble locking herself to control her breathing.

Sophie had migraine symptoms as often as twice a week, usually on her busiest days. She would put down painkillers until she could collapse in bed to sleep with the unbearable experience.

She told me that her problem was stress. And she had enough to be stressed about: she was almost the entire domestic load shop, cooking, cleaning, laundry, plus all drop-offs, pick-ups and admin who are supplied with young children while holding a full-time job.

After almost 20 years as a psychotherapist, I suspected another cause: suppressed anger so deeply, she didn’t even know she felt it.

Sophie was unknowingly angry, furious in fact, at the position in which she was.

She was married, but somehow the responsibility for almost everything on the Domestic Front fell for her. When I asked why, she explained that it was a pattern that had developed while she was on maternity leave. Once she was back to work, it partly continued, she thought, because her husband now earned more than she, so his task felt ‘more important’.

Sophie rarely complained and unconsciously believed that, after she had chosen to have children and a career, she just had to continue with it. But her oppressed anger made her sick.

When I suggested this for the first time for Sophie, she honestly did not believe me.

But I encouraged her to bleed her frustrations – acknowledging that she felt angry and steam out of simple activities such as star jumps and punch cushions.

Within a few weeks she saw improvements in her symptoms and soon she had come up with the idea. Her panic attacks eventually disappeared and her migraine was brought back to the occasional attack.

So how did I know? After graduating from Cambridge, I trained as a forensic psychotherapist and I mainly worked with violent men in secure hospitals, prisons and rehabilitation centers.

I developed a strong, protective sense of their anger: a narrowing of the eyes, a slight clamp of the jaw, often in combination with an irritable or endurance tone.

I thought I had moved to a completely new atmosphere when I went into private practice eight years ago and most of my customers were successful career women.

So it came as a surprise to discover that some showed about the same energy as the violent men.

When they described the continuous requirements with which they were confronted, I could almost smell the cortisol that I had detected in male prisons in the air. The hair stood up in my neck, as if it was in response to a threat.

It was clear that these women, who made their own pesto every day and read their children, ensuring that their work presentations were as well investigated as their childless male colleagues, “saw about the unrealistic expectations of society.

In my West -London practice I have now treated dozens of successful, driven and caring women whose oppressed anger has led to chronic diseases and psychological problems.

In fact, I have written a book, women are angry and now organize a podcast, women are crazy, focused on what it does to us.

We all know that modern life sets intense demands on us – especially to mothers. And anger is a natural response to be asked to do more than you can manage.

So far, so clear. Especially the problems for women arise because many of us have been raised to believe that it is not ok to express negative feelings – anger, resentment, frustration, jealousy.

None of these is considered ‘ladies -like’ – so we learn from childhood to internalize them.

This is especially the case when we become mothers when feelings of anger tend to cause a recoil of shame that we do not ‘appreciate’ our children enough.

But how does suppressed anger lead to physical symptoms?

Everyday challenges – such as people who push us to do more if we have to rest desperate – activate what is called a ‘fight or flight reaction’. Cortisol levels (the stress hormone) are increased while the body is preparing to respond to an observed threat by attacking or running away. But usually you can’t just run away from your problems in modern life. What remains is anger and the drive to attack.

If we, instead of responding, we suppress what we feel, keep our cortisol levels raised and can contribute to inflammation in the body over time.

And increased inflammation can in turn cause or speed up the progression of a broad spectrum of diseases, including cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, autoimmune diseases and even cancer.

The statistics speak for themselves. Women have three times as chance as men to experience migraine, and four times as much a car -immune disease. Women are also more susceptible to depression, stroke and Alzheimer’s disease than men.

For any doubters who are there, I want to emphasize that this is not a cod psychology. The impact of our thoughts, feelings and experiences on our physical health is known.

General practice still depends strongly on antidepressants and medication for anxiety. But time and time again I witnessed that when a woman expresses her indignation, her physical symptoms of convenience.

A patient, Nicky, turned around as he spoke about calls from her furious boss while attending a school concert that her children had begged her not to be missed.

A civil engineer and mother of three, once at home, then had to continue to her usual second service – cooking, cleaning, laundry, homework supervision, bath and finally bedtime – before she opened her laptop at 9 p.m., to make up ‘lost’ working hours.

Her husband, a lawyer, whom they both considered the ‘most important breadwinner’, worked for long hours and was rarely at home in the evening to share the load.

The result of Nicky’s internalized anger? Irritable bowel syndrome, so that one minute of agonizing constipation remained behind and the next minute diarrhea.

Another patient, Amanda, a lawyer, had three teenage children and a mother with dementia. Her husband had left her for his mistress, so the daily juggling was completely her and she was unconsciously furious about. Her oppressed anger manifested herself like psoriasis, an autoimmune disease that causes flaky spots on the skin.

For several months – these changes do not happen overnight – Sophie, Nicky and Amanda have all learned how to recognize feelings of anger and what to do about it.

I recommend activities that consider our minds similar to ‘fighting’, such as beating, punching or throwing pillows, or just screaming (maybe in a car with the windows up …). These are all fast solutions that can help to release anger energy.

The next step was to learn to listen to their anger. So instead of just raging internally when the demands on them were too great, they sometimes started to say ‘no’.

To be honest with the men in the lives of my patients, they don’t want their partners to suffer. Most are very happy to perform more – as soon as the impact of this has not been pointed to them.

But the sad truth is that social conditioning often means that they do not notice things that have to do – and many working mothers struggle for too long, believing that they have no choice.

And what about men? I also have many male customers – but I don’t see these problems in it. Let’s face it, there is just not usually the same pressure to be all things, for all people, always.

And if there were, in a society in which male anger is tolerated, even expected, they would probably respond by shouting (rightly) about the unfairness of all this.

Client names have changed.

Women are angry: why you hide anger and how you do it (£ 16.99, Bonnier Books) is now out.