Our Emotions Are Not the Problem — How We Express Them Is

Why everyone is exploding right now — and what your body is actually trying to tell you.

There is a lot of unrest in the world right now. Facts coming to light that have previously been hidden. Decisions made by people in authority that have devastating consequences on people who didn’t make them. New waves of bad news from every direction we turn.

All of these are triggering explosions of emotion in people across the globe. But those emotions aren’t the problem. Most of them aren’t even personal.

How we choose to suppress or express them — and whether we learn to safely redirect them — is what determines whether they perpetuate the problems or become the foundation of the solution for a harmonious, integrated world.

The grief you feel when another budget fails the most vulnerable. The fury that rises when governments declare peace while approving weapons shipments. The helplessness when the cost of living makes survival a full-time job and you still can’t see a way forward. None of that is weakness. None of it is overreaction.

It is the sound of a lid that can no longer hold.

The Emotional Can of Worms

There’s a concept I teach called the Emotional Can of Worms. It explains how emotions are stored in the body — not individually, not neatly, but stacked, layered, compressed, and interconnected. Like worms in a sealed can. Like a pressure cooker with the lid bolted on.

Every time you swallow an emotion — bite your tongue in the meeting, don’t say the thing at the dinner table, smile when you want to scream — it goes into the can. It doesn’t dissolve. It doesn’t “pass.” It compresses. And every new experience of that same emotional family gets stacked on top of what’s already in there. Anger on anger on anger. Sadness on sadness on sadness. Fear on fear on fear. Going back not just years, but generations.

Because here’s what the science is now confirming: trauma doesn’t just live in your memory. It lives in your body. It lives in your DNA. It is encoded in your genetic expression and passed down through at least three generations of measurable inheritance, with anecdotal and emerging evidence suggesting up to seven. You are not just carrying your own suppressed anger right now. You are carrying your parents’. Your grandparents’. Your great-grandparents’ — people who survived wars, depressions, pandemics, and systems designed to keep them silent.

And it’s not just you — people all over the world are exploding with suppressed material right now. There are volcanoes going off everywhere. And the reason is not that people are suddenly weak or dramatic or unhinged. The reason is that the cans are full. The lids cannot hold anymore.

Anger Is Not What You Think It Is

Here’s what nobody taught us in school: there are three core survival emotions - anger, sadness and fear. Fear stops us falling off a cliff, sadness gives us the compassion to coexist in tribes and anger is a boundary emotion. That’s its entire job. Anger shows up when your system detects that something important has been crossed — your safety, your values, your identity, the people you love.

On the Emotional Spectrum by Esther Hicks Abrahams — a vibrational scale of human emotion from the lowest (powerlessness, grief, depression) to the highest (joy, freedom, love) — anger actually sits higher than depression, powerlessness, and grief. Which means sometimes, getting angry is progress. Sometimes the person who finally snaps and says “this is not okay” has actually climbed up from the numbness and hopelessness they’ve been drowning in.

The fact that quality people all over the world — good people, thoughtful people, the people who actually give a damn — are getting furious right now? That’s not the problem. That is the fuel.

But how we express it? That is what makes it either part of the problem or part of the solution.

The Suppress-or-Explode Cycle

We have created a civilisation that has exactly two settings for emotion: suppress it or explode it. There is no middle. There is no release valve. There is no globally taught, practised, culturally normalised way of moving emotional energy through the body safely.

Have you ever had a day where everything went wrong — stuck in traffic, bad meeting, someone cut you off, phone died — and then you walked in the door and your partner left the lid off the toothpaste and you lost it? They didn’t just get the toothpaste reaction. They got the full weight of the can — every suppressed frustration from that day, that week, that year, that lifetime — dumped on them in a single explosive moment they did nothing to deserve.

That’s the external explosion. And it’s dangerous. Not because the anger is wrong, but because it’s usually misdirected.

On the other side, we have the implosion. The people who don’t explode outward — they collapse inward. The men who are taking their own lives at staggering rates right now? I need you to hear me on this: these are not the people causing problems on this planet. These are the good ones. The ones who care so deeply that they have convinced themselves the world would be better off without them. They feel like a burden. They cannot see a way forward. And they don’t have the emotional infrastructure to process what they’re carrying because nobody ever taught them how.

If you or anyone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, please reach out to your local crisis line. And please remember — suicide does not remove the pain. It passes it on to someone who loves you and wants you to stay alive.

This suppress-or-explode cycle is not new. It is not a modern phenomenon. It is generations of “she’ll be right” meeting generations of “boys don’t cry” meeting generations of “good girls don’t make a fuss.” The cans have been filling since before any of us were born. The budget headlines, the wars, the cost of living, the loneliness epidemic — these aren’t the cause. They’re the final weight on a lid that was already cracking.

And that is how it got this bad.

Shake It Off. Literally.

I learned the most important thing about emotional release from my dog, Daisy.

When Daisy gets startled — a loud noise, a tense moment — she doesn’t sit with it. She doesn’t journal about it. She doesn’t meditate on it. She shakes. Physically, violently, for about ten seconds. Full body. And then she goes back to whatever she was doing.

Gazelles do the same thing. When a gazelle escapes a predator, it doesn’t walk away traumatised and develop an anxiety disorder. It stops, trembles from head to hoof, shakes the survival hormones out of its nervous system, and goes back to eating grass. It does not perpetuate the terror down the chain. It doesn’t run away from the lion and then go bite a squirrel.

We do. Humans take the fear, suppress it, carry it for decades, and then dump it on someone who doesn’t deserve it. Because we were taught to suppress the shake.

The 90-Second Rule

Here’s the neuroscience: an emotional peak — the full chemical cascade of any intense emotion — lasts approximately 60 to 90 seconds. That’s it. If you allow the wave to move through your body without adding stories, without words, without analysis — just the raw physical experience of the emotion — it crests and passes in under two minutes.

What keeps it going for hours, days, years? The narrative. The stories we tell ourselves about the emotion. “I can’t believe he said that.” “This always happens to me.” “I’m so stupid for reacting.” Those aren’t emotions — those are thoughts. And they refuel the chemical cascade every single time.

So here’s the practice: when the wave hits, get it out of your body first. Before the words. Before the processing. Before you try to be logical about it.

Go run. Go surf. Wrestle. Join Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Dance barefoot in the bush. Scream into a pillow. Dive under a wave at the beach and scream underwater — the fish might think you’re weird but nobody else will hear. One of my clients had severe anger suppression around authority figures — people who triggered the “be a good boy” programming — so we created a simple protocol: excuse yourself, go to the nearest bathroom, and stomp and shake until the charge passes. Silent. Private. Effective.

The point is: get the energy out of the body. Turn it back into energy. The gazelle doesn’t hold the charge — and neither should you.

Then come back to the processing. Then think about what happened, what you need, what you want to do about it. You cannot think clearly while your nervous system is in survival mode. Get the body safe first, then let the mind do its job.

The Cliff Face (And Why I Tell Every Client to Learn Self-Defence)

Think about the people you’ve seen hold their ground under enormous pressure — not with aggression, not with volume, but with an immovable calm. Athletes who’ve taken hits to the body their whole career. People who’ve done martial arts. Individuals who know, in their bones, that they can survive physical impact.

Watch what happens when someone like that speaks up. They don’t yell. They don’t grandstand. They just hold firm. Like a cliff face. The ocean rages against it — spray, force, relentless pressure — and the cliff doesn’t push back. But it also doesn’t collapse. It stands for what it stands for and it does not budge.

That is the energy we need right now. Immovable. Not violent. Not suppressed. Standing. Continued pressure on what matters without escalating to physical violence.

This is why I encourage every single one of my clients to take up some form of self-defence or physical practice — especially those who have been victims of assault, emotional abuse, or coercive control. Your mind’s primary job is to keep you alive. And that includes preventing you from speaking up to someone it perceives as physically stronger or more dangerous than you. If your nervous system believes — even unconsciously — that speaking your truth could get you hurt, it will shut you down. Every time. Not because you’re weak. Because your survival system is doing its job.

Becoming physically strong — learning that your body can protect itself, that you can take a hit and stay standing, that you have the capacity to defend your own ground — is the foundation of emotional strength. It's not the whole picture. But without it, everything else you build sits on quicksand.

Physical safety is the first floor. Emotional expression is the second. Verbal clarity is the third. And from there, you become the cliff face. Not aggressive. Not passive. Present.

Don’t Delete Your Anger — Direct It.

Do not suppress your anger. Do not bury it in your body. That path leads to disease — and I say that not as a metaphor but as someone who has watched it happen in clients for years.

But do not weaponise it either. Do not dump it on the person next to you who left the lid off the toothpaste. They don’t deserve the contents of your can. Don’t explode it on a social media rant, adding fuel to a fire with consequences you may not understand.

Learn to diffuse and direct it instead.

Shake it off — physically, literally, as many times a day as you need to.

Then take that energy — all that adrenaline, all that righteous fury, all that “this is not okay” fire — and use it as fuel. Not for violence. For change. For standing in your values so firmly that nothing moves you. For showing up at the community meeting. For writing the letter. For making the call. For refusing to go quiet.

Anger says: my boundaries are being crossed and that is not okay. Your body has just filled with every bit of strength you need to protect yourself and the people you love. That’s not dysfunction. That’s design.

Our global civilisation has hit a level of interconnectedness we have never experienced before, and with it a need to evolve. We need a better way to be heard. No longer dominate and control through fear and subservience. No longer suppress. No longer explode. The suppress-or-explode cycle is how civilisations regress. The diffuse-and-direct pathway is how they evolve.

The energy we need to end the corruption, the performative budgets, the wars dressed as peace, the systems that let vulnerable people fall through the cracks in some of the wealthiest countries on earth — that energy is already inside every person reading this. It doesn’t need to be manufactured. It needs to be released from the can, shaken out of the body, and redirected with precision.

Be the cliff face.

Hold firm with humility and compassion and maybe then we can all be safe and heard.

If any of this work resonates and helps you at all, please feel free to donate to my diesel (and possibly future legal defence) fund: ko-fi.com/fionaellis