The Reclaimed Man · Episode10

3 Things 15 Years Of Anger Taught Me

For thirty-five years, I was proud of being the bloke who never got angry. Then it started showing up in traffic, on the golf course, and while walking the dog.

In this episode of The Reclaimed Man, I share how a childhood moment in my dad’s shed shaped what I believed about anger—and what it cost me to keep burying it.

Through the end of my first marriage, conversations in therapy, and the everyday pressures of fatherhood, I explore three things I wish I’d understood sooner:

• Why anger doesn’t always look like anger—and why other emotions sometimes hide behind it.
• Why feeling angry doesn’t make you a bad man, and how feeling it differs from acting on it.
• How anger can point towards a boundary you haven’t set or a feeling you haven’t acknowledged.

If you’ve ever called yourself easy-going while quietly carrying resentment, or snapped over something small and wondered where it came from, this episode is for you.

When the size of your reaction doesn’t match the size of the thing, there may be something else asking for your attention.

Follow The Reclaimed Man for more honest conversations about being a man, a partner and a dad.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

My dad had a shed.

He was — he is — one of the handiest men I’ve ever known.

He could fix anything.

And when I was small, the shed was where he was, and so the shed was where I wanted to be.

I want to tell you something about him first, because it matters.

My dad is a deeply loving man.

Affectionate.

Kind.

He was never physical with any of us.

Never violent.

Not once.

But every so often, in that shed, he’d miss with the hammer and catch his thumb.

Or he’d stand up too fast and crack his head on a shelf.

And he’d let fly, the way plenty of blokes do.

I was five, maybe six.

And to a small boy, it looked enormous.

Much bigger than a thumb.

Much bigger than a shelf.

Looking back now, it was completely ordinary.

A good man who’d just hurt himself.

But I didn’t know that then.

It frightened me — not because I thought he’d hurt me, he never would have, and somehow I knew that even then.

What frightened me was the lack of control.

For a few seconds, it looked like he wasn’t in charge of what was coming out of him.

I didn’t understand that, and it scared me.

And standing there in that shed, without ever saying it out loud, without knowing I was doing it, I made a decision.

Anger is ugly.

Anger means violence.

Violence is bad.

I will not have that in me.

And it wasn’t just that one moment in the shed.

I grew up through the eighties and nineties, which is when the conversation about domestic violence — and violence in general — finally started happening out loud.

And it needed to.

But the message I took from it, and I think the message a lot of us took, was that anger only goes in one direction.

Anger leads to violence.

Anger is toxic.

Nobody was showing us any other road.

So the shed gave me the feeling, and the world around me confirmed it.

I kept that decision for forty years.

Today I want to tell you what it cost me, and the three things I’ve learned in the last two years that I wish somebody had sat me down and told me at thirty.

The first one took me the longest, because for most of my life I couldn’t see my own anger at all.

It was there.

It just never looked like anger.

If you’d asked me at any point over the last two decades whether I was an angry man, I’d have laughed at you.

Ask anyone who knows me.

Easy-going.

Laid-back.

Twenty-five years driving across the Westgate Bridge into Melbourne — five lanes merging into six, everybody late, everybody pushing in — and it never touched me.

Someone would cut across my nose and I’d let them in.

That was who I was.

And I was proud of it.

Then somewhere in my mid-thirties, it stopped being true.

Same bridge.

Same traffic.

Same bloke cutting across me.

And now something would climb up through my chest, and I’d find myself swearing at a stranger through a windscreen he couldn’t hear through.

I noticed it.

I didn’t like it.

And I told myself it was the traffic.

It was never the traffic.

Here’s what I know now.

When anger has nowhere sanctioned to go, it doesn’t disappear.

It finds the cheapest available target.

Let me give you a current one, because I’d rather not stand here pretending this is all safely behind me.

I’ve got a five-year-old.

Sonny.

And right now I’m trying to hold four things at once — the work I’m doing on my own health, the business, my marriage, and a boy who wants me on the floor with him every minute he’s awake.

Those four things do not fit inside one day.

They just don’t.

So I’m pulled.

Constantly.

And something builds.

And do you know where it comes out?

The dog.

Walking the dog.

He won’t heel, he’s pulling on the lead, and I’m short with him.

Snappy.

Irritated way past anything a dog on a lead has earned.

I’m not angry at my son.

But I’m short with the dog — because the dog is the only one in that house I’m allowed to be annoyed at.

That’s one way it hides.

The feeling is real, and it lands on the wrong target.

There’s a second way, and this one I’ve watched in other men more than I’ve lived it myself.

For a lot of blokes, anger is the only emotion that’s socially available.

Think about it.

A man can be angry.

A man is allowed to be angry.

What a man is not allowed to be — not out loud, not at work, not down the pub — is humiliated.

Or frightened.

Or ashamed.

So those arrive wearing anger’s clothes.

He isn’t furious.

He’s embarrassed.

But embarrassed has no exit and anger does, so anger is what comes out — and everyone in the room, him included, thinks they just watched a man get angry.

Two different men.

The same disguise problem.

One of them has anger and shows something else.

The other has something else and shows anger.

And neither of them can do one useful thing with it, because neither of them knows what he’s actually holding.

That’s the first thing.

Anger doesn’t always show up as anger.

And there’s a reason mine stayed hidden for so long.

It wasn’t only that it was wearing a disguise.

It’s that I’d already decided what it was.

That’s the problem with a verdict like the one I handed down in that shed.

Anger is ugly.

Anger means violence.

Violence is bad.

Once you’ve decided that, you don’t just stop expressing anger.

You stop being able to locate it.

I was thirty-eight, maybe thirty-nine.

My first marriage had ended.

I wasn’t in crisis.

I actually felt alright.

But I thought, this is a significant thing that’s happened to me, I should go and talk to somebody and clean it up properly.

So I found a counsellor.

And somewhere in there he asked me a question I’ve never forgotten.

He said: do you feel any anger towards your wife?

I sat with it.

Properly.

I went looking.

And I found almost nothing.

I remember being quite pleased with myself about that, if I’m honest.

Look how well I’m handling this.

And he looked back at me and said — that isn’t normal.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot since, and there’s a layer to it I want to name carefully.

It wasn’t just anger.

It was anger at a woman.

If anger means violence, then anger at a woman means something uglier again.

We live in a world where violence against women is still everywhere, and I didn’t want any part of it.

I was trying very hard to be a man who was part of the solution, not part of the problem.

So when he asked whether I was angry at her, I couldn’t feel it — because I didn’t believe I was allowed to.

It would have been wrong.

There was no safe way to be angry at a woman, so as far as I could tell, the anger wasn’t there.

I want to be really clear about this.

Can a man be angry at a woman?

Of course he can.

Violence is never okay.

Never.

But anger doesn’t have to mean violence.

It’s what you do with it.

Back then, though, I did nothing with what he’d said.

I heard it, I filed it, I got on with my life.

Because to take it seriously I’d have had to sit with the idea that there was anger in me I couldn’t find.

And everything I believed about anger told me that finding it would make me the thing I’d been frightened of as a boy.

So I left it there.

It took another decade and a far bigger problem before anyone said it to me again.

If you’ve listened to the first episode of this show you’ll know there was a stretch where anxiety took me apart, and depression underneath it.

I’m not going to retell that here.

But I was sitting with a therapist, working through it, and he gave me his read on what was actually happening.

He said: I think the anxiety and the depression are unexpressed anger.

And do you know what I said to him?

I said — I’m not an angry person.

I don’t have any unexpressed anger.

Sit with that one for a second.

A man is sitting in front of a professional who has just finished explaining that he’s carrying a great deal of unexpressed anger — and his response is to inform the professional that he isn’t.

Told twice.

Ten years apart.

I only heard it the second time.

And when I finally stopped arguing and went and looked — properly looked, not the glance I’d given it at thirty-eight — it was all sitting there.

I was angry that my marriage had failed.

I was angry about the financial mess that came afterwards.

I was angry about how hard it was to work things out around the kids.

I was angry that I was starting again from nothing at nearly forty years of age.

I was angry about my back.

I was angry about not sleeping.

None of it had gone anywhere.

I’d just refused to call it by its name for fifteen years.

So here’s the second thing, and I want to be very plain about it.

Anger is not a bad emotion.

Feeling it does not make you the worst thing you fear about yourself.

I had it backwards my whole life.

I thought the anger was the danger.

The anger was never the danger.

What I did with it was the danger — and what I did with it was bury it, and it came back up wearing a different name and put me into complete nervous system overwhelm.

Burying it cost me more than expressing it ever would have.

Once you stop treating it as a crime, something becomes available to you that wasn’t there before.

You can start treating it as information.

And the place I learned to read that information wasn’t a therapist’s office.

It was a golf course.

Here’s what I noticed, and it’s the thing that changed how I understand all of this.

My anger on a golf course has almost nothing to do with my golf.

I can play badly — really badly — and feel completely fine about it.

Laugh.

Enjoy the day.

And I can play perfectly decently, have one ordinary shot get under my skin, and it follows me down the fairway, into the car park and all the way home.

Same game.

Same mistakes.

Completely different response.

For a long time that just confused me.

Now I read it as information.

Because if the reaction isn’t tracking the golf, the reaction isn’t about the golf.

It’s telling me something about what’s going on in my life that week — something I haven’t sat down and looked at properly.

The golf course just gave it somewhere to show up.

That’s the third thing.

Anger is a messenger.

So when it arrives now, I don’t try to talk myself out of it.

I don’t put a positive spin on it and call that growth — I spent twenty years doing that, and all it taught me was how to lie to myself faster.

I feel it.

And then I ask one question.

Where is something not working out the way I want it to?

That’s it.

That’s the whole question.

And in my experience the answer lands in one of two places.

The first is a boundary.

Something’s been crossed, or something was never set.

And the anger is doing its actual job, which is to show me where my edge is.

The dog on the lead is a boundary.

I haven’t set one around my own time, so I’m being pulled four ways and taking it out on an animal.

The anger isn’t the problem in that picture.

The anger is the alarm telling me I’ve built a week that doesn’t work.

The second is that it isn’t actually anger at all.

Remember the disguise?

When I look underneath it, there’s often something else sitting there.

I’m not angry — I’m sad, because something didn’t go well.

Or I’m frustrated, because something didn’t work out the way I wanted it to.

Sometimes it’s fear, or humiliation, or shame.

And here’s the honest bit.

It is a lot easier for me to say “fuck it” on a golf course than it is to stand there and feel sad.

So the sadness is what needs my attention.

The anger was just the quickest way past it.

And this is the part I most want you to have.

On its own, anger isn’t toxic.

It isn’t good and it isn’t bad.

It’s neutral.

What it does is bring you to a fork.

Down one road — the one I was so frightened of as a boy — it becomes an outburst.

And in a lot of men it goes out sideways and lands on people who didn’t cause it.

It becomes toxic.

Hurtful.

Dangerous.

It becomes violence.

That’s the road we’re trying to move away from.

Down the other road, that same energy is a force for good.

It cleans up a boundary you’ve needed for years.

It cleans up the way you communicate.

It gets your life back on track.

It gets you out of a bad job.

It gets you out of a bad relationship.

Same messenger.

Same energy.

Two roads.

And a man who’s been told his whole life that anger is bad never reaches the fork at all — because he never lets the messenger through the door.

That’s what I did for forty years.

So let me take you back to where it started.

The shed.

A man hits his thumb with a hammer and swears.

And a small boy standing there decides that anger is the most dangerous thing in the world.

Here’s what I’d tell that boy now, if I could get to him.

You didn’t see anything ugly.

You saw a good man who’d just hurt his thumb.

The only thing out of proportion that day was the conclusion you drew — and you carried it for forty years.

So here’s what I’d like you to take with you, and it’s one sentence.

When the size of your reaction doesn’t match the size of the thing — it isn’t about the thing.

A missed putt.

A dog on a lead.

A bloke cutting across you on the bridge.

That mismatch is the most reliable signal you will ever get that something in your life needs your attention.

It isn’t a character flaw.

It isn’t proof that you’re turning into your father, or becoming the man you swore you’d never be.

It’s information, it’s free, and most men throw it straight in the bin.

So this week, the next time your reaction is too big for what actually happened, I want you to do one thing.

Not manage it.

Not breathe through it.

Just ask:

Where is something not working out the way I want it to?

And then be honest with yourself about the answer.

It’ll be a boundary that’s been crossed — or it won’t be anger at all, and there’ll be something else underneath it you haven’t found yet.

It’s nearly always one of those two.

I spent forty years making sure I was never angry.

It didn’t make me a better man.

It made me a man who couldn’t walk his own dog.

I’ll see you next week.