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The "anger-to-anxiety pathway" explains how chronic anxiety in women may really be suppressed anger.

Gender and cultural norms for anger may have different implications across racial-ethnic groups.

Uncovering anger beneath chronic anxiety may lead women to set new boundaries and make major life changes.

Women have higher rates of anxiety than men (McLean et al., 2009), but there may be more to this picture than innate biological differences. In my work as a clinical psychologist, I have come to observe that for many women with chronic baseline anxiety, what is being masked is anger. It can take several months of therapy as I give them permission to explore their real feelings, opinions, judgments, and desires before finding that the anxiety dissipates, and underneath is rage. Rage that their partners and families ask too much of them. Rage that their workplaces ask more from them than is reasonable. Rage that they are being treated differently because they are female.

Each gender is narrowly assigned an emotion that can function as an outlet for distress. Conversely, men are allowed anger. When running a men’s group at a VA when I was in training, I was afraid no one would attend. Instead, every man on the unit showed up for the group, as anger was one of the few socially acceptable feelings men could publicly express. Their own grief, loss, and humiliation in having served in Vietnam and returned to a country in contempt of them came out in anger. For women, anxiety is our socially sanctioned feeling.

The VA group that I ran was wisely entitled by my supervisor at the time—the late, great Dolly Sadow, Ph.D.—“Using Anger Constructively.” She knew that anger held wisdom to guide our behavior and energize us into action. For........

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