Episode 46: Healing Through Anger – A Conversation with Bronwyn Schweigerdt

Psychotherapist Bronwyn Schweigerdt joins Jay DePaolo to reveal how embracing anger—not suppressing it—can heal shame, reverse trauma, and restore emotional freedom.

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Choices. My name is Jay DePaolo, owner of Choices Books and Gifts in New York City, a store dedicated to health, wellness, and recovery. We've been here for over 30 years, and I'm the host of your podcast. You always have choices. Where we dive deep into stories of transformation, healing, and personal growth.

All right. Today, we welcome Bronwyn Schweigerdt, psychotherapist and anger expert. Bronwyn is a psychotherapist, author, and public speaker known for helping people externalize the feelings they're most ashamed to have, like anger, hatred, and betrayal. With a master's degree in counseling and nutrition, she has guided clients to overcome depression, anxiety, bipolar disorders, and even psychosis by reconnecting them with their emotions and healing their relationships with anger, rejecting the label of an angry person, and the limits of traditional anger management. Brown believes true healing happens when we stop suppressing our emotions. And instead express them in a safe, validating space. Through her private practice and her podcast, Angry at the Right Things, she helps people release stored pain and reclaim their emotional freedom.

And there we have it. Welcome. It's nice to have you on our podcast, and I'm looking forward to diving into this subject.

Oh, thank you for having me. Me too. Great. All right. So I'm going to jump right in. And we'll start with the questions. Is that okay? Sounds great. All right. So, question one, you describe yourself as a psychotherapist who helps people externalize their most painful feelings. What led you to focus on this unique approach?

Yeah. So, I didn't really set out to become a psychotherapist, actually. I, you know, as life kind of changes everything. I fell into a very, very severe depressive episode myself about 16 years ago. I have a master's degree in nutrition. So that's why you hear that? I wasn't going to look to go back to school or anything like that, but I found myself not able to function at all. And I went to multiple therapists, and every time I did, I sat there on their couch thinking to myself, you know what, Bronwen? You are not able to function yourself. And yet I still think you would make a better therapist for yourself than this person. Yeah. Across from you. So that was actually kind of the catalyst for me going back to school. And that was very healing for me at that time, unfortunately. Unfortunately, I guess if we're going to take a big picture approach, I fell into a subsequent very severe depressive episode, maybe a year, a year and a half later, that one lasted years, and it was horrible. And actually, I had a suicide attempt for this one. It was very profound.

And, you know, we could unpack them more. But basically, what I found when I kind of got back to life

and started working as a therapist again, is I started connecting the dots between my depressive episodes. My client's depressive episodes and their anxiety episodes, or their panic attacks, or their manic phase, or have you. And I saw that the one common denominator is our suppressed anger or dissociated anger, that's kind of what lies underneath that.

And I started realizing, you know, for myself, when that first depressive episode happened, if I  had the awareness to go, you know what, you can be angry right now. You don't have to dissociate. You can

feel the anger in your body, and you can give it words in a kind way. You don't have to become a monster. You can say, Hey, this is what I need, and it's not being met right now. That need isn't being met. If I had had that wherewithal to feel the anger and channel it out of my body in a productive way, through assertiveness or through a boundary,

I would have saved myself years of, you know, very severe pain. Yeah. Go ahead. No, no, I was just going to say I'm glad that, you know, you came out of it and this wonderful information came along with it. Yeah. And, yeah. If you are finished, I'll go to question two. If not, please continue. Well, they'll probably all bleed into each other, but right, I do agree. Yeah. So, I yeah. So that gave me such wisdom though for these clients instead of managing their anxiety, managing their depression, managing the symptoms, I was able to kind of do a deep dive down to the root and see if we can help them see that their anger is valid and it's okay to feel, because a lot of us, we talk ourselves out of the anger. I'm okay. It's not a big deal, right? And so that's how we dissociate from it. And if I can help validate my clients, so you know it, it's actually not okay. It doesn't mean you need to be a monster. You can just have a voice and say, This isn't working for me, right? In a gentle, kind, respectful way, or have a kind boundary. And that has helped me to help so many people. And then that catalyzed me to start my podcast, Angry at the Right Things, because I want to get this out to more than just my clients. I want to get it out to everyone. If everyone can avoid unnecessary suffering in this life and mental illness, let's do it.

Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah. All right. Question. Too many people think therapy is about fixing problems. Why do you believe the real healing happens when we allow ourselves to feel the emotions we most want to avoid?

Yeah. Kind of. On the same note, if we don't want to feel our feelings, we're first of, we're not.

When we associate with one feeling, we actually end up dissociating from all feelings. It's not possible to just turn off sadness and still feel joy. We can't do that. We just become dissociative. And that's not really alive. You know? We're just kind of there. We're just kind of, you know, barely alive. We're like a warm body. So we need to feel our feelings to be alive.

And the other thing is, we need to have a disposition towards our feelings that they matter because they do matter. They're there to give us wisdom. And when we can start seeing that, we can say, you know what anger doesn't mean? I'm going to go in a rage and say something I regret later. It's just I'm just going to move toward it. I'm going to know it's valid. I'm going to feel it here in my chest. That's usually where we feel it. And I'm going to say, hey, anger, what do you need from me right now? You're trying to tell me something. You're trying to give me wisdom. What do you need? And I want to meet that need. Right? So when we can see it as there, those emotions are there to give us wisdom, and that they are valid. We are fighting mental illness in the process. We're not going to get emotionally sick. And I also want to add, you know, I am seeing now more and more of what we call somatic illness. So somatic is like I mean, honestly, I think 99% of all physical illnesses are somatic, meaning people get headaches when they're angry, but they don't want to feel or connect to their anger.

They feel gut issues. I mean, those are when we feel shame. Shame lives in the gut, and so we feel shame, but we don't want to go there. We want to dissociate from it. Also, it's where we feel disgust for someone else. And, so, you know, we have gut issues, we have immune disorders. Now, there's a lot of research connecting autoimmune disorders with suppressed anger that we're not giving words to, that we're dissociating from.

There are other things, like insomnia. I had insomnia myself for about 30 years of my life. The minute I started connecting with my anger towards my father and holding him accountable for his abusive behavior, voilà, I now sleep like a baby, and I was able to discontinue my medication.

So, yeah, there are so many somatic illnesses making us sick, as well as mental illnesses that we don't need to experience. Great. All right. You say feelings like hatred or betrayal do not disappear when ignored. They are stored in the body. Can you explain what that does to our mental and physical health? Yeah, I can only imagine that sort of eats you up inside. Right. And all those things you just mentioned, the headaches, the pains, the illnesses.

But, yeah, you could say it better than I can. Well, I mean, yeah, we kind of already did a little bit, but yes, I mean, it is phenomenal. I actually had a client tell me the other day she found a video on YouTube where this woman was saying she would have panic attacks all the time, but when she finally left her husband, no more panic attacks like so we I guess, you know, I guess one thing I would say is we I think the overall medical community or establishment sees a lot of these mental illnesses as only regarding ourselves, like intra personal, and we don't realize they're actually into her person. Right. So if you go to a health professional and they say, you know, you're really angry, we need to manage it. We need you to take some deep breaths. They're treating it like you're the problem. And we're not ever angry just at nothing. We're angry at someone. So we have to take into account that there's someone who's making us angry, and we're not going to do justice.

We're not going to heal if we don't take that perspective. So we need to address it for sure. Very good. Why do you think so many therapies and medications fail to resolve depression and anxiety long-term? I'm guessing because they don't ever identify it as anger. But please, no, I think you're right. I think because we don't feel the anger and you know, we don't feel the anger often, because even, you know, going down to as very young children, you know, we all went through the terrible twos, and we all have mothers and mothers today, hopefully are learning better.

There's definitely some more education on this. But you know, when your kid goes to the terrible twos and you come from the old school parenting where you're the boss and they're not allowed to defy you, that little child is expressing anger and boundaries for the first time in their life. And when you distance yourself, give them the silent treatment, you put on a shaming face.

All these things. It creates a template in that child's brain that says, Oh, me. Showing anger equals abandonment or shame, right? And so we carry those templates with us for the rest of our lives. And

they absolutely influence our own relationship with anger. So we don't allow ourselves to feel the anger that was so helpful to know it starts at that young age. And that's where we're where it builds from. Thank you so much. Yeah. What does it mean to heal our relationships with anger? And how is that different from simply managing anger? Yeah, I don't want to get it, though. I do agree, I want to heal it. I don't want to put a Band-Aid on it. Yeah,

Yeah. So I think it starts with knowing we all have anger, all humans. You know, I think one of the questions is

On your list, is there such a thing as an angry person? And I would say that's like saying, is there such a thing as a breathing person? Because we all, all humans have anger, which is good. We need to feel angry when something is wrong. If we didn't feel angry when things were wrong, that would be someone who is not a safe person at all. So we need that. That's what comes with having a conscience. That's a good thing. And we need to start seeing our anger as healthy as a healthy warning light. Like on the light of the dashboard of our emotional car, saying, Check the engine. Something needs your attention, right? Some people are angrier than others. Don't you think that, though?

Yeah. And so the people we call may be hotheads. You know who we use that term for? Those are people who just kind of. They're always erupting at any little thing. Right? And we all feel like we're walking on eggshells around these people. Their anger is valid. But what the problem is, it's almost always at one of their parents or maybe both parents, and they haven't processed that.

They have not addressed it. And so it's just they're like a constant volcano and it's and it's erupting onto the wrong people. And, you know, actually, that's true for all of us if we aren't responsible with our anger. So let's say I'm angry with a coworker, but I come home and I'm not being responsible for my anger with the coworker at work. That anger is now trapped in my body. Yes, I'm bringing it home, and I'm going to take it out on maybe my partner, maybe my child, which is really, really unfair. Maybe my pet, even. And so if we aren't responsible with our anger, with the true source, it's going to leak out and hurt people who least deserve it.

 Yeah, yeah, I know I've done that myself. So I hear, yeah. Can you share a story of someone who transformed their mental health by reconnecting with their anger? So I read that right. Yeah. Okay. Tell me. Well, I have one client. She lets me brag about her when I talk about these things. So she. I'll call her Kelly.

She came to me a couple of years ago, and she had psychosis, which is, she had hallucinations, which is, like, pretty serious. You know, they were very debilitating. And she would see witches like evil witches. And she would see, like, Dementors, like from Harry Potter. And they would cause her to be so afraid and confined in her house.

She didn't want to leave at times. But, you know, what happened is, she was able to connect with her anger at her mother and cut off her mother because that's what needed to happen. And the minute she did that, those hallucinations were no more. Really? Wow. You were able to see that they were actually. Those images were actually her brain's way of warning her about the mother. Because her mother's the dementor, who so affects your soul. You know?

Yeah, I like that. You know, some, like you said, you know, you should feel the anger and identify it this way. I mean, she's such a healthier woman today. I couldn't imagine having all these, you know, psychoses. And seeing these things. That's got to be so hard on one. Yeah. All right. You say there's no such thing as an angry person. What do you mean by that? Yeah, again, just that I think when we say that, there are people who are more obviously angry than others. But then the natural understanding is you know, I do have people say I'm not an angry person, and I'm like, are you alive? Yeah.

You have anger. Of course you do. And if we don't tap into that, we will really lose a part of ourselves, part of reality, and it will affect us. I don't doubt that whatsoever. Absolutely. And as you said, you know, if you're alive, you have anger. Angry person. We are all that at some time or another. Yeah. How can unresolved shame drive mental illness? And what's the first step in releasing it?

Yeah. So shame we haven't really talked about that. That is a huge contributor to mental illness. Shame. I see shame as a liar because shame doesn't say Jay, you made a mistake. You're human. Let's learn from it. We're good. Shame says no. You didn't just make a mistake. You are a mistake. Yeah, and it tells us we're not just, you know, humans, but we're all bad. Shame says you're all bad. And, you know, we. Shame is a natural residue of our experience of neglect, I think, especially from our parents, which parents don't necessarily know they're neglecting their kids. I mean, if you have a lot of kids, you can bet some of them are going to experience neglect. Does that mean you're a bad parent? No. It means that you didn't know you couldn't have that many kids and not neglect some of them, right? So we're all ignorant. So I'm not saying this to shame anyone.

But yeah. So neglect, especially, is one I think that really goes under the radar because we talk about trauma and people don't realize neglect is, you know, what neglect says, and even just emotional neglect too, because we'll say, oh, I had my needs met at a roof over my head. I was fine. But if we don't feel seen by that parent,

If we don't feel like we matter, especially our feelings, that's neglect. That's emotional neglect. And what it says to a child is You don't matter. And that creates that shame. So when a child feels like they don't matter, they have shame. And so, we all have shame. But what we can do is we can dislodge that shame. And I lead my clients, and I do this on my podcast. I lead people in exercise where we just go back to that, what I call an imprinting memory. So, I did this for myself. I'll give you the story. A few years ago, maybe four years ago, I was out for a run one day, and I stopped at a stoplight.

I close my eyes and I picture my ten-year-old self, ten-year-old Bronwyn, at the dining room table where I'd eat every night, and my dad would mock me the whole meal. He would just make fun of me, and what I did was I pictured my adult self-entering that memory, going over to little Bronwyn, getting down on her level, looking her in the eyes, and saying, Bronwyn, I know how much shame you feel right now and I don't blame you, but you know what we're going to do? We're going to put all of it in this big cardboard box right now, and we're going to give it back to our dad because it's actually his shame. Yeah. And we're going to say, here you go, Dad. I used to think this was mine, but it's not. It's yours. And I'm going to return to the owner. And after I did that little exercise, something just completely shifted in me, and I started kind of just trusting myself more.

Trusting my intuition. Not feeling like a need to be perfect, not being as critical of myself. When someone did try to scapegoat me, I was able to see what they were doing and not blame myself, and agree with them. I was able to say, Oh, I see what you're doing. You're trying to give me that box of shame, and it's not working.

So yeah, when we do that for ourselves, it's like we come back to life and we kind of reclaim our very self, and it's really beautiful. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it reminds me of two things. First, when you told that story about, you know, being a young person and the things we like, there was something that I did as a child, and you just made me realize why I did it, because of the shame. And it really is like it just woke me up. And I had my therapist do something very similar, like Jay, you're the little Jay in the room now. The big Jay comes in, and Jay takes care of him. And what were the big what with the big Jay let any of this happen to him now, and you know, it would. And you know, I'm a big sort of tough guy. I'm not tough. But you know what I'm saying? I can take care of myself. And it was just it was like you just said, healing. It was completely and utterly healing. So, a lot of identification with this. Thank you. Yeah. All right. You've seen people recover from depression, anxiety, bipolar disorders, and even psychosis through emotional reconnection. What do those breakthroughs have in common?

Yeah, I mean, I would just say we start to trust again. We trust our emotions. We trust their wisdom. We trust ourselves. And kind of like, as you just alluded to, as we heal that rift between ourselves and ourselves, we become whole. And that is actually the word for that is integration.

We integrate with ourselves. And that's what wholeness is. And it just changes everything. So, we can all do that for ourselves, but we need to dislodge that shame because that shame causes fractures within us. Excellent, excellent. Thank you. Yeah. Why do you think traditional anger management programs often fail to create lasting change?

Yeah, I would say because they don't understand these dynamics that it's not that one person's issue.

It's relational. The anger. And you know, so again, breathing counting, you know, all these things are not bad things to do. But if we don't see it as a relational problem, and we don't. And also, I would say those with anger management issues see anger as a problem. And I would say that's the problem. Yeah, it's that we're seeing anger is the problem.

That was said perfectly. You know, they don't see it as the problem. They are just working on the anger and not so much the depth of why we're so angry. Yeah. And I think that's what you do, which is fantastic. How can parents teach their children to have a healthy relationship with their feelings, especially anger, like that two-year-old thing? What do we do differently? I mean, yeah, you know, so we have to learn to do. Yes. And

yes. And you know, like improv, you learn. Yes. And I don't know, they tell you that, but with kids, you can say, Johnny, I, I validate that you were angry with mommy because she won't let you have that cookie.

I don't blame you. I would feel the same way. It doesn't mean you're going to get the cookie, because you're not going to get the cookie right. So, we can still have the boundary and not let our kid boss us around. Because I think a lot of people, they go to extreme where they're like, yeah, now they're being kind of bullied by the kid, and the kid will bully you if you let them, or they're being the bully and I think we need to kind of come to this healthy place where, you know, Johnny's anger is always valid and we can always validate it and help him know that he's seen and, that he matters and his anger matters. But it's not going to always give him what he wants either, because, you know, he needs to learn. Mom has feelings, too. And mom's feelings matter, too. Like your feelings matter. My feelings matter. Everyone's feelings matter. How can we work to bring out the best solution in this moment? Let's do this together, right?

Yeah, yeah, without a doubt. And children have to know. You know, we're not giving you something because it's not always good. I wouldn't give a child a sharp knife. You know what I mean? I'm going to say no because it's. You're going to hurt yourself with it. Yeah. You know, what role does vulnerability play in the process of external lies and deep emotions?

Yeah. We have to trust that we're not going to, you know, kind of fall into a million pieces. A lot of people are so deathly afraid of being vulnerable. They've never done that, and they've never had anyone show up for them. And not shame them, not abandon them. Right. They've never had anyone that they could trust.

And we have to learn to just take that risk so we can heal. Yeah. And if you're not vulnerable, you like this, you know. You know, when you're vulnerable, you can be a little bit more open. Yeah. And I think kind of like with the child, it's a yes. And like, there needs to be times where we are like this. We can't always be like this, right? We have to be ready for whatever comes our way. And we can do all of the above. Excellent, excellent. How can someone know if their anger is trying to tell them something important rather than just being a stress reaction? I think that's great because that's what you've been talking about the whole time.

Yeah, I don't even think I like the word stress anymore. I think all stress is, is suppressed anger. And I think we just need to say now you're not stressed, you're angry. What are you angry about? Like, let's figure it out. So that way we can resolve it, right? Because that's the goal is to resolve whatever the problem is.

And but I will say, you know, a lot of people, they have like intrusive thoughts. And again, you come to therapy and they're like, well, let's help you with your intrusive thoughts. And for me, I'll say, what are your intrusive thoughts trying to tell you? It sounds like your brain's really angry about something. So let's listen.

Let's see what it is all about, and then let's address that. So, you know, I believe humans naturally, just like when we hurt ourselves, our skin will heal over time. Humans are always working towards healing, and we need to not see our bodies or mind, or thoughts as problematic. We need to see that they're always trying to heal, and so everything makes sense. Those intrusive thoughts are working on our behalf to try to resolve something understood. Understood.

You believe we can reverse our trauma? What does that process look like in real life?

Yeah. I think what makes things traumatic is that we still have anger residing in our bodies that we have not yet expressed, and we can do that through fantasy. We don't need to confront the perpetrator, okay? We don't need to confront anyone. We can do it in fantasy. So I do it in my therapy sessions. But we can also write fantasy letters.

 

I you don't want to see how many Google Docs I have on my computer. Fantasy letters, but we can. We need to say it. We need to express our anger in words. That is how. Yeah, we analyze it out of our body. It can't be through going to a batting cage. It has to be through words. And the other thing that makes trauma traumatic is the shame piece. So we need to put it in a box and give it to the perpetrator in our imagination. We don't need to confront them, but we need to do that for ourselves. And that's how we know it's no matter. It's no more trauma. After we do those two things, express the anger in the words out of our bodies, and then dislodge the shame by giving it back in our imagination. It's just a memory now. It's not traumatic. It's no longer traumatic. I love that. All right. If listeners take just one idea from your work into their lives. What should it be today?

I think I should ask you, what do you think? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for me. And that's good. If you want to put it back on me, it's learning where all this anger came from, and that's that.

That's what I have, you know, to identify it. You know, I had about an AA. Yeah. And it said, you know, say what you mean. Mean what you say, but don't say it means. However, sometimes that didn't always work when I was frustrated, angry, and upset. And I can still get that way. I play a lot of sports and things of that nature, and I'm much, much better than I used to be.

However, I think the greatest thing I learned today is that we all have anger. It's okay. And try to identify where it came from and then squash it that way or squash it. Maybe it's not a good word.  Express it out of your body. Yes, you're right, either in fantasy or if you need a boundary with that person or to be assertive.

But it can be either one. Yeah. Yes. Bronwyn, thank you so much for coming on this podcast and talking with me. I can't tell you. I think I know, I got a lot out of it. So I think our podcast listeners did as well. I'm just going to read a little something here. Okay. Yeah.

And with that, we'll wrap up this episode of the Choices podcast. I hope our time together was inspiring and motivating. Reading stays empowered and stays well. You can watch this episode and all episodes on our website. Choicesgifts.com. God bless you, and we'll see you soon.