Your Childhood anger is destroying your adult relationships (and healing it might end them)
The deepest healing work I've ever done ended my marriage.
It wasn't a bad marriage. But the safety I'd found in it was also a reflection of my deepest wounds. We were a trauma bond wrapped in love and kindness.
And the real healing—the kind that reaches into your bones and shifts your entire energy field—would dissolve that bond completely.
This isn't a story about failure. It's about what happens when you finally feel what you've spent a lifetime suppressing. And why sometimes, the deepest healing means outgrowing the relationships built on your wounds.
The Anger I Didn't Know I Had
I used to think I was calm. Spiritually mature. I didn't get angry.
Actually, I was disconnected from my anger, so deeply that I didn't even know it was there.
My childhood taught me that the adults around me, including my parents, couldn't be trusted. Betrayal ran through my family and community in ways that shattered my foundation. So, I compensated by becoming hyper-independent.
I built a fortress. If I can rely on myself and do everything on my own, I'll be safe. I won't have to need anyone. I can't be hurt. I wore that independence like a badge of armor. I was proud of it.
Years later, during a Qi Gong practice, I started to feel something unexpected:
Rage.
It brought me to my knees. And it wasn't just my anger. As I tuned deeper into my energy field, I could sense I was also carrying ancestral patterns, familial wounds, and relational energies that were not mine.
Prior to this, I thought I had healed from childhood trauma, when in reality I had just gotten very good at suppressing my emotions.
Why Suppressed Emotions Don't Just Disappear
Unprocessed emotions are physical energy that don't just go away. They lodge in your body and energetic field, keeping your nervous system in a state of stress—unable to truly relax, trust, or connect—and sabotaging your relationships—sometimes for decades.
In Chinese medicine and energy work, we know that:
Emotions live in the body (not just the mind)
The energy field holds memory (of trauma, patterns, relational wounds)
The nervous system records everything (and replays it until it's cleared)
Talk therapy can help you understand your patterns intellectually. But understanding why you're angry and actually releasing the anger from your tissues are two completely different things.
Despite years of therapy and spiritual work, my body was still holding rage I didn't consciously know was there. And that suppressed anger was quietly shaping every relationship choice I made, including who I married and how I showed up in that marriage.
When emotions stay stuck in the body, they create energetic templates that attract certain relationship dynamics, keep you in survival patterns, and prevent authentic intimacy.
The anger lodged in my reproductive system was actively keeping me in a relationship pattern built on control and hypervigilance rather than trust and openness.
Until I moved that energy out of my body, nothing could truly change.
We Marry Our Childhood Wounds
There's a physician named Gabor Maté who says something that resonates with me:
Almost everyone will marry someone who triggers their childhood trauma—because subconsciously, we're trying to heal it.
We don't do this consciously. On a deep level, we're drawn to people who will activate our oldest wounds so we have a chance to resolve them.
In my case, I needed safety and control. With my husband’s childhood trauma, he needed care and structure. Our traumas fit together perfectly—a trauma bond wrapped in love and kindness.
And it worked, for a time. The safety of that relationship gave me a container to do more necessary healing work. But here's what was unexpected:
When you heal the wound the relationship was built on, the relationship itself can dissolve.
When Healing Becomes Disruption
As I worked with my reproductive energy through Qi Gong and womb-centered practices, I began releasing the suppressed anger lodged in my body. I yelled into pillows. I stomped and danced and found safe spaces to let the rage move through me.
I meditated while I practiced pelvic steaming, an ancient ceremonial practice where you sit over a bowl of steaming herbs, creating space for emotional and energetic clearing from the pelvic region where so much ancestral and relational energy is stored.
I did cord-cutting meditations to release energies that weren't mine.
And slowly, profoundly, I began to change.
I had been running masculine energy in my marriage—the breadwinner, the one in control, the one managing everything. My healing journey awakened a desire to soften, to be held, to come into more feminine energy.
But we weren't growing in the same direction. As I healed and shifted, the gap between us widened. Not because either of us was wrong, but because the version of me that had entered that marriage no longer existed.
The relationship that had once been my safe harbor became the thing I needed to release.
Your Reproductive System Holds Your Relational History
In Chinese medicine and energy work, your pelvic region—whether you have a womb or not—is one of the most energetically loaded parts of your body. It holds:
Ancestral energy (passed down through generations)
Relational energy (from partners, family, formative relationships)
Life force and creative power (your sexual vitality and soul's purpose)
When anger, shame, grief, or trauma get suppressed, they don't disappear. They lodge in your tissues—often in the reproductive system. And when that emotional energy stays stuck, it affects not just your body, but your relationships.
Unprocessed childhood anger shows up in adult partnerships as:
Control issues and hypervigilance
Inability to trust or be vulnerable
Attracting partners who replicate childhood dynamics
Explosive reactions that seem disproportionate to the situation
Emotional numbness or disconnection
Unconscious trauma bonds that feel like "chemistry"
Physical health issues or symptoms, often (but not always) in the reproductive system
Your body doesn't lie. The patterns you learned as a child live in your nervous system, your energy field, and your relationship choices until you address them.
The Healing That Changes Everything
About a year after my second son was born, I experienced—unexpectedly—what's known as a Kundalini activation, a powerful surge of life force energy that moves up the spine, clearing anything misaligned with your soul's path.
It's difficult to describe if you haven't experienced it. Imagine suddenly giving birth to yourself, but it’s like you didn’t even know you were pregnant so you hadn’t read any of the “what to expect when you’re expecting” type of books so you are totally unprepared. Everything that isn't authentic gets revealed. Every wound demands attention. Every misalignment becomes impossible to ignore.
I couldn't sleep for months. I lost weight. The energy moved through my body like a divine chiropractor, forcing me to confront every unhealed place.
And one of the clearest revelations: I wasn't in the right marriage. Not anymore.
Not because my husband was a bad person (to this day I think he’s a wonderful person). But because I had fundamentally changed, the person who needed safety and control had transformed into someone seeking authentic alignment and deeper purpose.
The relationship had served its purpose beautifully. But its time had passed.
What No One Tells You About Healing
Not every relationship is meant to last forever. Some are teachers. Some are containers for specific seasons of growth. And when you do deep healing work—the kind that shifts your energy at the cellular level—you might outgrow the relationship that once held you.
This doesn't mean healing is dangerous or that you should avoid it. It means healing is honest.
It shows you where you've been living in patterns instead of presence. Where you've been comfortable instead of authentic. Where you've chosen safety over alignment.
And yes, sometimes that clarity will ask you to make hard changes you never anticipated.
The Unexpected Gift of Forgiveness
As I moved through this process, something remarkable happened: I found forgiveness I couldn't access through years of talk therapy alone.
Forgiveness for my parents. For the community members whose choices hurt me deeply. For myself, for all the ways I'd protected myself by shutting down.
When emotional energy finally moves—when it's not just understood intellectually but released physically and energetically—forgiveness becomes possible in a completely different way.
My Qi Gong mentor described forgiveness this way:
It’s when you are no longer impacted by the energy of the initial wound. It’s an internal energy shift. A letting go. A healing. It’s not even about the other person or people. It’s about you and what you're holding.
If This Feels Familiar
Maybe you recognize yourself in this story. Maybe you're the hyper-independent partner. Maybe you're realizing your relationship was built on complementary wounds rather than authentic compatibility.
Or maybe you're just starting to feel something beneath the surface—anger you've kept buried, patterns you can't quite name, a sense that something needs to shift.
I want you to know:
Your anger isn't the enemy. Your body's signals aren't something to suppress.
They're invitations. Doorways to deeper healing and more authentic living.
The path to releasing this energy will look different for everyone. Healing doesn't require dramatic catharsis (though sometimes that helps). What it does require is creating space for emotions to move through you rather than stay trapped in your tissues and relationships. You might explore:
Energy practices like Qi Gong that help emotions flow through the body
Somatic work that releases trauma stored in your nervous system
Ceremonial practices like pelvic steaming for emotional clearing
Movement that feels cathartic—dancing, stomping, vigorous exercise
Using your voice—singing, yelling, speaking truths you've held back
Therapeutic support from practitioners who understand trauma and energy
Your childhood wounds don't have to determine your adult relationships. But healing them might change those relationships in ways you can't predict.
And that's okay. That's not failure. That's evolution.
For empaths and highly sensitive people doing this deep work: you're not alone in this experience. The awakening that's happening isn't just personal—it's collective. Please follow me for practices, workshops, retreats, and resources to support you along your journey.
Know that it can be profoundly beautiful, even when it's disruptive.
