Why Anger Manifests as Depression in Women

Women, typically, are not thought of as being angry. When you think of the angry person who goes off to work or school to shoot up their fellow employees or classmates you think, male. That is why they’re called gunmen, not gunwomen. Women, no doubt, are angry but their anger manifests differently than that of angry men.

Far example, your heart has probably been broken a thousand or so times but never once did you contemplate killing your ex-lover. He was, more often than not, more of a fool than you’d care to remember but never did you feel the need to raise your hand to him or to take out his children in a blazing rage of fire.

I’ll leave it up to the professionals to explain ultimately why it is men feel the need to express pain outwardly (taking as many people as they can with them to death) and why women tend to retreat within and more or less punish themselves while in pain.

I have no doubt that women are angry. I see it when I see women suffering from bulimia and anorexia. The one thing they can control is their body; the same body they hate and love equally. I see it when abused women use sex to get attention and to feel some kind of love and worth. It shows in the faces of housewives who cope pill by pill just to make it through another day.

Women are angry, pissed off, and in denial at the same time due to the fact that there is nothing attractive about an angry woman. So, where goes all of that bottled up rage? Who, if anyone, will ever really know a woman’s anguish and despair?

Her daughter will. Both her daughter and sister will be able to look back and recognize the depression. Her lover, if it’s another woman, will feel the pain as if it was her own. And her mother will have unintentionally passed the secret of shame and hopelessness on from her generation. If women can’t express their anger at the people who hurt them the most, namely men, than who’s left to fall amongst or reconstruct the pieces of broken lives but those who share in its brokenness.