The Medicine of Rage

Kerry Jehanne-Guadalupe

Rage did not enter my life as a problem to be solved.

It arrived as a response to something sacred being violated.

Before my mind had language for it, my body knew. Something in me stood up—hot, alert, unwavering. Rage came as a boundary long before it came as an emotion. It was not asking to be analyzed. It was announcing that silence was no longer survivable.

I was not taught to welcome rage. Like many people, I was taught to suppress it, fear it, or replace it with something more socially acceptable. Rage was framed as dangerous, destructive, and shameful—a force that ruined relationships and led people astray. In many ways, that teaching made sense. Rage and disrupt. It can end things. It can burn through structures that depend on compliance, endurance, or self-abandonment.

What I was not taught is that rage often arrives precisely because something essential has been ignored for too long.

For years, I tried to keep rage contained. I feared it as something that could overtake me, pull me out of reason, and turn me into someone I did not recognize. I feared losing control. More than that, I feared losing love. I knew—on some deep level—that if I allowed rage to fully move through me, it could cost me relationships that depended on my restraint, politeness, or silence.

That fear was not imagined.

There came a moment when rage finally broke containment. It was not directed at anyone. I was not attacking, accusing, or blaming. I was simply allowing rage to move out of my body through sound. Waves of it rose and moved through my throat—hot, strong, alive. I believed I was being held in that moment, witnessed as something ancient finally found its way out.

The experience felt profoundly right. Healing. Liberating. I could feel old pain breaking open and burning away. I remember thinking, This is medicine.

Days later, I received a message detailing how unacceptable my rage had been.

That moment cost me a relationship.

I do not share this story to romanticize rage or to position myself as right and another as wrong. I share it because initiation, at times, has a cost. Rage is not always welcomed in systems—familial, cultural, or relational—that depend on suppression to maintain harmony. When rage is allowed to move, something will change. Something will fall away.

What I learned is that rage does not destroy indiscriminately. It destroys what can no longer stand.

In that moment, rage accessed pain that had been buried far beneath the surface—pain that had waited patiently for the conditions that would allow it to be released. Rage burned through wounds that were ready to go. That release marked a threshold. I was not the same person afterward. I could not return to who I had been before. Something essential had been reclaimed.

Rage, I came to understand, carries medicine.

Rage wants to move. It does not want to be analyzed first, managed prematurely, or redirected before it has been heard. When suppressed, rage does not disappear—it hardens, distorts, or leaks out sideways. When allowed conscious movement, rage completes an emotional circuit.

People find many ways to let rage move: running, dancing, shaking, screaming, chopping wood, tearing paper, drawing furiously, creating with precision. There is no single correct expression. What matters is not the form, but the presence. What matters is staying with rage long enough to feel what it is guarding, what it is protecting, and what it is demanding we stop tolerating.

Rage is not frequent in my life. But the moments when it has arrived have been pivotal. Each time, it has carried me across an inner threshold. Rage has been a fuel—jettisoning me forward when I had been stalled in endurance, accommodation, or doubt. On the other side of rage, I have felt clearer, more rooted, more aligned with my truth.

Rage is alchemical.

There are times when integrating rage for our well-being requires harnessing its destructive force—not to harm others, but to dismantle what has been quietly harming us. Rage is capable of breaking through lifelong patterns that suffocate the soul: self-betrayal, over-functioning, silence in the face of injustice, loyalty to what diminishes us.

I have witnessed this alchemy in people leaving abusive relationships. Rage arrives as a definitive enough. It cuts through confusion, rationalization, and fear. It exposes injustices that earlier versions of the self learned to endure in order to survive. In its wake, boundaries emerge—sometimes awkward, sometimes unfamiliar, but deeply aligned. Rage restores a sense of worth that had been negotiated away.

Rage illuminates and transforms, often at the same time. It shows us what must change and supplies the energy to change it. When wielded consciously, rage becomes a flame that does not burn others, but burns through old wounds within us. It mobilizes the energy trapped in deep pain and corrects what has fallen out of alignment—internally and relationally.

Rage is also protective.

There are moments when rage rises not from accumulated harm, but from immediate threat. In these moments, rage acts as a guardian of the soul. It alerts us that a boundary is about to be crossed, that manipulation is present, that something sacred is under attack.

I have experienced rage as an inner flame—a sudden, precise force field that shelters rather than scorches. In these moments, rage does not feel chaotic or out of control. It feels intelligent. Exact. As if the soul itself has stepped forward.

I have felt rage vaporize gaslighting before it could enter my heart or mind. I have felt it burn through scapegoating, so it could not take root. In these moments, rage did not make me louder; it made me clearer. It did not fragment me; it consolidated me.

In one such experience, rage not only protected me—it transformed an old pattern of freezing and self-silencing. In its place emerged a deeper trust in myself. A knowing. A solidity that did not require explanation.

Rage does not come to make us violent. It comes to make us honest. It comes to end agreements that were never just. It comes to restore sovereignty where it has been eroded.

And rage does not stay once it has done its work.

When the boundary is restored, when the truth is reclaimed, when the soul is no longer under threat, rage recedes. Something quieter follows—not collapse, but clarity. Not numbness, but integration. Rage completes its task and releases the body back into presence.

Rage is not meant to be lived in permanently. It is a visitor with purpose—a force that arrives, acts, and then yields to whatever follows: grief, resolve, tenderness, action, or peace.

Initiation is not only about crossing into fire; it is also about recognizing when the fire has completed its work.

What appears destructive from the outside is often the creation of something new—or the return of something ancient that was forced underground. Rage consumes what cannot travel forward. It clears the ground.

I see rage as a messenger, a protector and guardian, and at times, a sacred alchemical fire. It carries boundary intelligence and initiatory force, and while it can be costly and consequential, I know it as sovereign when held in relationship with discernment and responsibility.

When welcomed with presence and integrity, rage does not destroy the self—it reveals more of it. Rage serves life by clearing what cannot move forward, and when its work is complete, it recedes, leaving behind greater truth, deeper sovereignty, and the quiet ground from which new life can emerge.