Why Rage May Not be All Bad
Updated: Oct 1
Women rarely bring this one up first. It tends to come out after everything else has already been said: and then there's the rage.
Many women experience a moment stops them in their tracks, frightened by the tone in their own voice. That moment when someone does something innocuous and you suddenly snap. Sometimes, you may even feel like you don’t recognise that version of yourself.
Most women describe this rage as sudden, disproportionate, and deeply out of character – which is usually exactly why it frightens them so much.
Rage Isn't Character Flaw
This rage often comes with a degree of shame because of the meaning women may give it – a newly emerging character flaw that shows she’s become a harsher, less patient person.
However, rage like this tends to be less a new emotion and more an old one, finally loud enough to be heard.
For years, you may have edited your responses – softened them, timed them, kept them controlled in a way that felt acceptable to the people around you – and that editing took real, continuous effort. Rage, in this stage of life, often shows up when that effort is no longer sustainable.
Why Perimenopause Raises the Volume
The hormonal shifts of perimenopause affect the same systems this whole series keeps returning to – the ones involved in regulating attention, mood, and reaction time. When those systems are under strain, the gap between feeling something and expressing it narrows. The pause you used to have, the half-second between the surge of feeling and the choice of what to do with it, gets shorter. What used to get filtered before anyone saw it, now sometimes doesn't.
If you have ADHD, that pause may have always been narrower – emotional intensity that arrived fast and hit hard, managed for years through real, constant effort. Taking a breath before responding, rehearsing a sentence before it left your mouth, physically swallowing a reaction because letting it out felt too risky.
What this means is that the anger that shows up during perimenopause is rarely new. It's usually the same anger that was always there, but with less resources to contain it.
It’s Rarely Only About the Moment
Rage, looked at directly instead of apologised for, is also rarely only about the moment it erupts in. It tends to be coloured by the years of smaller things that were never expressed at the time – the request that felt unreasonable but got agreed to anyway, the comment that stung but got smoothed over, the years of absorbing friction so other people didn't have to feel it.
Rage over an unwashed plate was not really about the plate. It was about the years of being the one who noticed the plate, every time, without anyone else taking responsibility.
This is not a justification for behaviour that frightens you or hurts people you love – that's an important qualification to make. If the intensity or frequency feels like more than you can safely hold on your own, then it’s worth seeking support.
But if we look beyond the behaviour, the feeling itself is very often accurate. It's just arriving all at once, a decade or more late, because there was not enough left in reserve to hold it back anymore.
What Rage Might Be Showing You
Often, once the fear settles, the instinct may be to try to suppress the anger like before – to find more patience, more self-control, and return to the version of yourself that didn't frighten anyone, including yourself. That's an understandable instinct, but often it's also the exact pattern that created the pressure in the first place.
Rather than trying harder to contain the rage, it’s worth asking yourself what this anger has being trying to show you that you never let yourself hear.
For many women, underneath the rage is a very specific, very reasonable grievance: about what was expected of them, about what they quietly agreed to for far too long, and about how much they absorbed so that things could stay comfortable for everyone except them.
That grievance doesn't go away by being pushed back down again. Instead, it tends to need to be heard – first by you, and eventually by someone else as well.
A question for you: if you think back to the last time that you felt that flash of anger – if you go beyond the initial trigger, what do you think it was actually about?
