Misplaced Anger
We tell ourselves we can't afford to be angry at the thing that actually made us angry, so the feeling gets rerouted toward something safer. A lot of the time this happens before we've even noticed we're doing it. Think about the last time something went sideways and you kicked a trash can, snapped at the dog, or slammed a car door harder than you needed to. The person who catches it is rarely the person who caused it. A spouse absorbs the fallout because the real target, maybe a boss or a stranger, is nowhere within reach. Pushed far enough, that rerouting turns dangerous, and some of the mass killings of children and adults have their roots in exactly this kind of displacement.
Who actually teaches us what to do with anger, or any strong feeling, when we're not allowed to aim it where it belongs? Emotions carry a lot of force, and they sit underneath much of what we do. Yet most of us were handed the opposite lesson: don't make a scene. Men aren't supposed to cry. Grief is supposed to stay tucked away because it unsettles the people around us. You can lose a job for no reason you were ever given, and the expectation is that you'll nod and go quietly. Feelings that never get a way out don't evaporate. They pile up, they turn into stress, and stress wears the body down in ways that are hard to undo.
There's a chain-reaction quality to all of this once a pecking order decides who is permitted to be angry at whom. Someone high up avoids blame by passing it down the line, and the person at the bottom has nowhere to send it. There are even jobs built around absorbing other people's anger, fielding complaints about a product or a service all day, and sometimes those jobs go to people with no other options left.