"Can IEMT Help With Anger? What the Process Actually Targets"
I don't often share my own story in this much detail, but this topic feels important enough to make an exception. Anger is one of the most misunderstood emotions in therapeutic and coaching spaces. It gets treated as something to manage, suppress, or reframe, rather than something to genuinely understand. I know this not just professionally, but from decades of living it myself.
I grew up with undiagnosed ADHD and ASD. For most of my life, I had no language for why frustration built in me so quickly, or why ordinary daily friction, things other people seemed to move past easily, would sit in my body long after the moment had passed. What I learned instead, like so many undiagnosed neurodivergent people do, was to suppress it. To push it down, keep functioning, keep going. I did not yet understand that suppression is not the same as resolution.
It simply relocates where the feeling goes.
When Suppressed Anger Became a Medical Mystery
The clearest, most undeniable evidence of this came after I lost my father to suicide. Grief alone would have been enormous to carry. But underneath the grief was something else entirely, a deep, specific anger about how he died, anger I did not always feel able to express or even fully admit to myself.
In the aftermath, I was hospitalised twice with excruciating pain. On both occasions, medical teams found something genuinely abnormal happening in my body. The bile duct to my liver had enlarged. Despite extensive tests, screenings, and observation, no one could explain why.
Each time it happened, I told the consultant the same thing. I felt intensely angry about my father's death, and shortly afterward, my body would respond. I was met with a look I can only describe as polite disbelief, as though I had said something a little unhinged. There was no framework in that room for taking what I was describing seriously as a physiological explanation.
Why I Already Understood What Was Happening
What made those hospital conversations so frustrating was that I already had a framework for understanding it, just not one that Western medicine typically recognises. Decades earlier, I had begun learning about Chinese medicine, which has long held a very different, deeply developed understanding of the relationship between emotion and the body. In this tradition, anger is specifically associated with the liver. Suppressed or unresolved anger is understood to directly affect liver function, sometimes physically, not just metaphorically.
So when my liver related bile duct began enlarging at the exact moments I was consciously aware of intense, suppressed anger about my father's death, I was not confused about the connection. I recognised it immediately. What I lacked was a medical environment equipped to hear it, let alone investigate it seriously.
This experience taught me something I now carry directly into my work. Anger that has nowhere to go does not simply disappear. It moves inward, and it can genuinely affect the body, sometimes in ways significant enough to land someone in a hospital bed, with no clear medical explanation on the chart.
This is not a fringe or unfounded idea within that tradition. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, each major organ is understood to correspond to a specific emotion, and the liver is specifically associated with anger. Extreme or unresolved anger is understood to disrupt the liver's function, affecting the smooth flow of qi through the body, and practitioners have long observed physical symptoms, from irritability to more visible signs of dysfunction, arising directly from this emotional-organ connection.
Why This Matters for How We Think About Anger
Most conventional approaches to anger focus on behaviour. Learn to pause before reacting. Count to ten. Find healthier outlets. These strategies have their place, and I am not dismissing them entirely. But they largely address the moment anger becomes visible, rather than the underlying charge that produced it in the first place. For someone who has spent a lifetime suppressing anger, sometimes without even fully realising they were doing it, behavioural strategies alone rarely touch the root of the problem.
This is exactly the gap I now understand IEMT is built to close, and it is a significant part of why I trained in it and use it in my own practice.
What IEMT Actually Targets
IEMT does not treat anger as a behaviour to be managed. It works with the emotional charge attached to the memories, experiences, or patterns that produced the anger in the first place. Rather than asking someone to talk extensively through every incident that made them angry, the process works directly with the felt intensity connected to that anger, using guided eye movements.
For someone like me, carrying decades of suppressed frustration on top of acute grief and rage following my father's death, this distinction mattered enormously. I did not need more insight into why I was angry. I already understood that intellectually, sometimes painfully well. What I needed was a way to actually reduce the charge itself, so it stopped needing somewhere else to go, whether that was my liver, my nervous system, or simply years of quietly carried tension.
Why Suppression Is So Common, Especially in Neurodivergence
Looking back, I can see clearly why suppression became my default. Undiagnosed ADHD and ASD often come with a lifetime of masking, of learning to override your own internal signals in order to appear fine, to keep up, to not be seen as too much or too sensitive. When you spend years disconnected from your own emotional signals in that way, anger does not get less intense. It simply gets buried further out of conscious awareness, until something, sometimes a genuine crisis, forces it back to the surface.
This is part of why I believe anger work needs to look different for neurodivergent people specifically. It is rarely just about learning new coping tools. It is often about finally processing years, sometimes decades, of charge that was never safe or possible to express at the time it was originally felt.
What Changed
I share this story not because I want sympathy, but because I think it says something important that clinical settings often miss entirely. When I finally began working with the emotional charge directly, rather than continuing to manage or explain away the anger, something shifted that no amount of behavioural strategy ever had. The anger did not vanish, and grief for my father has not disappeared either, nor would I want it to. But the charge that was driving my body into crisis genuinely reduced. I stopped needing my body to carry what my conscious mind could not yet hold.
If Your Anger Feels Bigger Than the Moment
If you find yourself suppressing anger, perhaps because you were taught it was unacceptable, unsafe, or simply too much, or if you have ever wondered whether unexplained physical symptoms might be connected to emotions you have never fully processed, I want you to know that connection is real, and it is not something you are imagining or exaggerating.
Anger that has nowhere to go does not disappear. But it can be worked with directly, and it does not have to keep finding its way into your body to be heard.
If you have lost someone to suicide yourself, please know that grief following a loss like this can be uniquely complicated, and support built specifically around this experience exists. Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide (SOBS) offers a free UK national helpline, email support, and peer support groups run by people who have experienced this kind of loss themselves.
Helpline: 0300 111 5065 (9am–7pm, every day)Website: https://uksobs.org
Link: https://uksobs.org
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