There is a family incident from two years ago that still puzzles me for how much it overwhelmed me at the time.

It was before dinner on the night before Christmas Eve at my parents’ house in Virginia. Some nearby relatives were coming to join us. My then seven-year-old son helped to create and set name cards on the large oval dining table in the “dining room” that my parents have dined in two or three times at most over the past three decades. It’s not that we were hosting so many people or that there was anything remotely formal about the meal. It was meant to be only a fun planning exercise that invited both our kids to consider who would most enjoy sitting next to whom.

An elderly uncle of mine arrived early and surveyed the seating arrangements. He shuffled some of the cards around. My son, undeterred and giving me conspiratorial smiles, shuffled them back to their original places. I was the only other adult in the room at the time. “Oh, the kids spent time creating a special seating plan. We have no rules!” I explained to my uncle with a laugh, trying to convey a spirit of lightheartedness. But my uncle, who is anything but lighthearted, only moved the cards again, saying that it was proper for the hosts to sit here. My son followed after to undo his work, as if it were a game. All at once, my uncle began yelling at my son. Furious, he told my son that he must listen to his elders, that he was being rude and disrespectful. He declared that he would leave and go home. And then he left.

The volume of his raised voice had carried over to the kitchen, even above the loud crackling of stir-frying and the roar of overhead exhaust fans. My mom came in to ask what happened. I said my uncle was upset and had left. My dad went to fetch him back. They didn’t need more details at the time; my parents are familiar with his volatility.

I stayed calm as I checked on my son. He seemed genuinely fine and somehow able to shrug the incident off. When I was convinced he was truly okay, I went upstairs and, alone in my childhood room, I collapsed into tears. At some point I realized dinner was underway. I desperately tried everything I knew to re-regulate myself. Breathing exercises. Visualizations. Progressive relaxation techniques. Cold water. Nothing really worked. (I know now that, in the world of parts work, I still had some crucial connections to make with my own “vulnerable child” part.) Somehow I managed to pull myself together enough to join the dinner, trying valiantly all the while (and not entirely succeeding) to focus my full attention on not crying and instead helping my five-year-old with her meal—even when my uncle stood up to apologize to the table for his earlier outburst.

Later that evening, safely in bed, I began to cry again. Again, there seemed to be no stopping the tears.

The memory of this baffling incident came rushing back to me as I began to write what I thought would be a reflection on being conflict-averse. After all, it’s something that every personality test I’ve ever taken tells me about, and it’s true that I’m acutely sensitive to the presence of conflict, in or between others or within myself.

But the more I consider what it means to be “conflict-averse,” the more overly simplistic it feels. I usually don’t mind differences of opinion. And I usually don’t mind uncertainty and ambiguity, which feel like extended states of conflict between multiple things that could be, or could become, true at the same time—which simply feels like reality. For better or for worse, I appreciate multiple sides, and I care to understand how someone came to think or feel what they think and feel. It’s a natural form of empathy, humility, and imagination, if not idle curiosity, to recognize that nothing can spring into being without something that came before—and that I cannot presume to know what that something is.

(In organization development parlance, it’s understanding that there is always a ladder of inference to walk back down. It occurs to me that coaching is often a joint exercise in traveling up and down various ladders of inference.)

I think what poses more of a challenge for me is anger, or the threat of it. Namely, I have trained myself well over the years to resist feeling anger—and to protect myself from incurring the anger of others by, well, doing my best not to anger anyone if I could help it.

Needless to say, this is not a quirk unique to me. There are larger intersectional forces at play. Women especially, and women of color even more so, have been conditioned for generations to quell their own anger, rather than express it, and to avoid angering those with power over them. Our bodies have inherited the fact that to be in the presence of aggressive or toxic anger is dangerous—something I didn’t fully appreciate until that holiday dinner two years ago.

There are multiple kinds and manifestations of anger, and there are people for whom anger management is a real issue. Perhaps it’s a self-protective part of me that fears that any anger precludes understanding and leaves no room for possibility or choice, ambiguity or uncertainty. It’s anger, not conflict, that wrecks the peace (or the complacency) that I instinctively desire.

Over the past few years, I’ve often found myself in the position of helping clients (both men and women) see that they are more angry than they’d like to admit. I hear the catch in their voice. The bitterness in an aside. The fragmented lists of grievances. The way they build, session by session, a careful case against their circumstances or for their own burnout, while still trying to be circumspect and even-keeled. They know there’s no power in playing victim. They sense it’s a kind of privilege to even complain to me about the things they complain about.

I listen to them, all too aware that I’m a classic Enneagram 9 “Peacemaker”: an inveterate believer in the power of silver linings, seeking the gift in all circumstances, receiving all the lessons of life, harmonizing, etc. And what I’m learning is this: that many of us have become all too skilled at rationalizing everything and undermining the power of our own anger in the process. We minimize it as “venting” or we redirect it towards systemic, institutional things we don’t really believe we have the agency to confront. (But what if we do?) We put our lives in a holding pattern. “I just need to get through this [project / cycle / transition],” we say to ourselves (or to our coach), “and then I’ll see.” In so doing, we argue for the status quo.

Looking back, it’s often when I’ve been angry enough that I’ve made real change or taken meaningful action in my life. The times that I’ve been willing to do something and not be complacent or complicit, I drew the energy and courage to act from the well of my own anger.

Anger is a kind of knowing, a kind of certainty, which demands action. And perhaps that is exactly why anger can be a deeply clarifying, catalyzing gift we receive from our own selves—trying their hardest to signal who we are, what we actually want, and what we really stand for.

Who we are, what we actually want, and what we really stand for.

What more do we want to know?