The Unexpected Power of Autistic Anger (5 min. read)

Ask my husband how many times he’s seen me angry.

I’m not talking about the days when I was in active addiction and emotions exploded out of me like a rogue volcano.

I mean stone-cold sober anger.

The kind of anger that’s raw and real—anger that compels me to climb onto an audible soapbox. The kind that refuses to stay silent in the face of bullshit. The kind that comes from the core of my autistic truth, when my values are so deeply violated that I can’t help but rage.

His answer?

Less than one hand. A few fingers, at most.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a household where anger appeared in three-second bursts before people disappeared into other rooms, never to speak of it again.

Maybe it’s because I sat in the front pew at church, absorbing verses about being “slow to anger and rich in kindness” during my formative years.

Or maybe it’s because anger has always felt like a dirty emotion—one that overwhelms, consumes, and leads to poor decisions.

Anger has long felt like tapping into my unrefined, unevolved lizard brain.

And if there’s one thing I’ve always prided myself on, it’s being cerebral—striving for a higher consciousness that transcends base instincts.

To me, becoming a higher version of myself never included anger. If anything, anger felt like a step backward.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned through getting sober and receiving my diagnoses, it’s this:

You don’t get to pick and choose which emotions you feel.

To be fully human—to be healthy—you have to feel the whole spectrum: the complex, the messy, the inconvenient.

And I’ve started letting small slivers of anger come through.

But even then, they’ve been padded with kindness. Filtered. Diluted by a fear that my raw truth might offend, might unsettle, might not align with someone else’s version of reality.

You may have noticed it slipping through in recent posts.

I scoffed in The Oughtism of Autism at the idea that wanting a more ideal world is somehow unrealistic. I stood firm in Speak Truth to Bullshit about struggling to accept that the truth isn’t always welcome.

Even as I wrote those posts, I felt it—the subtle restraint. My fingers hesitated over the keyboard, filtering my words, mindful of how they’d be received.

Because expressing my true, unfiltered voice? That’s terrifying.

Terrifying to a nervous system trained in childhood to stay safe by staying quiet. Terrifying to an undiagnosed autistic girl who just wanted to blend in, to survive.

I’ve bitten my tongue so often, I’m surprised I still have one.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s wisdom in choosing silence, in speaking only after thoughtful reflection.

But yesterday, during a coaching session, something shifted.

One of the wild things about life coaching (vs. therapy) is how deep it gets—how quickly you find yourself in the trenches of your own mind.

There’s always this moment before a breakthrough. You can feel it—a tension between your conscious mind defending its position, and your unconscious mind cracking open from the persistent questioning.

One final time, my coach challenged me. “There’s more underneath this emotion,” she said. “More beneath the guilt and frustration.”

And suddenly… the ceiling shattered.

I was angry.

All-consuming, bewildering, unfiltered anger.

I’m angry about social norms—and how even I, in my masked autistic state, have bought into them.

I’m angry at gender expectations that define a man’s worth by his paycheck.

I’m angry at the lie that love—real, tender, transformative love—could ever be wrong.

I’m angry at racial hierarchies that still convince people that skin color determines value.

I’m angry that society dares to measure human worth, that it dares to define only one “right” way to have a brain—while tagging all the others with “disorders” like ASD or ADHD.

I’m angry that more people aren’t angry about these things.

And most of all?

I’m angry at myself—for how expertly I buried this anger beneath years of messaging that told me it wasn’t safe or useful.

But this kind of anger?

This isn’t the kind that destroys or diminishes.

This is sacred anger.

This is power—wrapped in the robes of humanity and justice.

Because when anger is conscious and methodical, it’s like a man braiding leather into a whip before flipping tables in a temple.

It’s not destruction—it’s divine disruption.

And that power?

It gives me a voice. A real voice.

A voice that drives change. A voice that makes me exceptional.

How about you?

Have you ever felt the need to suppress your anger?

Could there be power hidden underneath—waiting to be felt, harnessed, and used?

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With love, rage, and radical self-trust,

Liv

P.S. If this post resonated with you, come hang out with me on Instagram @exceptional__living and sign up for a free coaching session—whether 1:1 or in a group—if you’re ready to explore the power within your own autistic anger.

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