Rage is not a symptom.

The Wellness World Lied to You About Rage and I say that as someone who spent years delivering that lie.

CNN just exposed an online network of men teaching each other how to drug and rape their partners. I'm not softening that sentence.

I'm not putting a content warning before it. Because the discomfort you just felt reading it? That's the point. 62 million visits in February 2026 alone. Not strangers in alleyways. Husbands. Partners. The people who brought cups of tea before bed. One survivor didn't know her tea was being drugged. She was just grateful he was being thoughtful.

She still struggles to call it rape.

I understand why. Not because she doesn't know what happened to her. But because for years, people like me handed her the wrong tools and called it healing.

We Have Been Gaslighting Survivors in Spiritual Language

Say that again.

The wellness industry - the one selling nervous system regulation and forgiveness frameworks and breathwork for trauma - has been, largely and systematically, teaching survivors that their rage is the problem.

Not the violation. The response to the violation.

I was sexually abused as a child. I was sexually assaulted more times than I should have to count. I was raped by people who were supposed to be safe. And I can tell you exactly what the wellness world handed me …

Breathe. Journal. Forgive. Release. Heal.
(insert eye roll to the back of my head, here)

Later, when I started training in trauma and became a counsellor, I realized I had been handed those same tools to give to other people. And for a while, I did. I was trained to move clients through anger toward acceptance. To frame rage as a stage rather than a signal. To celebrate the moment someone said they had found peace, even when I wasn't sure the ground beneath that peace was solid.

I am not doing that anymore.

Because what I was really doing - what so much of this industry is still doing - is teaching survivors to make themselves easier to be around. Quieter. Softer. Less inconvenient to the people and systems that would rather not reckon with what happened.

Here's What Your Nervous System Actually Knows

Your amygdala doesn't read a calendar. It doesn't know the violation was five years ago or twenty. It responds to the felt sense of danger. And when that danger involved betrayal by someone who was supposed to be safe, the response is bigger, not smaller. Because your nervous system isn't just processing the assault. It's processing the complete demolition of safety itself.

The energy that mobilizes in response to that? The thing in your chest and your jaw and your hands that makes you want to burn something down? That is not a symptom. That is not a stage. That is not evidence that you haven't done enough work.

That is your body doing exactly what it was built to do.

The problem was never the anger. The problem is that we were never given permission to have it. Women especially. Survivors especially. We were taught that anger was ugly, unhealed, unfeminine. That the truly recovered person had floated serenely into acceptance and maybe even gratitude for the lessons.

Gratitude for the lessons. When someone drugged your tea.

Gisèle Pelicot Knew Something We Keep Forgetting

Her former husband drugged and facilitated her rape over 200 times. At his trial, she looked at the world and said:

Shame must change sides.

Not heal. Not forgive. Not release and let go.

Change sides.

She was the most healed person in that courtroom. Not because she had transcended her anger. Because she knew exactly where to put it. The shame has never belonged to survivors. It belongs to the perpetrators. It belongs to the platforms that profit from violation. It belongs to the systems that make prosecution so difficult that most perpetrators will never see a single consequence.

The rage, though? The rage is ours. And we are allowed to keep it.

What I Actually Want You To Do With This

If the CNN story made you furious, good. If it woke something up in your body, something old, something you thought you had dealt with, that is not regression. That is your nervous system correctly recognizing a pattern that is real and ongoing and enormous.

You are not unhealed because you're angry.

You are not too much because you're angry.

You do not need a breathing exercise right now.

You need someone to tell you the truth. So here it is.

You survived something that should never have happened. You are living in a world where it is still happening on an industrial scale. And the wellness industry, for too long, has been more invested in keeping you comfortable and quiet than in helping you become formidable.

I know this because I was comfortable and quiet for a long time. I know this because I sat with my own rage for years and called it unhealed instead of calling it accurate. I know this because the moment I stopped trying to move through my anger and started letting it mean something, everything I do in this work changed.

Rage, when it has somewhere to go, is one of the most powerful forces for change that exists.

So let it go somewhere.

Advocate. Set the boundary you have been softening. Refuse to minimize what happened to you or anyone else. Give other survivors permission to feel exactly what they feel without rushing them toward peace. Be the person who says the quiet part out loud.

The comfortable don't disrupt systems. The formidable do.

About the Author

Lea Morrison is a Registered Therapeutic Counsellor (RTC) and trauma educator based in Kelowna, BC, working with clients across Canada. She is the founder of Mind Your Heart Academy. She writes and teaches at the intersection of nervous system science, somatic healing, and the things the wellness world doesn't like to say out loud, informed by both her clinical training and her own history as a survivor of trauma and sexual violence.