Face your anger and let it out. It is the only way to stay healthy.

I had been meaning to write about anger for a while. As I sat down to begin this column, a recent psychoanalysis session came to mind. I was telling my analyst about something that might have made me angry, but instead, as I spoke with her, I experienced a sudden wave of irresistible sleepiness. I described this sudden fatigue as I felt the overwhelming weight of my eyelids and gave up trying to keep them open, losing the thread of what I had just talked about. “Maybe you’re channeling your anger into sleep,” my analyst said.

The more patients I treat in psychotherapy, and the more psychoanalysis I receive as a patient, the more I find that anger is often the most difficult feeling to feel. More than sadness, more than love, more than hate, more than mourning, anger is suppressed, or acted out, or drunk away, or numbed, or killed, or put to sleep. All, it seems, but allowed into our minds and felt.

Often this is because we have a visceral fear of our anger. Sometimes this is linked to someone’s history of childhood abuse, if they grew up in a home where a parent’s anger was expressed through violence. But often this is not the case. Sometimes this fear can take root in a mind that finds emotions indigestible and overwhelming, leading to an unconscious confusion that angry feelings are the same as violent actions, that the anger itself is damaging, and that this damage is always irreparable.

Or – and sometimes And – the fear comes from an internalization of racist and misogynistic tropes: a person is unconsciously afraid of being cast as “the angry woman,” or “the aggressive black man.” Such stereotypes are insidious, they lodge themselves in the minds of their targets, who may end up denying themselves the ordinary and vital experience of being angry when wronged.

I say simple and vital because being angry when we are wronged can be a creative and rich emotional experience. It is crucial to good mental health and fulfilling relationships. It is at the core of that precious instinct to leave relationships where we are not being treated well. When we kill that instinct, we kill a part of ourselves – and we compromise our safety.

The vibrant, dynamic energy that anger can bring can all too easily be bitten back into a teeth-gnashing resentment, a colorless, stony sense of martyrdom and grievance, impenetrable to understanding. And there can be all sorts of important feelings hidden beneath that anger that cannot be expressed unless it can first be felt.

Realizing this is, in my experience, crucial to good relationships. Up until a few years ago, whenever I sensed an argument with my husband coming on—when his voice started to rise or I felt a growing pounding in my chest—I would leave the room and close the door.

One thing that made me realize the seriousness of this was a conversation with psychoanalyst Josh Cohen. “I only have two words for a woman who can’t get mad at her husband,” he said. “Tick and tock.”

It helped me understand that in any romantic relationship—and I’ve never seen this more clearly than since becoming a mother—conflict and anger are inevitable and essential to survival. Cohen’s book All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World, about anger in the intimate and political life, comes out in October. I think I’ll ask my husband to buy it for Christmas.

It took a lot of therapy for me to understand that by cutting off the oxygen to these arguments by leaving the room, I was essentially trying to close the door on my own anger. I was suppressing my husband’s feelings, my own feelings—and our relationship—and robbing us of the chance to discuss them, express ourselves, understand each other, and get back together. It was transformative when I finally understood that if you can’t be truly angry with your partner, you can’t heal it in any meaningful way.

Although I can now be angry with my husband and express it, that does not mean I am comfortable with feeling anger in general. This is a work in progress. As I listened to my analyst’s words, forced my eyes open, and fought the sleep that seemed so unyielding, I felt the truth of her words in the pit of my stomach. I unconsciously channeled my anger into sleep. It is high time we wake up.