Fight or Flight Anxiety: The Suppressed Anger Underneath

Written by Roland Bal

Fight or flight anxiety is often present when you suffer from complex trauma or post-traumatic stress. The problem is that anxiety can take up so much space that you may think it is a stand-alone issue — something to be overcome, managed, or medicated away. It rarely is. Underneath the anxiety, there is usually another emotion doing the driving, and until you can recognise that layer, the anxiety itself has nowhere to resolve.

What looks like chronic anxiety in the body is frequently a nervous system stuck in fight or flight — held in sympathetic activation by something that hasn't been allowed to move. Most of the time, that something is anger — suppressed, unexpressed, and turned inward. The fight response is still firing. You just can't feel the fight part anymore. What remains in awareness is the residue: the racing heart, the tight chest, the restless dread.

Why Anxiety Is Often the Coping Emotion

There is a distinction worth making here between core emotions and coping emotions. Core emotions are the original response — in this case, anger arising in response to a boundary being crossed, a need being denied, or a threat to the integrity of the self. Coping emotions are what take over when the core emotion is too dangerous, too overwhelming, or too socially unacceptable to feel directly.

Anxiety is one of the most common coping emotions. It is the emotion that is easier to express, easier to stay with, and easier to take to a doctor. It keeps you busy. It gives you something to focus on. And precisely because it is so occupying, it pulls your attention away from what is underneath it. You forget the suppressed anger part and become focused on overcoming the fight or flight anxiety. The overcoming itself becomes the whole project.

This is not a flaw — it is how the system adapted to keep you functioning. But as long as the coping emotion is the only thing you are working with, the underlying activation has nowhere to go. The nervous system remains tuned to a threat that was never fully met, and the anxiety keeps looping.

How Suppressed Anger Becomes Fight or Flight Anxiety

When the fight response activates and cannot complete — when you couldn't push back, couldn't say no, couldn't protect yourself at the time it mattered — the mobilised energy doesn't simply disappear. It stays in the body. The nervous system remains on alert, waiting for a discharge that never comes.

Very often anxiety relates directly to a lack of boundaries, which in turn relates to complex trauma and its symptoms.

Over time, the suppressed fight energy loses its original shape. It no longer feels like "I am angry at this person" or "I need to say no to this situation." It becomes diffuse. It becomes the nameless pressure you wake up with, the dread you feel before a conversation, the tight stomach before you see your family, the racing thoughts at 3am. The anger is still there, but the access to it has been closed off — because as a child, or in the environment that shaped you, feeling it directly was not safe.

This is where the fight response goes when it can't go anywhere else. It becomes anxiety. And because the original cause is no longer visible, you start treating the anxiety as the thing itself.

Boundaries, Self-Worth, and the Nervous System

When you have difficulty speaking your yes and your no, you are impacting your sense of self-esteem and self-worth, and over time this will result in anxiety. This is not a philosophical point — it is a nervous system point. Every time a no that needed to be spoken goes unspoken, the fight energy that rose up to protect you gets pushed back down. Every time a yes that would have been true gets overridden for the sake of keeping the peace, a small part of you registers that you are not allowed to matter.

The nervous system keeps count. Not consciously — the body keeps the record. After enough repetitions, the baseline state becomes one of low-grade activation, because the system is permanently bracing against its own unexpressed pushback. This is the raw material of chronic fight or flight anxiety. It is not generated by the present moment. It is generated by an accumulated history of suppressed responses that never got to complete.

Anxiety, in this frame, is not a malfunction. It is a very accurate reading of a nervous system that has lost access to its own protective force. The fight energy is still there. It has just been turned away from its proper target — the situation or person that needed to be confronted — and pointed inward at the self.

Working With the Layer Underneath the Anxiety

The way through is not to fight the anxiety harder. Pushing against it, trying to think your way out of it, or treating it as an enemy to be defeated tends to reinforce the same pattern that created it — another layer of self-suppression on top of the one already there. The work is to gradually come underneath the anxiety and make contact with what it is covering.

This is somatic work. It happens at the level of the body and nervous system, not primarily at the level of thought. You begin by noticing the anxiety in the body — where it sits, how it moves, what it feels like — and then, slowly, you let the awareness descend beneath it. Often, underneath the jitter and the racing, there is heat. Pressure in the chest. A clenched jaw. A wanting to push. That is the fight energy, still there, still alive, still unexpressed.

Meeting that energy is not the same as acting it out. It is not about screaming, blaming, or discharging it onto someone. It is about letting the body know that the response is allowed — that the no can be felt, that the push can have its full shape, that the anger is not a betrayal of who you are but a signal that something matters. When the fight response is allowed to complete internally, even in small doses, the anxiety begins to drop. It has less work to do, because the thing it was standing in for is being felt directly. This is what nervous system regulation actually looks like in practice — not the absence of activation, but the capacity to feel it, work with it, and let it move.

Building Back Through Small Successes

When you start to become aware of the deeper layers of anxiety and your fight or flight anxiety starts to become more contained, you can then start to work with expressing your boundaries. The way to go about this is to start with challenges that are manageable — where your fight or flight mechanism doesn't fully kick in and take over.

Pick the conversations you can actually have. Pick the no you can actually say. Pick the situations where the stakes are small enough that you can feel the activation rising without being flooded by it. Each time you manage to stay with the discomfort and still speak, something recalibrates. The nervous system gets a new piece of information: the fight response can be used, and the world does not end.

It is by creating small successes that you can build up a sense of self-esteem again. Not through willpower, not through forcing yourself to be assertive in situations you aren't ready for — but through repeated, manageable experiences of your own boundaries being honoured, first by you. That is how the layer underneath the anxiety slowly comes back online, and the anxiety itself loses its grip.