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It was a cold, bright day in London when I took a lift up 10 floors to my first therapy session, where I had one key objective in mind: to convince the man in front of me I had no reason to be there.

I had, of course, been the beneficiary of that most treasured of mirages: the happy, normal childhood. The fact I was drinking a bottle and a half of wine every night to drown out my anxiety and get some sleep had to be about something else – work stress, maybe. I figured I’d let off a little steam for a few sessions, perhaps learn some useful coping mechanisms, and then be on my way.

I had no idea that what I was really embarking on was a relationship that would last eight years (and counting) while profoundly changing me. A long, painful and at times exhilarating reckoning with not just the events of my life but the limitations of the persona I had carried out of childhood in which serious cracks were starting to show. 

Beyond convincing my therapist I didn’t really need his help, my second aim that day was to make him like me, because making people like me was the only life skill I truly had. I often say the first gift he gave me was a kind but firm instruction: ‘Don’t ask me how I am, this time is for you.’ The idea that I could centre my own feelings and not worry about someone else’s was excruciating at first – until it started to feel radically freeing. 

Gradually therapy taught me to understand this compulsion to put others at ease even at my own expense, and where it came from. There were many times I reached a new level of this theoretical understanding – I am the way I am now, because of things that happened then – and felt tempted to quit, as though the job was done. But something in me knew the insights I was gaining hadn’t yet permeated below the level of intellect. I understood myself better but it hadn’t changed much about my inner world. So I kept going. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. 

Over the years therapy taught me other life skills that I could call upon from time to time, besides making other people happy. How to have honest, direct conversations. How to spot the useful information smuggled inside difficult feelings. How to halt my relentless inner critic and speak to myself with compassion. Most of all it taught me to trust an emotion I had ignored, repressed and scorned in others my entire life – anger.

Realising through therapy that I was actually furious about so many things – and that this was not only OK but could be a source of immense wisdom and power – was the start of finally overcoming what had been a lifelong battle with anxiety. Since I was a child I thought a daily thrum of fear and dread was my lot in life – a cross to bear, a biological inheritance for which there was no lasting cure. Who knew the answer wasn’t to take up yoga or gratitude journalling, or drink myself to oblivion, but to finally give voice to the rage trapped inside my body? First the leg shaking stopped, then a range of other somatic symptoms I’d tried to medicate away for years stopped. 

By giving voice to my anger – first in the safety of the consultancy room, then carefully in the outside world – I started to finally achieve some inner peace. I learned to instruct what Carl Rogers called ‘the watchman’ – the rigid, untrusting marshal of my own inner thoughts – to stand down a little. Paradoxically, the more space I made for anger, the more relaxed I felt, and the more generous I became towards other people. I saw less hostility in their actions because I stopped projecting the angry parts of myself onto them. I came to see that, whether it’s in politics, the workplace or our personal relationships, the sense of shame and fear many of us have around anger is the root of so much misery and dysfunction.

This became the subject of my first book. In it I interviewed people from all walks of life who have come to consider anger a secret superpower – a source of deep wisdom, clarity and purpose. I also spoke with psychologists, researchers and neuroscientists who argue that anger remains the most overlooked, ignored and underfunded of all the core emotions. Together this convinced me that if the mental health conversation needs a new frontier, anger should be it.