Rewilding: On Rage, and the Return to Your Primal Senses

I want to say this to all of you who have been holding it tight.

Those of you who have been saying "it's okay, your feelings are valid" to everyone else — while quietly squashing your own. Putting your own feelings behind a closed vault to deal with later. So there's no attack. So there's no opening for someone to decide that the intensity you feel is up for criticism or judgment.

Your rage is valid.

But once you let it out, it feels like Pandora's box. That endless supply of word vomit. That disappointment. That certainty that you are not going to be met.

I'm here to tell you: your rage is valid. And although it's hard, you should feel it. See it through. Even if it feels endless — I promise you, it isn't.

Here's the part most of us were never told. The emotion of anger — the raw biochemical surge of it — moves through the body in about 90 seconds. Harvard-trained neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor named this. When something sets us off, a chemical cascade floods the bloodstream, runs its course, and flushes out in roughly a minute and a half. After that, the physiology is done. What keeps the feeling alive past 90 seconds is the story we loop on top of it.

But the rage underneath it is different. That rage isn't short term. It's been building — for months, for years — precisely because it's never been met. You've felt the 90-second wave a thousand times and each time you swallowed it, sealed the vault, and moved on. The physiology cleared. The unmet part stayed.

And this is where the body keeps the receipt.

Peter Levine, who built Somatic Experiencing from watching how wild animals shake off life-or-death encounters and walk away clean, describes trauma not as the event itself but as an incomplete response to it — survival energy that mobilized to fight or flee and then got interrupted, frozen mid-motion, stored in the body as unfinished business. The animal in the wild trembles, discharges, and completes the cycle. We — civilized, watchful, afraid of being "too much" — abort it. Over and over. The charge doesn't disappear. It waits.

So I wonder:

Would it still feel endless? Or would it move — the way it was always designed to?

Imagine a padded room. No one gets hurt. But your roar, your yell, whatever release your body has been rehearsing in secret — it finally gets to leave you. Felt. Released. Completed.

It doesn't have to be a padded room. Sometimes nature will do.

There's real physiology here, too — this isn't only poetry. Time in the natural world measurably lowers cortisol and shifts you toward parasympathetic recovery; researchers have clocked a roughly 21% per-hour drop in salivary cortisol from a nature experience, with the sweet spot landing around 20–30 minutes. The open space, the light, the green — your system reads all of it as safe enough, and the threat response begins to stand down. Nature gives your nervous system permission the padded room can't fake.

Just to let yourself feel the rage. And let it out.

That, to me, is the rewilding.

Why "rewilding," and why now

We are sensory creatures. Long before language, before analysis, before we learned to narrate our own experience, we sensed — from the inside out. Scientists call this interoception: the nervous system's moment-by-moment read of your internal landscape — heat, pressure, tightness, the flutter before the tears. It's the ground floor of every emotion you have. And it's the exact sense most of us have spent a lifetime overriding.

Rewilding isn't about becoming feral. It's about coming back — back into the primal, sensational intelligence of the body you've been managing from the neck up. Back to the wild woman Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote about in Women Who Run With the Wolves: not a metaphor for chaos, but for instinct — the deep-knowing that gets domesticated out of us when we learn that being agreeable is safer than being true.

When you've spent years being the one who holds it all — validating everyone, vaulting yourself — your primal senses go quiet. Not gone. Quiet. Rewilding is turning the volume back up. Learning to feel the 90-second wave as a wave, and to let it complete, so it stops pooling into that bottomless rage that has nowhere to go.

You're not broken. Your body isn't malfunctioning. It's been bracing — faithfully, exhaustingly — around a rule that was never built for you: keep it small, keep it safe, keep the peace at your own expense.

We can un-learn that. Slowly. At the speed of safety.

If the wave feels too big to meet alone — if the vault has been sealed a very long time — that's not a failure. That's a sign this is co-regulation work, not solo work. An unregulated nervous system that's been suppressing everything from rage to grief to "I'm fine" doesn't need to try harder. It needs a trained set of hands and a contained space to complete what it's been carrying. That's the work I do.