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June 26, 2025 16 mins
In this episode of #FeelingsMatter, hosts Michelle Stinson Ross, Tina Schweiger, and Heather Hampton explore the intense emotion of feeling furious - that state of intense anger, actively raging, or feeling violent. The conversation examines fury as an "amygdala hijack" that can signal the need for significant change and growth, while also offering practical strategies for managing this overwhelming emotion. The hosts share personal experiences with fury and discuss techniques for de-escalation when this intense emotion emerges.Episode Highlights:
  • Michelle describes fury as rare for her but connected to feelings of helplessness when she has no control over a harmful situation, noting that for her it takes "something excessive" to reach this level of intense anger
  • Tina explains fury as a complete "amygdala hijack" that can actually precede significant personal growth, suggesting that when you're helpless enough to feel furious, it can drive you to realize what you cannot control and need to accept
  • Heather shares that she rarely experiences fury in daily life except while driving (where her car serves as a safe space to express strong emotions), and emphasizes that anger emotions often signal core beliefs being challenged
  • The hosts discuss practical de-escalation strategies, including the "exit sign" visualization technique for removing yourself from volatile situations, and Tina shares a road rage story that illustrates how choosing not to engage can defuse dangerous confrontations
  • Michelle introduces the "whisper technique" for managing fury - deliberately speaking in whispers forces others to calm down to hear you while simultaneously helping regulate your own nervous system and buying time to regain clarity
Podcast theme music by Dubush Miaw from Pixabay

This episode of the #FeelingsMatter Podcast was recorded and produced at MSR Studios in Saint Paul, MN.Copyright 2025, all rights reserved. No reproduction, excerpting, or other use without written permission.

This episode is sponsored by 
FeelWise - bridging the gap between reflection and resilience, offering practical tools to help people overcome obstacles, embrace change, and grow stronger emotionally. https://www.feel-wise.com/

Don’t miss a moment of the conversation, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcasting platform

Podcast theme music by Dubush Miaw from Pixabay

This episode of the #FeelingsMatter Podcast was recorded and produced at MSR Studios in Saint Paul, MN. No reproduction, excerpting, or other use without written permission.

This episode is sponsored by 
FeelWise - bridging the gap between reflection and resilience, offering practical tools to help people overcome obstacles, embrace change, and grow stronger emotionally. https://www.feel-wise.com/

Don’t miss a moment of the conversation, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcasting platform
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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Do you have trouble talking about your feelings, You're not alone.
It's a topic that can make even the most powerful
people somewhat squeamish. You're listening to Feelings Matter, where our
mission is to demystify everything about emotions so that we

(00:23):
can all get more comfortable in talking about them. Join Heather,
Tina and Michelle as we unpack a new angle on
emotions and the psychology of human nature.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Feelings Matter. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Feelings Matter.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
I'm Michelle Stinson Rass and I'm teenage Wiger.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
I've been feather anton.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Furious is the emotion that I pulled from the box
this week. Let me go through the definition first. Feeling
intense anger, actively raging, or violent. So this is beyond
just anger, but we are now into high energy rage
and wanting to physically possibly cause harm either to ourselves

(01:19):
or the space around us. Some of the questions you
could ask yourself, am I feeling furious? Have you noticed
a change in your breathing patterns?

Speaker 3 (01:28):
So?

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Is there a physical change in your body and increasing
your heart rate? Do you find it challenging to think
clearly or make rational decisions like this? This is absolutely
the amygdala hijack in action. When you are furious, it's
like the lizard brain has stepped in and you are
no longer able to process and think clearly. Have you

(01:52):
received feedback from others suggesting that your behavior or demeanor
reflects extreme anger or fury. Have you been getting feedback
that maybe you're off the charts on the anger meter,
you might be experiencing the feeling of furious. I have

(02:12):
to say this one is a challenge for me. I
am an optimist. I tend to operate in a space
of I want to connect to joy, to peace, to bliss,
and you have to push me extremely hard to get

(02:37):
to furious. Usually, by the time I've just gotten to anger,
I am very much aware of it and already starting
to process it and work with it. It would have
to be something excessive that would get me to furious.
There have been maybe two or three times in.

Speaker 5 (02:57):
My life where I would say I was genuinely furious,
and I have to say, in those moments, I also.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Felt really helpless. If I've been pushed to the point
of furious, it is because I no longer have any
control over the situation and things are happening to me
that I know this is not good. I'm not happy.
This needs to change, but I don't have any agency

(03:30):
to change it. In that moment and hello, furious shows
up and for me it's very rare, exactly.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
So first I started thinking about, like, when is the
last time I felt furious? And it's been I think
the last time I can remember feeling like I'm throwing
pillows furious is.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
I was?

Speaker 3 (03:49):
It's been sixteen years probably, But I have to say
that the definition of the amygdala hijack, it's the right fight, flight,
or free So it can be in the moment reaction,
or it can be something that is a reaction to
a situation. And you're correct and that there's a lot

(04:10):
of helplessness associated with fury, and I want to build
on that because I would have to say that if
you're in a situation where you do feel furious and
you're literally for me, it's like I'm picking up a
pillow and I'm banging in on something, I have to
physically get the fury out of my body. It precedes
a big evolution of growth. When you're that helpless, that

(04:36):
you're that furious, it can drive me into a new
level of realizing what it is that I cannot control
and that I need to accept. And when that realization
breaks through the fury and you eventually land on that realization,
you've achieved another level of growth. So when I think,

(04:59):
that's one reason people or don't want to say negative
or positive to emotions, because you would immediately go, oh,
fury is a negative emotion. It's an unpleasant emotion, but
it's also could be very positive because that level of
an intense emotional feeling can proceed an enormous growth. So

(05:19):
in that sense, it's positive. So there's a light side
and a dark side to things.

Speaker 4 (05:24):
Correct.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
I'm glad that you brought up acceptance because for me
to get to the point of fury, I'm in a
situation that I cannot accept. That is part of it.
I probably had already tried to sit with it and
accept it because it wasn't something that I could control

(05:46):
or change. But usually fury shows up for me when
it's a situation, a circumstance of whatever that I could
not accept. Yeah, I just want to add to it.

Speaker 4 (06:01):
Tina said about the growth opportunity.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
I think pretty much any emotion.

Speaker 4 (06:06):
In the anger category is right for personal development because
there's almost always something below that your core beliefs are
being challenged or whatever it is. But anger, I feel
it's a very instinctual reaction right as a protective reason.

(06:30):
But then what is the reason for that anger? What
are you actually hurt underneath that rage because someone betrayed
you or whatever that is. I don't really feel like
I experience fury in my life, and I thank goodness
other than when I'm driving, and this is well covered
territory with.

Speaker 6 (06:50):
I do get furious, but the car is also in
my safe place to express some stronger emotion and I
can just let them go. When I can just like,
oh know, stupid blah blah blah, then it's over and
I can let it go and I can move on.
But in my daily life, like furious, other than our
political climate currently, that's not really emotion that I feel regularly.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
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(08:06):
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Speaker 2 (08:15):
I like Tina's pointing out that's a signal for growth.
I have said for the last what I guess I've
been saying this now for about five years.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
Tina, you correct me if you think differently. But anything
within the anger category, I feel is a strong emotional
signal that something needs to change.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
And often for us as people, the only thing that
we can change as ourselves. But when you can accept
that's the situation that something needs to change and the
only thing that I can change is myself, then I
guess the acceptance A bit of this is that I
accept that I need to change something about what I'm doing,

(09:00):
who I'm engaging with, whatever the case may be. But
I have always believed that any of the flavors within
the anger category are that emotional signal that you need
to stop, you need to take a break, and then
you need to change.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
And the one like nuance within that, I think is
the contempt is a very judging, heavy anger and it
has its own category, which is where the acceptance lies.
I think there's the other category of just pure anger,

(09:41):
and they're almost just completely inseparable. But the nuance there
on acceptance is that when that anger creeps into contempt.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, because furious, that sense of fury is such a
difficult thing to experience. Do we also want to talk
a little bit about strategies around this. I know that Tina,
with your very male household and just the age group

(10:18):
that your family is in, that there really needs to
be some tactics, some things in your toolkit that you
need to be prepared in advance for when fury shows
up in the household. How do you guide maybe your
children in working through an emotion like this.

Speaker 7 (10:37):
I don't have children, and so I can't speak to that.
I would say for myself personally, when feeling that intensity
start to come up, for me, I need space. I
need to immediately remove myself from the situation. And distance
is agreat with mindseftia, So distance I need immediately. And

(11:03):
the question arises is how do we handle that when
we can't.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Debt space distance?

Speaker 3 (11:12):
The old card that had the word distance on it,
and the new card doesn't say distance. It has something
called the rage meter and so fury would be like
that rage meter is blowing its top, and so that
new version would be that rage meter, it's blowing its top.

(11:34):
The way that I switched that up was because I
have on here to picture an exit sign, so that
we're not relying on logic. That if there's the ability
to train yourself to come up with a visual to
picture an exit sign and have that be tied to
a strong anger emotion, you can remember in the moment

(11:58):
to step away, just think about road rage. I'll bring
it back to that. But we had an incident not
that long ago, a few weeks and it was a
nearly physical altercation. My brother was in town. We were
stuck on a road. Somebody was behind us on a
little narrow road, and this big old truck just drives

(12:19):
up and wants all of us to back up so
that he can take a left into a driveway. Meanwhile,
there's nobody behind him, and we had already pulled over.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
To get out of his way.

Speaker 3 (12:29):
So we were sitting there and this guy just literally
steps out of the car and my brother is about
to get out of the car, and nobody wants to
see my brother. He's six foot six and three hundred
pounds and if he comes at you like you're gonna
get back in your car real fast. It didn't even
come to that because my brother and my husband at

(12:51):
the same time, we're you know what, We're not gonna
go there, and Richard, my husband, just rolled down his
window and was like, you know what, We're gonna movie.
And so I was like, how long is this gonna laugh?
So we put our Netflix up and we just we
all turned on a movie like we had kids in
the car.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
We had we weren't.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
Gonna do that, and we couldn't back up, so we
were just like stuck. So we did see the rage
meter go up really fast, and I saw fury in
the other driver. He did get out of his car
and then he got back in it pretty quickly, and
then I think it was about one hundred and eighty

(13:35):
seconds to two minutes that it took for him to
actually go you know what, I'm not gonna win. This
backs up. So we go through, and then the minute
we go through, he nearly crashes into another car, whipping
around us. To make a point that road rage is
a big source of fury, I think for so many people,

(13:55):
and that's why pairing it with an exit sign. Exit
the freeway, exit the building, exit stage, just exit, exit
the situation.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
It isn't always that you need physical space. Like back
to how there's points. What do you do when you
can't isolate yourself from it? Lessons on how to fight
well right. It takes two people to engage in an
argument and keep it going right, and so in that case,

(14:24):
whether it's a text message or email or any number
of things, you can choose to just exit the conversation
and refuse to fight in that regard. That is one
way to exit that. Even if you can't remove yourself physically,
you can certainly remove yourself from the conversation. I have

(14:45):
had to do that several times in my life. It's
saying yeah, nope, no, I just no, thank you, there's
no reason for us to get in an argument about this.
I'm not going to participate. I'm just not going to participate.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
Sometimes that can increase the fury of the other person.
You got to be careful.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
I was just going to say.

Speaker 4 (15:08):
Another technique that I find very useful is the whisper technique,
because when we get into a state of being furious,
we tend to get louder and bigger, like we expand.
But if you are shouting or yelling or that, if
you can bring a conversation down to a whisper so

(15:28):
that the person you're in conflict with has to bring
themselves down to actually hear what you're saying, it can
very quickly de escalate a situation. And by making yourself
calm down for a whisper, it actually starts reregulating your
nervous system to calm down.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
And buy you a little time to get them clarity.
So hopefully a few tips, a few techniques, a little
bit of mindfulness will help you to manage those moments
when and fury shows up and you're starting to experience
that feeling of being furious, And hopefully you guys find

(16:08):
this is helpful. I absolutely have thank you ladies for
sharing with me. You bring so much into my life.
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