What PMS Rage Really Means—and How to Work With It Instead of Fighting It
I spent years performing "fine" while my body screamed for rest. Here's what happened when I finally stopped lying to myself about my PMS.
What you'll learn:
Why your monthly "breakdown" is actually a breakthrough in disguise.
How capitalism profits from your disconnection and what to do about it.
The difference between managing your anger and partnering with its wisdom.
You're snappy. Maybe it's full-blown rage. Sleep's weird. And yes, your boobs feel more sensitive than normal.
Welcome to the luteal phase in summer. Double fire season. Your body's already running warmer when progesterone rises and your nervous system gets touchy about stress. Add literal summer heat and you've got a recipe for combustion. I mean seriously, I am melting.
You're too hot to handle. Not just the sweating-through-your-sports-bra kind. The emotional, energetic, hormonal kind.
Yes, PMS can be bloating, cravings, exhaustion. But it’s also the sudden rage when your partner blinks wrong. The heat in your chest. The clench in your jaw. That’s not crazy. That’s communication.
When you ignore this, your body protests. Most women are already running on empty. Overheating is your warning sign. Modern life says push through the heat, the fatigue, the irritability until you crash. As if sickness is the only permission for rest.
Capitalism loves a woman who ignores her cycle. She's productive every day, never calls in sick, and blames herself when she burns out instead of questioning why the 40-hour work week was designed for men who don't bleed.
Spoiler: you don't need to crash and you don't need permission.
PMS Isn't Your Destiny
"What we call PMS is often just the body finally speaking after a month of being ignored." — Alexandra Pope
Is irritability in your luteal phase common? Yes. Is it normal or inevitable? No. It’s not a fixed sentence. PMS is (often) shaped by inflammation, stress, mineral depletion, and emotional suppression, not just hormones.
Research shows that up to 90% of women experience at least one PMS symptom, with about half dealing with clinically significant symptoms that impact their lives. Yet we're still told it's 'normal' and to just push through
The week before your period gets labeled "PMS territory" where irritability, mood swings, bloating, and overwhelm are expected. But those symptoms are signals, information to work with, a sign your system might be out of rhythm.
Conventional medicine often treats the body, brain, and emotions as separate systems. But PMS lives in all three, in the physiological, emotional, and spiritual. That's why one-size-fits-all fixes (like the Pill or antidepressants) don't address the root.
More often the root causes are your unmet needs, stress levels, suppressed anger, over-efforting, lifestyle choices.
While Instagram yogis sell you moon water and crystal yoni eggs, your still snapping at your partner or spiraling in silence because no one told you your luteal phase needs actual rest.
Your cycle isn't just moonbeams and manifestation. Sometimes it's ugly crying because your nervous system is fried and society told you to yoga your way through it.
When the nervous system isn’t used to something, like safety, it can short-circuit. For me, entering a healthy relationship didn’t make me feel calm. It made me rage. Years of unmet needs, chronic stress, and swallowed anger finally had space to surface. I didn’t recognize myself.
What saved me wasn’t a quick fix. It was understanding how the nervous system works and returning to my natural rhythm through Ayurvedic wisdom. Learning to eat, rest, move, and create in sync with my cycle. Learning to pause before my body had to scream.
Real empowerment isn’t pushing through. It’s reclaiming your rhythm. Listening early. Choosing nourishment over punishment.
Your health is resistance. The patriarchy profits off your disconnection. You don’t have to accept that. Your power lives in the pulse of your body.
The Truth About Your Rage
"PMS is not all in your head. It's in your hormones, your history, and your unmet needs." — Lara Briden
For many women, PMS can actually be a breakthrough. It’s the moment where estrogen drops and honesty finally pierces through the noise.
For the longest time I didn't question it, just felt the anger rise and blamed myself for being "too emotional." Or blamed others for being unreasonable. It's always easier to blame them, right?
But suppressed anger doesn't always look like rage. Sometimes it hides in plain sight.
Inspired by archetypal and somatic psychology, here are a few ways it can show up:
The Performer keeps doing, proving, succeeding. She keeps going while clenching her jaw. Always says she’s “fine.” Her trigger? Fear of failure. Her deeper need? To feel worthy without the performance.
The Stoic handles anything until her body can't. Eczema, migraines, tight hips, a gut that never relaxes. Her trigger? Chaos. Her deeper need? To feel safe letting go.
The Exploder holds it in until she can't anymore. She doesn't want to destroy anything. She just wants to be heard. Her trigger? Being ignored. Her deeper need? To know her truth matters.
The Inner Critic stays hyper-aware, self-policing, exhausted. She calls it discipline but it's really self-abandonment. Her trigger? Imperfection. Her deeper need? To feel lovable when she makes mistakes.
The Vanisher leaves before she can be left. She numbs just enough to survive, says "I'm good" while disappearing inside. Her trigger? Vulnerability. Her deeper need? To feel safe staying present.
Some women get fiery. Others freeze. Anxiety, withdrawal, or disconnection before your period? That’s Vata talking and not just Pitta rage.
I've been all of them. Still find myself in one sometimes. Maybe you have too.
Here's what I learned: anger is a patterned response. Not just mood, not just hormones. It's a nervous system strategy your body learned to keep you safe. The snapping, freezing, fawning, overworking?
Your body doing its job. Protecting you, regulating energy, responding to the world as it was, even if it's not that way anymore.
Your body is brilliant. The work isn't about "fixing" your anger, it's about listening to it. Because anger carries a message. Always. It says: a boundary has been crossed. Something needs care, not control. I want to feel safe again.
But we were never taught how to hear it, only how to suppress, bypass, or explode.
I often hear women saying "I never get PMS" as a personal achievement. But I also often see it being disconnection from the body, which isn't self-care but a survival strategy. And I say that with care, because I've done it too. Sometimes what we call strength is just disconnection dressed up as control.
So what helps? Don't suppress it or spiral into shame, guilt or fear. Breathe with it. Hand on heart, hand on womb. Maybe first scream or take a brisk walk focused on nature instead of your looping thoughts. Then listen.
Breathe before you react so you can respond. Maybe you need to remove yourself from a situation. That's not weak, that's a win. When you take that pause, you start to see: anger is the part of you that remembers what it's like not to feel safe. See it as a companion, not an enemy.
The question isn’t how to get rid of it, but what it needs to feel safe enough to soften.
Your Body Keeps Score
"Emotions are not problems to be solved. They are signals to be listened to." — Dr. Hilary Jacobs Hendel
That's the work. Not to override the response but to slowly change the conditions that keep creating it. Easy? Hell no. It's uncomfortable. Maybe the hardest thing you'll ever do. But it's real and it will pass.
When I started paying attention, I realized my rage carried messengers. The pressure cooker of years of silence.
I avoided anger because I grew up around rage that hurt. Words like weapons. Love that felt conditional. I learned early that being “too much” could cost you connection.
Maybe you had that too. Maybe no one asked, "What do you need?" when you cried. Maybe anger in your home slammed doors, or never made a sound. Maybe you learned to smile when things hurt, to shrink, to disappear.
What I buried was anger but also fear. The fear of losing love if I let the truth rise. That’s what I’m learning to hold now. With breath, softness, and no urge to fix. It’s ongoing. It’s worth it.
Because here’s what I’ve discovered: it’s easier to perform, to please, to protect your comfort than to risk being fully seen. But full expression asks us to let go of the version of ourselves built for approval.
I started asking: Who would I be if I didn’t need to be liked?
You know what’s worse than raging before your period? Smiling through it until it eats you alive. Because your body doesn’t forget. It keeps telling the story through symptoms, tension, and that ache you can’t name before you bleed.
For years, I had pain on the right side of my body, like clockwork, it flared before my period. Nothing was “wrong,” but my body was holding every unspoken word I’d swallowed.
I follow shamanic traditions and believe every illness carries a psychosomatic imprint, our bodies expressing what the mind hasn’t processed. Since learning to surrender, listen, feel, and release through voice, movement, and fascia, the pain is mostly gone.
When it returns, now on the left side, I know it’s asking me to soften into my feminine. So that is the work right now.
Your body always knows. It's just waiting for you to listen. So here's your invitation to let it speak,
Feel it. Move it. Shake it. Walk it out. Cry it through. Scream it if you need.
Then allow yourself to pause. Listen.
Because every time you stay with yourself like that, without fixing or shame, you're healing more than anger. You're rewriting the system that told you to fear it.
That kind of freedom? It’s fierce. And it’s yours.
Join The Resistance
Learning to work with your luteal phase instead of against it is how you stop living like a stranger in your own body.
It’s how you reclaim the wild intelligence patriarchy spent centuries trying to tame.
A woman who honors her cycle becomes dangerous to systems built on her depletion.
She stops apologizing. She trusts her body's intelligence over everyone else's opinions. She knows that her cyclical nature is the feature that makes her unstoppable.
Since I learned how to release and listen, yes, irritability still visits sometimes. But that explosive anger I used to carry is gone. So is the hiding, the anxiety, the need to apologize for simply being.
Now I channel all my energy in creating something for myself. Into the change I want to see in the world, instead of it being this destructive force. Where I can live and work on my own terms, not someone else’s.
So next time the luteal fire rises, join me.
Let it burn away everything that isn’t truly you.
3 reflective questions
“How was anger expressed or suppressed in my home growing up?
“How do I respond to my own anger now, and what does that response protect me from feeling or facing?”
“If my anger is a boundary in disguise, what is it asking me to say, stop, or step away from?”
Answer from your body, your womb, your heat, not your head.
If these questions spoke to something buried or brave in you… I’d be honored to read your words. And it might help a sister, because we were never meant to heal alone ♥️🙏🏼.
P.S. here, I'm sharing a cooling summer guide for when that fire gets too hot to handle. Because sometimes you need to honor the heat AND know how to work with it.
I’ve actually bookmarked this (and a few of your other recent posts) to come back to. So powerful and so practical at the same time. Really glad I found your page this morning!
Wow! So much here and such a great post. Thank you for bringing these things to the forefront for further exploration! 💙