Why Am I Screaming?

“I woke myself up screaming.”

My client says this almost casually.

She woke herself up by screaming into the darkness of her bedroom.

In the dream, which she can barely remember, she is screaming at her mother. She does not recall the exact words. She wakes with her heart pounding and a feeling of raw, almost violent anger. The emotion is so strong that she cannot fall back asleep. She gets out of bed and paces the room for a while, trying to shake off whatever has erupted inside her.

In waking life, she has never done anything of the sort.

Helene was raised by a hardworking Chinese family who settled in Paris several decades ago. She is in her early thirties, unmarried, and successful in her work as an accountant. Her mother is loving, attentive, devoted, and deeply involved in her daughter’s life—she decorates her flat, she surprises her with blind dates arranged through friends.

Helene grew up between cultures, carrying both the opportunities and obligations of her family story. Respect, harmony, and loyalty are not simply values in her household; they are ways of belonging.

Yet something in her has spent years trying to create distance where no distance was allowed to exist. Whenever she attempted to push back against her mother’s expectations, she encountered a silent wall. Eventually she stopped trying. The rules of the relationship became clear: Helene had to agree, and anything her mother disapproved of—which included many of the things that genuinely animated her—had to remain neatly outside the peaceful space of the family home.

Her anger had no place there.

As I sit with Helene, the flatness of her tone and her ever-present polite smile make me wonder what lies beneath. The psyche is rarely willing to remain quite so polite.

“Have you ever disagreed strongly with your mother?” I ask.

“We disagree on nearly everything,” she replies, a flicker of irony suddenly appearing in her voice.

“And do you argue about those disagreements?”

“No.”

The irony disappears.

“It is difficult to get angry with someone who is nice.”

She smiles again.

“Have you ever tried?”

She tells me about a memory from when she was around ten years old.

Her mother wanted her to wear a pink fluffy dress to a classmate’s birthday party. Helene hated the dress. She cried, screamed, protested, expecting her mother to respond in kind.

Instead, her mother went silent. She bit her lip, turned around, and disappeared into the kitchen.

The silence lasted for hours, until Helene eventually complied. She put on the dress and was driven to the party. They never spoke about it again.

What she remembers most clearly is not the dress itself. It is the excruciating loneliness she felt that evening. Long before she understood anything about conflict, she learned that expressing anger could cost her connection.

We often imagine conflict as something that appears when relationships go wrong. We picture shouting matches, slammed doors, hurtful words, dramatic breakups. Conflict becomes synonymous with aggression and danger. Yet some of the most difficult conflicts I encounter in my work with couples and families are not the explosive ones. They are the conflicts that never happen.

They disappear beneath the surface of daily life, settling into ordinary interactions performed with a smile. Like sediment gathering at the bottom of a river, they become part of the landscape. Everyone learns to navigate around these rocks. Nobody speaks of them. Yet they quietly shape the course of the relationship.

These dynamics show up in my consulting room in many different forms: a daughter who cannot tell her mother to stop calling three times a day, a wife who never complains, a couple who proudly tell me they never fight.

At first glance, this sounds admirable. Who would not want a peaceful, safe relationship?

Yet I have become increasingly suspicious of relationships in which conflict never appears. Not because fighting is inherently healthy, but because conflict, like anger, tends to go somewhere. When it cannot be spoken, it goes underground, lodging itself deep inside the psyche and often inside the body as well.

I see furious compliant women with violent migraines. Perfect family men who eventually punch walls when their carefully maintained self-control collapses. Adult children carrying decades of resentment beneath impeccable manners.

The anger remains. Only its expression changes.

Some time ago, I worked with a couple whose marriage looked enviable from the outside. They were successful professionals. They had built a beautiful life together. They travelled, entertained friends, raised children, and seemed deeply committed to one another.

They also never fought.

The wife often mentioned this with a certain pride.

“We’ve never been one of those couples,” she announced, glancing towards her husband, who nodded with an almost imperceptible smirk.

“How does that feel for you?” I asked.

He sat quietly for a moment.

Then he said something I have never forgotten.

“Talking to her feels like screaming into a soundproof wall.”

The image startled me.

His wife turned towards him in disbelief. For a brief moment, her face lost its usual composure. She looked less controlled, more exposed, somehow more alive.

As we continued, he ventured further than he ever had before.

“I am bored out of my mind.”

She looked confused.

“I am bored to death with myself. With our life. With you.”

The words arrived with surprising force, as if they had been waiting years to be spoken.

She quickly regained composure. Calmly, she explained that he had been burned out at work for years. She reminded me how dissatisfied he had become with academia, how trapped he felt professionally, how reluctant he had been to make a change.

As she spoke, her voice took on the quality of a soothing stream.

Listening to her, I found myself thinking that everything she said was probably true. Yet something else was happening in the room.

A few moments earlier, he had been angry, animated, almost reckless in his honesty. Now he was becoming quiet again. Whatever had briefly come alive in him was already receding.

What I was witnessing told me something essential about their marriage.

Whenever dissatisfaction surfaced, his wife met it with understanding. She was thoughtful, emotionally aware, and genuinely caring. What she struggled with was not empathy but conflict itself. Before irritation could become a conversation, it was explained, softened, and folded back into understanding.

The complaint disappeared. So did the man making it.

Listening to him, I found myself thinking of Helene’s dream. One screamed in her sleep, the other in broad daylight. What united them was not anger, but the absence of a listener.

Over time, he became deeply bored. Not simply with his work, and not even with his marriage. What gradually disappeared was his sense of himself. His frustrations with academia were real, but they were not the whole story.

“I don’t know,” he replied irritably when I asked him what he wanted.

The answer struck me as important. He was no longer merely disconnected from his anger. He was becoming disconnected from his desire.

Anger is often misunderstood. We tend to imagine it as something destructive, a force that healthy people should master or eliminate. Yet anger is also connected to separateness, preference, and desire. It is often the first signal that something matters.

If we can say no with clarity, we can begin saying yes to things we genuinely want.

The wife in this couple was not devoid of anger herself. Quite the opposite.

The first time I challenged her role in this dynamic, she became visibly irritated with me. For a moment, her carefully maintained composure cracked. She defended herself vigorously. Her husband’s boredom, she insisted, had nothing to do with her or the marriage. It was entirely about work. Entirely about burnout.

My questions felt provocative to her. The more we explored the subject, the more passionately she defended herself, her voice gradually rising as she insisted that her husband’s boredom had nothing to do with her, or with their marriage.

The anger was there all along. What struck me was not its presence, but where it resurfaced. Expressing anger toward me felt safer than expressing it toward her husband. In the sessions that followed, she gradually recognised that somewhere deep inside she did not trust her marriage to survive conflict. The therapeutic relationship, on the other hand, could withstand her frustration.

Over time, both Helene and this couple began discovering the same thing: conflict is not what threatens a relationship. More often, it is the fear of conflict that slowly empties it of life.

The most important work begins when people start trusting that disagreement does not necessarily destroy love. Irritation can be spoken without becoming cruelty. Anger can be expressed without humiliation or blame. Relationships do not become stronger because conflict disappears; they become stronger because conflict can be survived.

Perhaps this is why Helene had to scream.

For years she had done everything right. She had remained respectful, accommodating, reasonable. Her anger had no recognised place in the relationship she shared with her mother. It could not be spoken, so it waited.

What stayed with me was not the violence of the dream, but its necessity. Somewhere inside Helene, a part of her wanted to be heard and met in her anger.

Later, she remembered another detail. In the dream, her mother did not turn away. She did not retreat into silence or disappear into the kitchen as she had done all those years ago.

She stood there and listened.

Perhaps this was the deeper wish hidden inside the scream. Not to destroy the relationship, but to discover that it could survive her anger.