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<\/p>\nThis article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).<\/p>\n
It\u2019s Sunday morning in Downtown Los Angeles and the city is mid-yawn, slowly stretching itself awake. The streets of the Fashion District are deserted save for a lone dog walker trailing a tiny chihuahua, its nails scratching softly against the pavement. All is hushed. Yet when I push open the unassuming door of Rage Ground, an entirely different scene is unfolding.<\/p>\n
Above the thrash metal soundtrack blasting through the speakers, a woman \u2014 who, just minutes earlier, had quietly entered the building and tapped her bank card at the welcome desk \u2014 is letting rip. A visceral scream ricochets off the walls of the former warehouse as, feet planted like a baseball player at the plate, she takes a full-bodied swing with a bat at a beaten-up old car parked inside a steel cage.<\/p>\n
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Los Angeles is often seen as the place where therapy first became socially acceptable.<\/p>\n
Kirk Stouffer, Alamy<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve come to LA to explore the city\u2019s rage room trend. Since Rage Ground opened in 2017 as the city\u2019s first anger-release experience, a handful of others have popped up in California. The concept didn\u2019t start in the US \u2014 rising to prominence first in Japan a decade earlier \u2014 but it\u2019s found fertile ground here. Perhaps that\u2019s unsurprising given it was in Los Angeles that psychologist Dr Arthur Janov popularised primal scream therapy in the late 1960s. The avant-garde approach focused on releasing screams and sobs to access repressed pain, and it soon captured the imagination of countercultural types and celebrities, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In more recent years, rage-ceremony wellness retreats organised by the likes of Secret Sanctuary \u2014 along with practitioners including rage ritual facilitator Mia Banducci and somatic healer Rachel Pringle Urb \u2014 have found a new audience, fuelled in part by hashtags such as #rageritual on TikTok and YouTube.<\/p>\n
(<\/b>Related: Scream therapy is making a comeback\u2014here’s why.<\/a>)<\/b><\/p>\n Karla Torres, Rage Ground\u2019s manager, says the trend is particularly appealing to women. \u201cI\u2019d say between 60-70% of our guests are female,\u201d she says above the sound of shattering glass. \u201cIt\u2019s usually someone going through a hard time, like a breakup, divorce or just a frustration in their everyday life.\u201d<\/p>\n Keen to see what all the fuss is about, I sign the waiver and slip into green canvas overalls, welding gloves and a construction helmet with a flip-down face shield. My rage booth is clad in graffiti-covered plywood. Inside, a pyramid of glasses and bottles towers before me, stacked like a champagne display at a ritzy cocktail reception. Picking up a crowbar, I suddenly feel like I\u2019m confronting more than just breakables. There\u2019s also the weight of generations of female social conditioning that discourages displays of anger, compounded by a typically British instinct for emotional restraint.<\/p>\n Most rage rooms use recycled items, from TVs to tyres, crockery to cars, and customers can choose from a variety of bats and bars to smash them up.<\/p>\n Rage Ground (Top) (Left) and Rage Ground (Bottom) (Right)<\/p>\n All of that melts away within minutes, however, as I take a deep breath and bring the crowbar down hard, smashing the bottles to smithereens. They explode in a deeply satisfying cacophony of clinks and pops, shards of broken glass scattering across the floor like twinkling gems. By the time the knock on the door comes to signal the end of my 30-minute session, the rhythm of destruction has become almost hypnotic.<\/p>\n Next, I head to Hollywood Boulevard, the palm-tree-lined artery that\u2019s home to a constellation of Walk of Fame stars. It\u2019s also home to World of Illusions\u2019 Smash It! experience. Here, guests are invited to write on a plate the habits, traits, fears or irritations they want banished from their lives, before getting them to hurl the personalised crockery against the walls of an aluminium-lined gallery room visible from the street. \u2018Laziness\u2019 is the most common scrawling, the woman behind the desk tells me as she hands over a pair of safety glasses and a neat stack of plates. I launch the latter, one by one, at the wall with gusto just as a tourist bus pulls up alongside the kerb.<\/p>\n As passengers crane their necks to watch the destruction unfolding, it\u2019s tempting to dismiss rage rooms as just another performative LA fad. And yet, in a modern world thick with low-level anxiety and unprocessed frustration, these spaces are finding an eager audience. As Karla at Rage Ground put it earlier, most of its visitors come to work through the weight of emotions that everyday life asks them to shoulder. It seems that, in a city built on unfiltered self-expression, LA\u2019s rage rooms offer travellers a rare souvenir: not something to carry home, but, in fact, something to leave behind.<\/p>\n How to do itAt Rage Ground<\/a>, packages range from the $75 (\u00a356) \u2018Recruit\u2019 (30 bottles to smash) to the $135 (\u00a3100) \u2018Warrior\u2019, which includes a car smash. <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ragerooms_IzzyBottleBreak_HR.jpg\"\/)
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