Anger and Learning

I am 22 days clean from bingeing and (mostly) compulsive food behaviours.  In the last 22 days, I have not binged.  I have not had chocolate or popcorn or chips or other binge foods.  I have had a teaspoon of sugar in my tea when I wanted to feel something other than I was feeling.  And I had a very late lunch one day and ate a 10" pizza.  Which was not ideal.  But not a binge.  I am being as honest as I know how to be with myself about my food behaviours. 

I have also significantly changed my other avoidant behaviours.  The bingeing on mindless internet surfing.  Netflix.  Podcasts I'm only half listening to.  Avoiding housekeeping.  My feelings.  I am trying very hard to actually feel how I feel.  The result is I am easily angered.  I am easily in tears.  I am easily frustrated.  I have decades of experience in using various techniques, including food, to numb out.  And when I take those things out of my life, a cascade of emotion, some of it decades old, comes flooding out.

And I am meditating on anger.  The Big Book says "If we were to live, we had to be free from anger.  The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us.  They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison" (How It Works).  In me, I see that anger suppressed is a recipe for bingeing.  Anger itself is just a warning sign that I am not dealing with some underlying upset.  I feel wronged in some way.  And usually it is me who is wronging me.  I am not being firm with a personal boundary.  I am not being honest and so I feel shame.  I am putting someone else's needs ahead of my own and expecting to be loved for it.  When my expectations are not met, I feel resentment.  And if the resentments pile up, I feel rage.

I like this entry in Voices of  Recovery (June 11):

I have to be careful about my attitude toward anger.

Righteous anger is the hardest thing for me to release.  I get such a good, self-affirming feeling from holding on to it.  However, anger, like fear, takes up so many mental megabytes that there isn't room for new information and new feelings, new insights and new paths to conversation with my Higher Power.  If I allow my hard-drive (my heart) to fill to capacity with anger or fear, then there is no room for the positive, for what my Higher Power wants for me in life.

When the anger or the fear is gone, what's left?  At one time I speculated that nothing would be left of me once I shouted or cried it all out and released it.  Now I realize that what happened was a massive blackboard erasure with a whole new background - life - to fill as I want.

I am learning to sit with my anger and not binge.  This is not to say I am processing my anger well (or sometimes at all).  But I am letting uncomfortable feelings come to the surface - I am not suppressing them with food or other distractions that don't help.  It is hard, hard work.  And I am in tears more than ever.  When it gets intense, my thoughts turn to food.  I have to remember to pray, to ask for help, to move my body, move this anger energy.

Blessed be.

Defiance

"I wanted help, and I tried to cooperate.  As the treatment progressed, I began to get a picture of myself, of the temperament that had caused me so much trouble.  I had been hypersensitive, shy, idealistic.  My inability to accept the harsh realities of life had resulted in a disillusioned cynic, clothed in a protective armour against the world's misunderstanding.  That armour had turned into prison walls, locking me in loneliness -- and fear.  All I had left was an iron determination to live my own life in spite of the alien world -- and here I was, an inwardly frightened, outwardly defiant woman, who desperately needed a prop to keep going." -- Big Book, p.204

I have been meditating on defiance lately.  And resistance.  Why do I resist what is good for me?  Why do I feel like abusing myself with food will bring comfort?  And I don't know the answers other than I know food is not the answer to my emotional distress. 

I searched both the Big Book and the AA 12&12 for instances of defiant or defiance.  There are a few.  The passages that struck me are the one above -- from the chapter in the Big Book, Women Suffer Too, and then this from the AA 12&12 in the context of how AA (and OA) lack a hierarchal governance system to a large degree, preferring to be governed by the group's conscience, insider the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions.

The passage is:

...We recognize that alcoholics can't be dictated to -- individually or collectively.

At this juncture, we can hear a churchman exclaim, "They are making disobedience a virtue!"  He is joined by a psychiatrist who says, "Defiant brats!  They won't grow up and conform to social usage!"  The man in the street says, " I don't understand it.  They must be nuts!"  But all these observers have overlooked something unique in Alcoholics Anonymous.  Unless each AA member follows to the best of his ability our suggested Twelve Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant.  His drunkenness and dissolution are not penalties inflicted by people in authority; they result from his personal disobedience to spiritual principles. (AA 12&12, Tradition 9)

As I struggle with what I want "in the moment" versus what is good for my long-term health, I have to remember that God does not want me to abuse myself.  Suffering is optional.  I can do what I need to do for my health happily or unhappily.  Either way, I have to get enough sleep, drink enough water, eat sufficient healthy food, avoid unhealthy food, and not abuse food for emotional purposes.  If I do that, I am honouring my humanity. 

The laws of physiology, nutrition, movement, and energy -- whatever they may be and I realize we know but a little here -- apply to me whether I want them to or not.  I am not exempt from the rule that if calories in exceed calories expended, weight increases.  Equally, I am not exempt from the rule that too much stress or too little sleep means the hormones in my body will prevent me from releasing excess weight.  That is just how we think it works.  And absent some other understanding, that is what I have to work with (or against).  And if I choose defiance, there are consequences, physical and emotional. 

So for today, my 18th day of not abusing food, I choose to celebrate embracing those things I cannot change.  That food doesn't fix sad.  The love isn't felt with food.  And that I had another day to learn what I need to learn.

Blessed be.