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.