Own All Of You

🔥 Anger can consume our minds and make it hard to focus on anything else. It becomes a distraction that keeps us from living in the present moment. 💭 Instead of letting it control us, let's acknowledge our anger and learn to channel it in healthy ways.

Ever get angry about something that happened a decade ago, that you weren’t angry about at the time? Let me share a particular flash of memory that triggers a whirlwind of anger within me 🌪️🔥🤬

When I was a 20 something year old, most of the close relationships I had, including my first husband, were with people that were obsessed with fitness, exercise and all things believing that what you looked like physically determined who you were in the world.

I felt inadequate in my normalcy.

I played pretend quite a lot for a long period of time - flexing self control and dedication to “meal prepping” and tracking every GD thing I did .. but secretly, and shamefully always being pretty relaxed about it all within myself when I was alone.

There’s not a day in my life I can remember that I haven’t indulged in something delicious .. and today I savour the pleasure I can conjur up through the experiencing of simple pleasures, back then, I let myself believe it meant I was weak, underserving of anything good and ultimately dysfunctional and in need of improving.

The random memory popping up lately was me being at a triathlon event supporting my first husband who was competing, standing there waiting hours for him to finish, and giving into the temptation to buy myself a coffee and a muffin.

The problem with that? Ohhh let’s not get into the disordered eating and body dysmorphia my “circle” at the time influenced, inspired and perpetuated.

I ate that muffin quickly, shamefully, feeling like a piece of shit for giving in to temptation (aka my body telling me it was cold and hungry) I felt guilty for the rest of the day.

When he finished the event and asked if I wanted to go to a cafe for breakfast, I didn’t mention that I had already eaten. I pretended I was really hungry too.

This isn’t a big deal, this story hardly seems relevant in the story of what actually went down in my first marriage… but it keeps popping up, and I keep getting REALLY ANGRY about it.

The anger is livid about the ways my disordered eating and body dysmorphia gripped me for 11 years.. and beyond.

The anger seems a little misguided though.

And when I felt my anger about it today, I guided myself through a SAH Method practice and the closer I got to the anger, the more I realised it was working really hard to be there.

My anger was so big because it was working really hard to distract me… from the shame I had felt that day. The shame that had been shoved down deep inside me, left unspoken, untouched, unprocessed for over a decade. Sweet anger.

It works hard to distract us from the emotions that we don’t feel safe to hold and feel and be with. It’s “easier” to be angry than it is to experience the deep shame I felt in another time and place.

So now, even though I tell this story knowing logically that there is no shame to be felt in eating a bloody muffin .. I recognise the shame I felt in that moment is still there.

So I offer myself the chance to purge the shame I have been choking on for most of my adult life. I’m clearing it all. And I’m letting my sweet anger know, she doesn’t have to keep working so hard to activate herself.. we can be without it.