Angry all the time

For those of us whom suffered the childhood without emotion. My parents would habitually use for my entire lifetime, They were both numb to the world. I was raised by 2 addictive personalities.

The damage and baggage that has to be carried along. Through active addiction we lose ourselves. Lose the ability to feel and have emotion. Everything becomes black and white and there is no grey area. Anger becomes the outlet. Fueling the rage. Angry all the time with no way to identify what we are angry about. Always mad, always filled with rage having no understanding of the actual emotions we feel. To unwind those feelings, to untangle that web of emotions and unmask the pain. Our pain is very real and the trauma inflicted before and during use is bottled up within us. Looking for a outlet. Any rhyme or reason.

This issue for me was then compounded, my parents and my elder mentors did not equip me properly for the mean cruel world we are to enter upon adulthood. I grew up in a hyper reality and was not prepared to handle life on life’s terms. This mentality mixed with the addictive personalities fueled my spiral out of control.

When working the steps and participating in a program, whichever works for you and has consistent evidence. Understand that we must thoroughly evaluate ourselves. To fully understand how our actions and reactions to a situation ultimately affect our emotional state and how to identify the actual emotion we are feeling. Instead of the classic three category mentality; Happy, Sad, and Angry.

Step 4 is the beginnings of this. To start the moral inventory. Once we start the moral inventory, we begin to see how our actions affected our thinking and our reacting. Our emotions come into play because they affect our actions. We take the moral inventory, we analyze ourselves inwards and outwards, we look at our relationships both past and present. Then we take that moral inventory again, only this time our perspectives have shifted.

This time with a sober perspective we see the emotions for what they really are . We’re no longer angry, we feel the anger although it takes on a different feeling. No longer numb from the abuses to ourselves we can interpret the hurt for what is does to us. When we are happy or excited over a event or a moments action. We are able to identify the joy in our life. When we find the joy and are able to interpret our emotions, we find the peace and happiness in life. Not just the response to the pain. Feeling the emotions and acting on them, not to them

As addicts our brains begin to undergo transformations. The nuro connections reroute themselves and the compulsive behavior bleeds over and effects our way of thinking and interpretation. For myself the child of addicts and the grandchild of an addict, I was generations removed from being emotionally equipped. My mother and father did not understand what it meant to love and to nurture their child. They did not have the foundation because their own mindset was numb.

My mother carried a lifetime of emotional baggage with her. The baggage she handed to me to carry. Passed down from her father to myself. The programming started here and only became compounded as my own addictions took over my life. The warped sense of right and wrong. The justifications based off wrong emotions. The turmoil we inflict on ourselves through addiction takes many forms. For us to properly defeat it’s grip on our lives, the step work is key to unlocking our real selves. The masked identity born while we are numb is not us. The soul searching that our step work awakening brings forth is our transition.

We find our true selves.