What Lies Beneath

Healing began when I stopped trying to outrun my anger.

If I could give you one piece of advice about healing, it is this: look at your anger.

Really look at it.

You’ll try to pretend it’s every other emotion in disguise. Anxiety. Perfectionism. Sadness. Control. But beneath so much of what we call suffering is anger we never allowed ourselves to feel. And anger that has nowhere to go does not disappear. It turns inward.

I spent so many years so angry, I wasn’t feeling a thing. It would rise up sharp and immediate, and I’d push it down just as fast. I told myself I was in control. That I was above it. That I was self-aware enough to bypass it.

But it doesn’t work like that.

What you don’t let move stays.

And mine didn’t just stay. It built.

Until it started coming out sideways.

It fed my eating disorder. My temper would flare when I was drinking. I hurt people I loved with my words. Sometimes something inside me could turn in an instant, and afterward I’d sit there wondering where it had even come from. That’s how it felt — like my anger was bigger than me. Dangerous. Shameful. Something I needed to outrun before it swallowed me whole.

So I kept trying to skip it. Go straight to understanding. To compassion. To being “better.” But underneath all of that, I was still angry. And it was eating me alive.

The biggest shift in my healing didn’t come from understanding myself more intellectually. It came during EMDR sessions in my 20s, when I was asked to bring in photos of myself as a child. Around twenty of them. My therapist and I sat there and went through each one. Who I was. What was happening at the time. What my family felt like. What I remembered.

I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to look at my younger self. Some part of me knew she was still carrying feelings I had spent years trying to outrun.

Little me felt like someone I had spent years trying to distance myself from. Someone too vulnerable. Too tender. Too sad. Too hard to fully feel.

But when I looked at those photos, I didn’t feel numb.

I felt grief.

I felt anger.

It wasn’t explosive. It was quiet. The kind that gets swallowed. The kind that turns inward. The kind that doesn’t have anywhere to go, so it goes into your body instead.

You can understand your patterns completely and still feel trapped inside them. I could explain my eating disorder perfectly. I knew the behaviors. The roots. The triggers. I understood all of it. And still, I couldn’t stop. Because understanding it never touched the part of me that was actually driving it.

That part wasn’t logical. It was emotional. Physical. Younger. It was still carrying anger my mind had learned to minimize long before my body ever did.

And slowly, through EMDR (and many, many years of therapy), something started to shift. Not just mentally. Physically. Memories I had talked through a hundred times stopped feeling so charged. The urgency softened. The tightness loosened. It felt like something stuck inside me had finally started to move.

And with that came something I didn’t have before: a pause. A moment between feeling and reacting. And that moment changes everything.

Because when you are deep in survival patterns, they do not feel like choices. They feel automatic. Like your body is trying to solve something your mind never fully let itself feel.

That was the real shift for me. Not learning how to suppress my anger better. Not becoming more “evolved.” Not pretending I had moved past it. Just finally allowing myself to feel it. Fully. Honestly. Without trying to fix it or rush it away.

And the strange thing is, once I finally let myself feel it, it stopped owning me.

Don’t get me wrong: anger still comes. But now it’s a blip — something I feel, move through, and release. It no longer owns the whole room.

Recovering from my eating disorder was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But letting my anger go — actually feeling it, letting it burn through me — was somehow more painful. And yet that choice gave me a freedom I hadn’t known was possible.

That’s what no one tells you about anger: It doesn’t stay when you let it move.

It passes.