How Judging Your Anger Perpetuates Binge Eating

Do you feel uncomfortable with the idea of being angry? Do you feel like it’s nicer or better to be afraid or sad, but you really don’t want to admit or feel anger?

Every person has anger, and most people have suppressed anger. If you binge eat, I can guarantee you have some suppressed anger.

Many people who engage binge eating have a challenge with feeling anger specifically. While binge eating can help us avoid any emotion, there is a definite strong correlation between suppressed anger and food addiction.

To heal our eating, we have to allow all of our emotions instead of suppressing them. Allowing them looks like feeling them in their full intensity, in a way that doesn’t harm ourselves or others, and often will mean feeling when you’re alone or with a trained professional like a therapist.

For many people, a big reason they suppress their anger is that they judge anger. Some people judge only their own anger and not the anger of others, and some judge anger all around. Some judge anger from women but not from men.

If any part of you would prefer to think you’re just afraid or sad and doesn’t like the idea you might be angry, enraged or furious, there is a good chance you have this judgment. Emotion is just emotion - it can all be felt, expressed and released in a healthy and healing way.

Judgment paralyzes us because it prevents us from properly feeling our anger in order to release it.

In fact, even further back in the process, the pre-existing judgment will actually cause us to remain numb to anger that might in fact be in us. I have many clients who initially will say to me that they don’t think they have much anger to begin with. That was me years ago too! We can numb out to the anger because we don’t like the idea of being an angry person.

While I work with men and women alike in healing overeating, I find that for women in particular, the judgment of anger is a huge issue. If you grew up in a family, religion or society that teaches women to be pleasant, polite, and docile (and let’s face it, that’s the whole world to an extent), you’ll have this issue. Women who grew up in certain religious and spiritual traditions frequently experience this as one of the causes of their compulsive eating. We may feel an angry woman is ugly, unattractive, morally degraded, or spiritually inept.

It is vital to reflect on how you feel about the idea of being a person with repressed anger, and how you feel about the idea of expressing it in a physical way (like a 2-year old does, but not in a way that harms anyone). Feel about what you think it means about you if you are angry, and what you think will happen. This process will be a game changer for healing your relationship with food!

To inquire about 1-1 coaching with me, message me here on my website.

Photo by Piermanuele Sberni via Unsplash