The Most Powerful Way I Deal With Negative Emotions

Here’s a key to how I deal with my negative emotions: I stop feeding them.

It’s a huge topic, but I’ll write just a bit on it here today.

Again and again I’ve had the brick wall of reality hitting my face when it comes to how certain eating patterns stoke the fires of unhappiness, anger, and despair.

What I intellectually know about nutrition and health goes out the window or, more appropriately, gets shelved, even as I know better, when it comes to trying to appease sad, angry, or traumatized parts of self.

My main approach the last few years has been to eat what I’m eating without judgment, to slowly (I believe will happen in time) turn the ship of unhappiness and how I can feed it by unhealthy eating patterns around.

This week I finally, finally, finally got that ship turned around enough to see a difference in my emotional field.

My eating triggers are forms of anger. Unfairness/injustice are loud ones, and frustration coming from loneliness can be, too. Also loud is frustration from various kinds of tech issues, which seem to abound as my life as an energy worker and channel can seem to interfere with the normal workings of electronics of all kinds.

I’ve observed that when I get set off and eat something in response, it’s usually an attempt to lower my vibration, or become more dense in order to handle the flow of lava-like rage–to slow it down. It’s really too much! And I’m grounded, or I’m rarely ungrounded, so things not working as designed and advertised just seems like unfair treatment from life, the universe, God.

It’s embarrassing writing that for public consumption, but I think this blog space is going to include personal things that might embarrass me. I have a series of posts planned about how I deal with parts of me that get suicidal, so all kindsa cats will be out of their bags when that happens …

And so the anger gets worse with certain eating patterns. I’ve moved away from sugary things almost entirely, which used to be a main issue. But I haven’t moved away from carbs (aside from some raw dairy and cooked vegetables), which is what’s happening now. It is making all the difference.

Years ago, when I lived in LA, I met a bunch of people who ate a raw primal diet. Or, rather, they lived a raw primal lifestyle that involved raw primal foods. The food part of this involved raw muscle meats and organs, as well as raw dairy and vegetables, green juices, with some fruits thrown in. But the focus of that eating pattern is raw fat coupled with raw protein interspersed with alkalizing green juices.

There are lots of reasons to do this. And your brain might have a lot of reasons it wants to tell me not to do it, but it works, and I’m not really listening to nay-saying on this one. I’ve done a ton of research, and I’ve tried things – and lived with them for years, and I know it works for me.

The primary benefit is that my ability to deal with my emotions is strengthened. In fact, when I’m living the raw primal pattern I don’t get frustrated. I don’t want to yell at the universe for being unfair. I don’t even notice most of the time when electronics don’t work correctly around me–I just work around it or wait for things to right themselves.

The sugar–whether actual sugar or carbs that get broken down into it–stokes the fire of dissatisfaction that swells into anger and, in time, volcanic rage. Plenty of raw fat and quality raw protein bypasses that whole process. So much so that as I write “rage” a few times here, I feel mostly like a chronicler explaining someone’s foreign, odd habits. It no longer feels like who I am.

When you do the raw primal thing for a long time, you might seem emotionless. But it’s just that you’re not being swept away by waves of undulating, ungrounded, unprocessed emotions. But, and this is key:

You’re also not experiencing your body feeling inundated with a toxin.

Whatever sugar in your blood is excess is felt to be a problem by your body as a whole, and you can be uneasy, reactive, touchy, and unpleasant to be around as a result. When you eat raw primal, you shift from burning sugars to burning fat (I first understood this via Mark Sisson’s site Mark’s Daily Apple – worth reading everything on it), so you don’t crash with low blood sugar–it’s a whole thing to learn about, and it’s important for dealing with the kinds of escalating emotional issues that can make temporary sadness turn into suicidal ideation.

I didn’t want this post to be an ad for eating raw meat and fat, but it is the single most effective way I’ve found to manage intense emotions that otherwise (normally?) make me feel out of control, as if an insane person about to lose control of myself. That’s hard to admit, but cutting out most carbs (and certainly not eating the RDA) changes my experience of being a person in serious, meaningful ways.

Even as I wrote and published this site, I struggled for months with those emotions. As I wrote its sections, there was even a meaningless- and despair-ridden part of me that was resentful that I was being guided to tell people why they shouldn’t kill themselves because that part of me wanted to so badly. That unhappy part of me was so incredibly loud for months!

My girlfriend and I have been in temporary housing since mid April (4.5 months as of this writing) after a flood at the house that was our fault. Long story, but we’ve been paying double rent until a couple of weeks ago when we could finally get out of our lease. And I’m the one earning money right now, so a lot has been on my shoulders for what seems several eternities plus a handful of forevers.

During those 4+ months, we had stressor after stressor, and more than a few times I thought I’d lose my mind. I’ve been working full-time the whole time, and doing great work, but just under more stress than I wanted to let on or wanted to really admit to myself, as I saw no way out.

Going back to eating raw primal recently was an attempt to stop the cycle of despair-anger-despair-depression-anger-rage-etc. After a couple of days, I began to notice a huge difference, so am sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

To always see food as medicine is key. Whatever healthy food pattern works for you is what you should do–I’m not trying to proselytize here. With depression, despair, hopelessness, and other negative emotions, we can slip into eating patterns that not only make the feelings worse but also are, in effect, akin to substance abuse.

As I write on this site, we have to learn to listen to our feelings without judgment if we’re to heal the deep emotions that give us trouble. And we have to learn to watch our patterns also without judgment, taking advantage of the unhappy parts of us making them and their pains known through those behaviors and choices, especially when it comes to food and eating.

Make no mistake: When part of you reaches for a food not as medicine but as escape or in an attempt to dull a feeling, it is speaking to you. It is telling you it’s unhappy, it’s sad, angry, depressed, hopeless–something that needs to be heard and acknowledged if you are to move through it and be free of tht weight of unhappiness carried by that part of you.

Stop judging that part of you, and ask yourself what it will take for you to stop feeding the anger, pain, sorrow, powerlessness, rage, or other emotion that keeps coming up. Do whatever you can to move into nurturing behaviors and choices, giving yourself a chance to see beyond the stuck feelings. It’s not easy, but it’s part of your path to become the source of love for yourself, what your soul has sent you to Earth to figure out how to do.