My Angry Liver

When my learned strategies to deal with stress only create disharmony, I turn to my liver for guidance.

The liver can be your guide in achieving harmony and balance in life. Our liver cleanses all blood from the stomach and intestines in the body, gathering nutrients and metabolizing drugs into nontoxic form. At any given moment, 13% of our entire body’s blood supply is in the liver. A healthy liver is responsible for 500 vital functions in maintaining a harmonious balance of chemicals, supplying our major organs with nutrient-enriched blood for survival. External stress encountered by living jeopardizes the liver’s ability to regulate balance.

It is my job, interacting as an agent of change to maintain a balance with the hundreds of interactions outside the body.

Traditional Chinese medicine associates anger with the liver. Anger is a primal form of energetic change. Allow this feeling to flow from the liver. When expressed with healthy communication to adjust and address areas responsible for causing stress. However, a build-up in anger created by unresolved issues not fully process, such as from an abusive relationship, financial hardship, social status, or feelings of insecurity, will create disharmony in the liver. Tension held in our organ of harmony is a reaction to external stresses kept in an imbalance of life, causes the liver to poorly regulate the bloodstream, reflecting disharmony of our outer world with the inner world. The strategies we learn to handle life’s stressors are as important to our liver as is eating a balanced diet with regular exercise.

Strategies learned to handle stress are observed as children, practiced while we are teenagers, and hopefully questioned when we become adults. In stressful moments, I’ve experienced as a child the comfort dealing with my anger through food. Eating bowls of salty potato chips melted with creamy American cheese subdued my emotions, causing me to instantly feel better. I learned to fix problems with food. A false repair since it was really my dopamine levels masking my mental state. The external gratification obtained from food was causing my liver to be preoccupied with processing trash rather than motivate me with anger, forcing action against the stressors in my life — an easy fix of my mood with food. A strategy of controlling food since I felt helpless in controlling my world appeared successful. Then I discovered an even easier hole for emotional stress to fill, alcohol.

I used spirits to regulate emotion by avoiding my internal stress with intoxication. However, this new masking technique didn’t result in a positive resolution to my situations any more than my bowl of melted cheese chips. My dependency on drinking away the pain to artificially create harmony had consequences. I was distracting my liver, overworking it to clean additional toxins from my bloodstream, creating more disharmony within my body, resulting in weight gain and lethargy. I became depressed, stressed, and exponentially more unhappy due to poor body image, resulting from consuming unhealthy meals and alcoholic drinks. Strategies I had come to depend on to ignore my anger became stored inside liver fat.

My internal harmony wasn’t being maintained by artificially altering my mood, it was being ignored.

I was treating the symptoms, not the issue of my anger.

The burden my liver held with years of unprocessed outrage was about to reveal its toll on my body. When my hand, trembling one night at a party before taking a drink, unmasked the damage I was doing with my learned strategy of avoidance. I developed a dependency on alcohol, needing its intoxicating powers to drown my emotions, distracting me from constructively dealing with life’s stress. I had to reevaluate my learned strategies to deal with life’s issues. First, I stopped drinking, resulting in moments of uncontrollable anger, changes in personality, and a battle my liver had to fight back from to bring thrown out of balance.

The liver is a natural generator for positive energy. I embraced additional strategies, removing additional artificial coping mechanisms and dealing with external stress through therapy and self reflection. I was giving the liver time to heal, as I reflected more balance in life, it reflected more unprocessed emotions. My unhealthy liver showed hand tremors for the imbalance inside of me, I showed a destructive lifestyle. When I removed alcohol, I could seek self reflection. When I started to adhere to an eight-hour eating window my liver reveled a lifetime of unmet challenges.

I came home after work, no food. I work longer than my eight-hour eating window, resulting in my total consumption of calories away from the home. There would be no melted cheese chips and rum with coke to handle my daily stressors. I had to communicate with my emotions, feelings of my angry youth stored in a liver now working a backlog of tasks it had been distracted from performing due to my old habits. I could feel my emotions needing to be processed. I was seeking harmony in my life, guided by my liver.

My liver healed, bringing with it physical changes in my appearance. Skin was radiant, I didn’t look bloated, my attitude became more positive.

In deciding to lead a less stressful lifestyle, I was allowing the anger centered in my liver to seek harmony within me and reflect balance outside to the world. The food choice was less destructive, eating a balanced diet of fiber from fruits and vegetables (a green shake) were essential in cleansing my liver. I had more energy. My physically demanding job promoted the burn of triglycerides for fuel, reducing liver fat. A month into this routine and I am able to come home with enough awareness to perform yard work, connect with my partner, discuss our day, and work through past emotions now being revealed by a healthy liver.

The Chinese associate anger with the liver. Anger is not a negative emotion. Anger is the emotion of change. It drives us to take action, to create harmony in our external world. The liver is responsible for maintaining peace inside of our bodies, trust the liver. In cleansing toxins from our life by removing the wasteful people and events, discarding what is not needed to achieve balance.

Copyright Christopher Madsen 2021