Published November 03, 2025 | By Alyx E, Founder of Collectors MD

There’s a moment—right before the explosion—when you can feel the temperature rising inside you. Your jaw tightens, your chest burns, and your thoughts start racing faster than you can catch them. In that instant, clarity disappears. What began as discomfort turns into defense. What began as hurt becomes heat.

“No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.” — George Jean Nathan

Anger is part of being human. But when left unchecked, it becomes more than emotion—it becomes a behavior. A reaction. A reflex. Many of us never learned how to sit with anger safely. Some of us were raised around yelling, slammed doors, or silence so thick it felt like punishment. Others learned to stuff it down until it bursts. In either case, the result is the same: a pattern of reactivity that corrodes relationships, clouds judgment, and often leads us back into the very cycles we swore we’d escape.

When it comes to collecting, anger can surface in subtle, unexpected ways. Maybe it’s the frustration when an eBay seller refuses to negotiate on a card you need to complete a set—one they’ve listed for three times its actual value. Maybe it’s the bitterness of seeing someone else hit your “dream card” on a live stream while you sit empty-handed. Maybe it’s the guilt or shame when a loved one questions your spending. Or maybe it’s the resentment that bubbles up when you realize how much time, money, and emotion you’ve poured into something that no longer feels joyful.

It’s in those moments that anger takes the controls—driving our thoughts, steering our reactions—while the rest of our emotions sit quietly in the backseat, unsure how to intervene.

Beneath all of that surface frustration isn’t really the card or the moment—it’s something deeper that’s been quietly simmering far longer. When we start to dissect the root cause, anger often reveals itself as disappointment, grief, fear, or the desperate need to control something we simply can’t. When we don’t address these deeper emotions, anger becomes our armor—a mask to hide the inevitable pain.

The truth is, anger is energy misplaced. It’s the body’s alarm system trying to protect us from pain. Just like compulsion, anger thrives in reactivity. It can be used to destroy or to awaken. When we stop using anger as a weapon against the very people who care about us—whether through aggression, deflection, or silence—and start recognizing it as a signal, something shifts. It becomes a messenger—not of rage, but of boundaries crossed, needs unmet, and pain unspoken. The goal isn’t to suppress anger; it’s to understand its message without handing it control.

So when you feel that familiar rush rising, ask yourself: What am I really protecting? What part of me feels unseen, unheard, or unsafe right now? That small pause—the breath between feeling and reaction—is where recovery lives.

Healing doesn’t come from avoiding anger. It comes from learning to meet it with awareness, compassion, and choice. When we learn to name what’s underneath anger—fear of losing control, shame over our actions, disappointment over what’s gone wrong—we start to reclaim clarity and control. We can’t think clearly with clenched fists, but we can begin to heal when we loosen our grip, breathe, and choose awareness over reaction.

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When we stop battling our anger, we finally see what it’s been trying to defend.

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Published September 28, 2025 | By Alyx E, Founder of Collectors MD

Recovery is rarely a straight line. Even when we’re making real strides—showing up, putting in the work, choosing intention over impulse—there’s a reality that can feel crushing: our partners or spouses may still carry deep, unshakable resentment for the pain our actions caused.

They aren’t just remembering abstract mistakes; they’re remembering the nights we disappeared, the lies we told, the money we spent, and the trust we broke. For them, those wounds live right on the surface, and when they resurface them in conversation, it can feel like we’re dragged back into our darkest times.

The hardest part is that their reminders rarely come from malice. Most often, they’re born out of pain—a way of saying, “I’m still hurt, and I don’t know how to move past it”. But for us, those moments can feel suffocating. Just when momentum is building, just when we’ve strung together days or weeks of healthy choices, being pulled back into the past can knock the wind out of us. The temptation becomes real: to soothe ourselves in the only way we used to know—by going back to the very habits we’re trying to leave behind.

Sometimes the distance between two people isn’t measured in miles, but in unspoken hurt that both are still learning how to carry.

This is where vigilance matters. We have to be careful not to let their pain pull us back into our spiral. Their reminders, though heavy, are not commands for us to fail. They are signals that healing is not one-sided—our recovery might be underway, but their recovery from what we put them through is just as real, and just as ongoing.

That means practicing empathy even when it hurts. It means recognizing that our progress doesn’t erase their scars. And it means finding new ways to manage the sting—through honesty, through support systems, through small acts of repair—instead of numbing it with the very behaviors that caused the damage in the first place.

Progress in recovery is fragile. But it’s also powerful. The work is to let their hurt exist without letting it undo the growth you’ve fought for. Healing is not only about moving forward; it’s about learning how to carry the weight of the past without letting it break you.

#CollectorsMD
Resentment doesn’t mean failure—it means healing is still in progress, for both of you.

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