No fair!!! That’s one of childhood’s classic refrains. As kids we do recognize right from wrong, and we call it out when we see it. But as we age, we learn that, in fact, life and the world are not fair. But on the inside we’re still six-year-olds turning red in the face.

As adults we have words for various kinds of unfairness: nepotism, favoritism, corruption, taxation without representation, illegality, disparity, classism, racism, sexism, ethno-centrisism, bigotry.

Our disease loves all flavors of unfairness.

The disease of addiction can’t wait to get hold of something that we perceive as unfair and turn it into justified anger. That’s the best kind of anger, right? It’s the motivator of all the raging arguments, debates, fisticuffs, revenge plans, courtroom scenes, and showdown fantasies that play in our heads. On repeat. Until we interrupt the thought with food.

As usual, we want to take the edge off, and why wouldn’t we with all the exhausting fights going on behind our eyes. The thing about justified anger is that it lingers much longer than the flashing anger we feel when we get cut off in traffic. Justified anger spins up and up, becoming increasingly complex as we tease out its nuances, assemble evidence for our prosecution, and revisit the subject ad nauseum. It starts to spill out in bad, then hostile moods as well as depression. But most of all, we just can’t get it out of our minds. So we think the only thing we can do is bury it alive with food.

As human beings, justified anger is going to happen. We are afraid of our own anger, and we know that we must do something to avoid letting our spiraling rage take over us like the Incredible Hulk. So we eat because we don’t know better. Once we have joined OA and worked on the Steps, however, we discover a third way. We learn to use spiritual principles to defuse our red-hot emotions.

To start with, we can go to meetings and talk about the situation with others. We need to reach out to the fellowship because justified anger is a great way for terminal uniqueness to spring up. No one can understand my anger because they don’t know my [family member, friend, boss, coworker, opponent] and what they’ve done. That kind of thinking is just our brain trying to kill us. It’s been waiting for something to come up so it can steer us back to the misery of compulsive eating.

We can pick up the 1,000-pound phone and talk to others. We can lean on our sponsor. We can read OA literature. We might write a letter to God about the situation. Because this is a spiritual program, we can trust and rely on our Higher Power by praying like crazy for removal of our anger. The Serenity Prayer and the Angry Man’s Prayer from page 68 in the Big Book are helpful here. The latter goes like this:

This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.

If we must confront the subject of our anger, we should do so only after prayer, meditation, and quiet deliberation. When we talk to this person or persons, we should do so carefully. It may be helpful to remember a bit of wisdom from a book of wisdom:

The words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious, and the lips of a fool swallow him up.

We are here to do good on this earth, not to pick fights. If we feel we have been treated unfairly, we may take action or we may choose to accept the situation. In either event, however, we must use spiritual principles and action so that we don’t sow seeds of anger in others. We don’t have the luxury to go off half-cocked because if we do, our disease might put us back in its full nelson.