Well that is closer to what I was thinking, steve.
Another thought... I think that as active addicts, we often develop a high level of apathy towards the world and stop caring what we want to achieve beyond the instant gratification provided by the addiction and trying to cover it up. So when we get sober, we may wonder "and so what now"? Suddenly we may recognize many things that we used to cultivate our self absorbed and sedentary life, and when those get out of the equation, we may discover feelings, including aggressive impulses, that were masked for a long time... or perhaps in our whole life. There are ideas suggesting that often the psychological root of addictions is repressed aggression, or aggression turned toward ourselves in the form of self destructive and numbing behaviors. Repressed anger and frustration toward destructive, abusive, or dismissive people in our lives, often from long time ago, that we do not attack but actually protect via finding flaws in ourselves and putting all blame on the self. And we anesthetize the remaining frustration via escaping behaviors and trying to alter our reality perception, with substances and in other ways. I personally think it is not as simple as that, but there may be some truth in it (this is the kind of stuff I explored in therapy for a while).
My personal view is that good recovery work should not involve putting blame for everything on ourselves forever, more a realistic, systematic, and thorough exploration of where these feelings and behaviors come from and how to handle them in a healthier, more balanced way. For example, exercise can be good to treat the symptoms in the moment, but it won't cure the root cause. Not all of our urges and impulses represent negative thought and emotional patterns, IMO sometimes the overly submissive ones do (for example, allowing abuse). This may spark some controversy here, but I sometimes feel that these things are discussed in another extreme manner in recovery circles, suggesting that people who struggled with addictions have inherently flawed motivational patterns in most things that can never truly be trusted. For me, thinking like that may just further cultivate a lack of self esteem and black & white world view, which may prolong that we will never accept and trust our feelings and perceptions because they failed in certain areas.
What I like to think as a good approach is to always examine ourselves when aggressive impulses and irritability arise and try to see in a realistic way what the source is. I think it is often within, but not always... and antagonistic feelings can sometimes be very healthy responses to real external threat and unfairness. Or perhaps just signs that we are not living the life that we truly would want.