Letting Go of Resentment: It’s Not Personal
Resentment is a powerful siren song. For a moment when you feel hurt, it feels so good to blame someone else for how you feel, to tear them down, defending yourself. “She’s a monster,” you mutter under your breath. “She’s the worst.” But the thing about sirens is that they only lead your ship to crash on the rocks.
Here, the certain doom of resentment lies in the blame, shame, guilt, and defensiveness that this thought habit breeds in your tender heart, keeping you from feeling powerful in your life. Always the subject of someone else’s decisions, choices, stories, actions. And always seething in resentment about it.
That’s now how I want you to live, my love. Another way is possible.
Does a life with less resentment sound like a beautiful thing?
If you’re like most of us humans who are moving through life with codependency and/or perfectionism, you are no stranger to resentment.
Many of us get resentful and then hold onto that resentment for dear life. Sometimes resentment makes us feel temporarily powerful, superior, virtuous. It can admittedly have a certain allure, to feel like the person who knows the right thing and the wrong thing to do, to hold onto that grudge for dear life.
But unfortunately or fortunately rather, resentment accomplishes nothing and only leads to more stress and angst and upset-ness in your own life, which my darling nerds, you know that tension leads to more anxiety, physiologically speaking. More of the sympathetic fight or flight energy, and when that system gets exhausted, more of that dorsal vagal collapse.
My beauty, when you are awash in resentment, holding a grudge, it usually means you’re avoiding the real issues that need tending to.
It usually means that you’re buffering. And when unresolved, resentment and the issues beneath it can really damage our relationships. With others and most importantly, with yourself.
Choosing resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
I’d go so far as to say that holding onto resentment is one of the most harmful things you can do to yourself and those you love.
And yes, being resentful is both a feeling and an action.
Resentment is what can happen when you feel that you have been wronged in some way.
When the story goes that someone else did something to you and you’re holding a grudge about it. The feeling of resentment can often carry shame, annoyance, irritation, as well as anger, and can also bring with it that hallmark of the grudge. The desire for revenge.
To make someone else feel as bad as they made you feel. And if you know about emotional childhood and emotional adulthood, you know how I feel about the story, “Someone else made me feel something.”
So let’s zoom out like we do and let’s look at the language we use here. It’s so common to hear someone say, “I resent your implication about me.” And that’s the thing with resentment. You are making someone else’s thoughts, feelings, actions have the result of affecting you, which we know as scholars and students of the thought work protocol and the think-feel-act cycle is actually not possible.
The key difference here between anger and resentment is that anger is generally recognized as being a response to your thoughts about an incident. And it’s important to note that I love anger. It can be a totally healthy response and we need anger and we need to let it out of our bodies.
So the example may go, “He did x, I feel y about it. I feel anger.”
Resentment, on the other hand, is more of an internal game. It’s a defense of your ego, your sense of self, the story about who you are in the world, your sense of being an I in the world. Your identity. All the words, stories, experiences attached to it.
So resentment touches into that. It goes, “Someone did something to me.” There’s a personalization. And when you’re in this framework, as we so often note, the rest of the world gets clouded and you’re unable to step back, zoom out, see the other person’s point of view, see the ways from emotional adulthood that it’s not about you and you oversimplify.
Your ability to experience other people as changing creatures, humans who are in their own think-feel-act cycle, all of that is lost. It goes, “This one time she didn’t show up for me. She never will.” And with resentment, because you’re trying to protect your sense of self and your ego, this way of looking at the world becomes the glasses you see the whole world through. Like everyone is out to get you. Everyone is doing things to you. It’s all about you.
Unchecked, resentment is the best way to turn any relationship into a flaming dumpster fire and can lead to a lot of pain.
And what’s so fascinating is that when resentment is your thought habit, you can go to 10 out of 10 resentful, filling up with bitterness, anger, upset in your mind, body, spirit, whether someone just killed your pet albatross or someone forgot to send you a thank you card. It runs through to the extremes and it affects all experiences.
In a world full of injustice, humans choosing actions that we can perceive as hostility, as rudeness, there’s almost always some reason for you to choose to feel resentful, to take it personally and make it about you if you want to go there in your mind, if it’s your thought habit.
Resentment can also come from thinking someone else should have done something that they didn’t. That there was an inaction on their part or even that they just made a careless comment that you took on as a major slight because it touched that ego place. It triggered that old defense mechanism that likely comes from your childhood.
If codependent thinking is part of your mental habits, then it’s likely that one of the times you feel resentful is when you think you’re doing something awesome and amazing for someone else and they don’t respond the way you hoped or thought they would.
And often, that’s probably because they didn’t even ask you to do that thing. They may not even want it or have any interest in it. You didn’t ask them if they wanted that thing. You didn’t get consent, or just the timing is all wrong.
And then, because you put someone else ahead of yourself, you did for others what they could do for themselves, you get pissed off, upset, offended, hurt, when they let you know that they didn’t want the thing that they didn’t ask for that you insisted that they get from you or do for them.
Whatever the reason you’re citing for feeling resentful, this thought habit is characterized by a dwelling, a stewing if you will over how you’ve been hurt, maligned, improperly characterized, and how the other person just isn’t doing this life thing right and you’re the victim.
And because it touches so deep, feels so personal and so about you, you may be feeling too much anger, shame, indignancy to be able to step back and engage in direct communication in order to speak your needs, in order to recognize it, pause, voice it.
And so, like any wound uncared for, my beauty, it festers. And so all that grump can come out sideways as a sympathetic driven response, dorsal vagal shutdown, withdrawal, a pulling away. And the problem with resentment is, yes, it makes you feel quite badly. It also keeps you from looking at the real issues and prevents you from taking responsibility for your part in creating a situation.
When your focus is on how you’ve been done wrong, I guarantee, you will continue to feel hurt and sorry for yourself, like the perpetual victim.
Moreover, if you’re stuck being pissed off about the things that happened, you’re not likely to be able to change it.
When your frame of mind is that you’ve been done an injustice, it’s hard to operate from a place of power. And it’s so easy to take it all personally, to make the situation about you when really, nothing in this life ever is.
That is, if someone steals something of yours, if someone hits you, ignores you, calls you a name, forgets to send a thank you card, it’s never about you. Like, you as a perfect human animal.
That is, their thoughts led to their feelings. They took an action that created an outcome, a result. And that was all about them. And yes, absolutely, their action and behavior affected you, impacted you, absolutely. And you get angry about that. Be sad about that. Have all your feels about that.
But my love, let me be clear. It wasn’t about you. It was about them doing what they wanted to do. From their own think-feel-act cycle. And I know this can be so hard to swallow, but coming to understand this, and this goes back to our conversation recently about control and uncertainty, this has been so freeing in my life.
To realize everyone is just living their own life and doing what they are doing and it is literally 100% of the time not about me.
It’s not about me. It’s always about them.
For example, a partner who never takes out the trash. They’re not going to change because you sit there seething, like staring at the garbage can with anger, cutting your eyes at them. You drank the poison, they’re fine, you’re dying.
You’re upset, your resentment changes absolutely nothing in your world or anyone else’s, and certainly does nothing toward your goal of letting the other person know you’re upset in a constructive way. It’s not how you get your point across, set a boundary, or change a thing.
The other problem with resentment is it can lead us to be reactive and to act out of anger, usually with pretty awful results. Change is seldom inspired by people being grumpy, mean, resentful. And speaking from that place, feeling from that place, living from that place takes you out of your integrity, my darling.
It also takes you out of ventral vagal, that beautiful place of safe and social connection with yourself and other humans and can launch you right into sympathetic activation when you’re unable to be thoughtful or strategic there. And most of us have done or said things out of anger that we deeply regretted later.
Resentment also clouds your vision by keeping you focused on the bad and blinding you to the good.
When you’re smoldering with resentment, you’ll be sure to notice every time your partner walks by the full garbage can, but you’re likely to miss the times they folded all the laundry or scrubbed the toilet or paid the bills.
You’re not only going to miss the good in the person you’re busy resenting. You’re going to find it hard to enjoy all the other good things in your life. Resentment is a joy killer. Resentment is also just super bad for your physical and emotional health.
Being resentful causes stress and stress wreaks havoc on everything from digestion to sleep.
What’s also fascinating is that sometimes, particularly in this context, this morass of perfectionist and codependent thinking, we can resent others for giving themselves what we are challenged to give ourselves.
That is, we judge others harshly for not holding themselves to the same painfully high standards we hold ourselves to.
My love, no matter how good it feels in the moment, resentment is a dead end for you and the people you love.
And we hang onto it because we’re avoiding conflict or protecting ourselves from the real issue the way I was for so long. And remember, all that humans want truly is to feel safe and connected. And if something has happened that distances you from that, you will resent the person, place, thing that broke that bond of trust that you will be okay.
And sometimes resentment can give us the illusion of power. When you feel that you’ve been wronged, you can feel out of control and like things are being done to you. Victimized. Responding by seething internally with resentment versus standing firm in your anger and saying, “That was f’d up, that was not okay,” and to be clear, big fan of the latter, but holding onto it as resentment can temporarily make you feel like you have power.
As if you’re taking action and regaining control. In contrast, stopping and admitting, “That hurt,” can be really challenging.
A lot of us find it easier in the short-term to boil with resentment in response to feelings of hurt than it is to breathe, center, and find the words or voice our pain directly.
And yes, trauma responses can absolutely get in the way here, and those responses are for sure something that can shift with time, attention, love, and care. Resentment is also a way to avoid taking responsibility. It’s way easier to point the finger at others for the problems in your life than it is to examine how you may be contributing to them.
And many of us are simply conditioned to respond with resentment. It’s what you’ve always done and perhaps what you’ve always seen modeled by the people in your life. I know this was the case for me for sure.
So what’s a human to do? What’s the remedy? My darling, we are always going to start with the three A’s. Awareness, acceptance, and action. So the first step is recognizing that it’s happening. The next time something makes you feel like you’ve been wronged, stop, pause, take that big deep belly breath, long exhale out.
Ask yourself what you are feeling. What’s happening in your body? What are the thoughts going through your mind? See if one of your inner children, maybe an inner adolescent has come up to defend or protect you or is feeling hurt. Check in there.
See if you can attend to your physiology, to move from an agitated state to a calmer state. Again, deep breathing into your belly, long breath out. Maybe drink some water. Go for a walk. Sometimes it helps to write about what’s happening and get that cognitive distance. Anything you can do to hit pause and to not be ruled by your reactive self.
Just note what’s happening and create some space between your feelings and your reactions. Start there. Awareness, nervous system, attending to the inner child. And from there, you get to do the challenging work of accepting that resentment is part of your story.
It’s part of your habitual thought patterns and that’s okay. You get to be really tender with yourself as you work to accept, “Oh wow, I did it again and again and again.” And from that, only from there, skipping no steps can you then begin to use the thought work protocol to take action.
I’m not saying that things never need to change or that you should put up with hurtful behavior.
We do not stay in abusive relationships or situations ever. I’m never going to advise you to do thought work about a situation where someone is abusing you. Never. I want to support you to get out and to seek care.
So with that said, I want to remind you that no matter what you want to have changed in your world, holding onto and responding, reacting from resentment will never yield the change you want and need. And being able to start to make change starts with dropping that reactive energy, the defensiveness, to recognize that it’s poison.
And it starts by parsing out what you can and can’t change in a given situation so you can focus your human energy on the things within your control, namely your own thoughts and feelings. So let’s go back to our simple example. Your chore hating partner.
It’s important to ask yourself, “What’s my goal here? And how can I best achieve it?” If your goal is to make your partner feel bad, or for you to feel righteous, chances are you know just how to do that. If your goal is to actually get your partner to partner with you and to do some chores, speaking from resentment is really unlikely to motivate more dish washing or litter box cleaning.
What would motivate your partner? Work with them to identify the reasons why they always forget. Figure out the barriers to doing things in a way that works for everyone.
If you find yourself, like so many of us, like me for most of my life, chronically resentful, in that wicked codependent, perfectionist way, that story that people aren’t doing as much for you that you’re doing for them, or thinking they aren’t doing things perfectly and it’s making you grumped inside, pause, breathe, ask yourself, why are you doing these things?
Why you’re having these thoughts and continuing to think them, what your goal is, why you insist on universal perfection to your standards. Ask yourself, do these thoughts bring me joy or frustration and resentment?
Consider letting others do for themselves what they are capable of doing and doing it to their own standards for their own life.
It’s not yours to manage, my love. If you want something done in a particular way, you get to do it yourself, for you.
Resentment never accomplishes a thing except keeping you in that wild place of attempting to control the uncontrollable and defending your ego at all costs.
And that, that is no way to live, my darling.
You’ve got this. It’s going to take some practice for sure. It’ll take practice to even see when you’re in resentment, but keep an eye out. Keep a little journal. Make note of when you’re feeling that resentment growing within you and just start looking at it. Start to get a real critical eye and asking yourself the questions I posed.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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