Resentment is an ongoing feeling of deep anger, bitterness and indignation towards a past incident and/or person that is often ruminated upon.

A good question to ask yourself is: 

When was the last time I truly felt overwhelmed with happiness, freedom, and gratitude?

If you can’t remember, then you may be holding on to resentments. Holding resentments can block our access to a sense of well-being.

Here’s how it works: Resentment, Anger, and Fear are all connected. We become trapped in a cycle of being afraid of the future, angry in the present, and filled with resentment over our past. 

The Antidote to Fear is Faith

The Remedy for Anger is Love

The Solution to Resentment is Acceptance and Forgiveness 

Replaying the past over and over has psychological, emotional and physical costs. 

Resentment refers to the mental process of repetitively replaying a feeling, and the events leading up to it that irks or angers us. We don’t tend to replay a logical list of facts in resentment, we re-experience and relive them in ways that affect us emotionally, physiologically, and psychologically which can be very damaging. The inability to overcome resentment probably constitutes the single biggest block to repairing a broken intimate connection or relationship, family rift or severed friendship. 

Although resentments may be provoked by recent, specific conflicts between two people, they usually encapsulate a hostility that goes much further back. Your friend, parent or partner may accuse you of a recent snub or slight but the hostility is more than likely fuelled by years of other real, or imagined, episodes of disrespect or disregard. For example, your partner may become enraged by a broken promise or breach of attentiveness, but if they can’t let go of it, it’s probably ignited by a long history of neglect, exasperation, and frustration. Your friend may accuse you of forgetting an event like their birthday, but again, the most recent accusation is just the trigger for these feelings. The strong reaction of resentment almost never appears to be warranted by what sets it off. It’s always the product of a long history of backed-up unhappiness. 

What causes this unhappiness that underlies resentment? 

• What we feel people did to us that was unnecessarily mean, hurtful, and thoughtless.
• What people in our lives did not do for us that we feel they should have done.
• When we feel the people in our lives have not done enough for us.

Resentments represent a basic choice to refuse to forgive, an unwillingness to let go of past hurts. We review and rehash our painful past, even as we profess to want to let go of it. We do so because we believe the illusion that by harbouring and revisiting our resentment, we will somehow achieve the justice we believe we are due. We cling to a futile need to be “right,” which overrides the capacity to heal and be at peace with ourselves. 

We hang on to perceived offences because we don’t know any other way of coming to grips with painful feelings of hurt, rejection, and abandonment. We need to learn to let go of resentment, because living with it can only bring us chronic pain and punishment, preventing us from building relationships based on love, trust, nurturing and support. Letting go of a resentment is not a weakness or a gift to the person you resent. It is, rather, a gift to yourself. 

Clinging to your angry, hurt feelings about someone to whom you once felt close with will only hinder your capacity to move on in your life and learn to deal with these wounds. Letting go of your resentments, whether it leads to healing the rift, or to wholeness and peace within yourself – or both – is integral to not letting your past interfere with your present. 

The best description of resentment I have come across is:

“Resentments are like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.” – Anon

It’s an incredibly effective way to understand resentment.

Take a look again at that quote: “Living with resentment is like taking poison and expecting the other person to get sick.” This makes vivid one of the most crippling aspects of resentment—one you may have experienced – or still be experiencing. 

If you’re thinking about ways to get even and prove to another person that you’re right and they’re wrong, you need to remember that the person who is the focus of your animosity may be feeling just fine, enjoying life, and perhaps not at all troubled by any of the interactions that are taking up space in your brain and system. Ultimately, resentment hurts you far more than the person toward whom you bear a grudge. 

Some time ago I copied something about resentment that’s a worthwhile read (unfortunately, I have lost the original source for this):

“The moment you start to resent a person, you become his slave. He controls your dreams, absorbs your digestion, robs you of your peace of mind and goodwill, and takes away the pleasure of your work. He ruins your religion and nullifies your prayers. You cannot take a vacation without his going along. He destroys your freedom of mind and hounds you wherever you go. There is no way to escape the person you resent. He is with you when you are awake. He invades your privacy when you sleep. He is close beside you when you drive your car and when you are on the job. You can never have efficiency or happiness. He influences even the tone of your voice. He requires you to take medicine for indigestion, headaches, and loss of energy. He even steals your last moment of consciousness before you go to sleep. So, if you want to be a slave, harbour your resentments!” 

Fortunately, there are ways to get out of resentment’s crippling grip. There are alternative, life affirming, and healthy responses that will help you achieve freedom from obsessing about past injustices. There are choices you may not realise are available to you. Take a look at the  following suggestions that may help you to let go of these toxic feelings

Steps to Letting Go of Resentment 

• Approach resentment as the addictive state of mind it is.
• Realise that you are using resentment to replicate old dramas and acknowledge that you cannot change the past.
• Examine how your resentment may come from confusing people in your present life with people from your past.
• Acknowledge that you cannot control those who have rejected you.
• Recognise that your resentment gives you only illusions of strength. Instead, highlight and validate your real strengths and power.
• Learn to identify signals that provoke resentment. Apply the acronym HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.
• Acknowledge your part in allowing the abuse to occur, forgive yourself for that, and make a decision to not let it occur again.
• Declare an amnesty with the person you resent and with yourself.
• Forgive when you can, and practice conscious and deliberate forgetfulness when you can’t, keeping in mind that these acts are gifts to yourself rather than capitulation to the people you resent.

Resentments are hard to get rid of and difficult for others to understand. Exasperated friends, family and colleagues may tell you to “Just get over it ” or “let it go.” 

These platitudes are well meant yet unhelpful. The following strategies are also extremely unhelpful when it comes to feelings of resentment:

• Ignore them
• Fight through them
• Shut them in a box
• Pretend you don’t feel them
• Try and forget them

Instead, the following strategies are usually extremely helpful:

• Face them
• Feel them
• Deal with them
• Heal from them

Pretending or taking a“Fake it ‘til you make it ” approach may sometimes be an easy, short term strategy. This won’t work, however, when it comes to deeply engrained feelings we have about certain people or situations. Dealing with them authentically is certainly easier said than done and can feel like  quite a risk and challenge.

How to Accept What Happened in the Past

Before you begin to overcome resentments, you should know the following things:

• It’s a process.
• It may get worse before it gets better.
• It requires a great deal of willingness and an open mind.

Resentments are negative feelings that you may have been carrying around for years. During this time, they may have done significant damage to your ability to interact with the world.

This may sound dramatic, but resentments are often based in big, deep-seated issues. You should know that you are embarking on a long and probably, quite painful, journey, but the destination is completely worth it.

A practical exercise to help you let go of Resentment

1: Make a list of all the people you have resentments towards

If you do this honestly, then the list should be pretty long.

Include ANYTHING that gives you an automatic negative feeling. You can also include places and institutions – nothing is too trivial or too small.

2: Next to the person’s name, write what they did to cause you to resent them

Again, nothing is too small. If you resent your boss, it may be because that person gives you unreasonable deadlines, or could simply be because you don’t like their voice.

The reason for the resentment doesn’t have to “make sense”—it just has to be honest. This is where it will get hard, and you will feel worse than you did before starting. Try to have faith and persevere, the end result will be worth it.

3: Now you write which part of your life each resentment affects.

If you resent an old teacher who made you feel inferior, you might say that it affects your self-esteem or confidence.

The point is to become acutely aware of the specific ways that the resentment is impacting your life, your identity and your ability to feel safe, secure, and loved.

4: Next to the reason, or cause for resentment, you are going to write down your part – This is how YOU have contributed to the problem.

For example, if you’ve established that you resent your boss because of unreasonable deadlines, your part in this problem could be that you never spoke up and asked for less work.

This is where honesty, authenticity and a courageous willingness comes in. You must be honest about your part, and willing to admit it, otherwise, you may get stuck. 

Now, read from left to right. You should be able to develop a clear picture of who you resent, why you resent them, the negative ways that it affects your life, and the part you played in all of it.

Understanding your resentments by breaking them down will hopefully start the process of evolving from a person who constantly lives in a generalised cycle of resentment, fear, and anger, and help you transition into someone who can identify the source of their feelings and target specific areas they want to change.

The purpose of this writing assignment is to experience freedom by letting go of long held, unhelpful, beliefs, perspectives, fears, and thoughts which we have been holding onto, and getting these issues out of our heads and onto paper to free up space in our internal system. 

What is done with the paper afterwards is up to you. Some people choose to share it with a trusted friend, others burn it as a symbolic gesture of surrendering those feelings.

This method is adapted from the 12-step program. I invite you to try it and take a risk in starting a new, inward, journey to free yourself from the tyranny and oppression of resentment

And just a reminder about Resentment: 

A Poisoned Mind, Is A Poisoned Body