Are your resentments worth more than your freedom?
RESENTMENT
Resentment is a mental and emotional resistance to a limited perception of what we think happened. The events may be so long ago we may even have forgotten exactly what they were. But we haven't forgotten how we felt, and someone is going to pay for that!! As the years pass, ageing resentments are rarely directed where they belong. Some other poor sod gets to wear what we refuse to let go of and complete with.
Resentment is an emotional re-living, re-creating, re-hashing, or re-fighting of some past experience. It grinds away like a broken record, but one that becomes more potent with each replay. In counseling, when I find a caller re-visiting an old battlefiield, I will often gently interrupt the flow, explain that yet another re-telling may only reinforce a reaction that clearly is not working, and invite him/her to participate in other lines of enquiry that will explore the archeological site of hurt from a fresh trench. The trick is to unearth what underlies the story without driving the whole thing further underground.
Justified or not, resentment is self-damaging. These days, I thankfully care less and less about how right I am. Being right never healed anything for anyone, and never will. But it has taken me a long time -- far too long -- to get the message. Righteousness and Guilt -- the ugly twin sisters, are the hammer that drives the nails deeper into the wounds. Forget Easter, we crucify our selves daily on the rack of Resentment and Righteous Guilt..
Resentment prevents us from seeing ourselves as self-reliant and at-cause in our lives. It makes us the victim of circumstances and of other people, and more prone to fail. In resentment, we surrender the reins of our life to the very people we resent, and allow our image of them to dictate how we will feel and act. And they (usually) don't know, and couldn't care less, that we have handed them that power. They know there's something wrong, and that we're acting crazy. And we are. Crucifying ourself in the hope that someone else will feel bad about it -- is NUTS!!!
Resentment nails us to the Cross of The Dead Past, and pushes us to look for further injustices to replace those that have lost their juice or that we may have actually forgotten about. And we always find what we expect to find. In a life that isn't working, Resentment gives us something to feel "right" about, dragging a rotting corpse into The Present like the family cat with a dead bird. We are so hell-bent on using Resentment to cover up a lousy self-image that we end up validating and reinforcing it.
Resentment is an exceedingly expensive emotion. It may have cost me a ripe old age
What's eating you? Resentment is a cancer.
Are your resentments worth it?
What's eating you? Resentment is a cancer.
Are your resentments worth it?
The Antidote to Resentment
Forgiveness. Letting go. Casting off from the rocks where you've been stuck.
Resentment is a stuckness that you just walk out of.
Walk away.
Forgive.
Walk away.
Forgive.
Forgive who? Forgive Ourself. Any resentments I still have are rankling on over here in my space. All your resentments and suffering are going on over there in you. I am doing it to me: you are doing it - to you. And that is the best news you could ever get. If someone else was doing it you you, they would have to get therapy for you to be happy. And you never would get happy, even if they did. But because YOU are doing it to you, you can un-do it any time you're ready.
Forgive your stuckness. Forgive your ignorance, and your stupidity around that. Forgive your hurt. Forgive your limited perception. Let go.
Forgive the "other" in yourself. Let it go.
The act of Forgiving (not to be confused with "pardoning") is acting in your own intelligent best interests.
INHIBITION
Resentment and guilt work in tandem to inhibit the freedom of our natural spirit. This, from my lifelong experience over my father -- a man whom I adored, feared and resented in equal measure........
Unable to ever physically or emotionally stand up to my father (until my late teens when I contrived to trap him in a moral bind), I resisted his violently imposed strictures with heavily internalised churning resentment. Because of my concomitant love for him, my resentment triggered torrents of guilt.
Racked with resentment, guilt and an appallingly low self-esteem, I became painfully shy, self-conscious, covertly hostile, nervous, irritable and sickeningly "nice" in my overly needy efforts to get along with everybody. I had no hope of genuinely expressing my self in the world (even if I had known who I was -- and I didn't.) The Playful Adventurer in me was constantly at war with the Irresponsible Danger. But I did not know that at the time. All I noticed was that, under stress I began to "stutter all over", and sometimes throw up. How literal our bodies are! By the time I reached my late 20's I shook so badly I could no longer play the organ in church -- and music had been my rock and salvation up to then. I took up acting as a means to self-discovery and expression. That worked as a therapy and led me indirectly to the journey of inward discovery. But the damage had been done. Now, after 6 decades of stuttering all over, my heart has joined in the dance of arrhythmia, and I can feel my brain succumbing to the effects of interruptions to the blood supply.
Resentment, guilt and inhibition take a terrible toll on the perpetrator. They pull us out of the Present, an absence that is at the root of all dissatisfaction in life. Our emotional thermostats are locked permanently in the Dead Past, onto a fiction that exercises an iron control over the Present, rendering us helpless to respond appropriately to anything in the Here and Now.
Resentment inhibits. Resentment ties us to a dead corpse, forcing us to "shy" away from anything new and fresh. Whenever we are challenged to come out into the open, we wonder in advance and rehearse.
Resentment is the death of creative spontaneity.
The Escape Hatch is Forgiveness.
Nothing is worth hanging onto. Nothing.
And I know you are probably going to have to find that out for yourself. I just thought I'd warn you.
That's all.
Unable to ever physically or emotionally stand up to my father (until my late teens when I contrived to trap him in a moral bind), I resisted his violently imposed strictures with heavily internalised churning resentment. Because of my concomitant love for him, my resentment triggered torrents of guilt.
Racked with resentment, guilt and an appallingly low self-esteem, I became painfully shy, self-conscious, covertly hostile, nervous, irritable and sickeningly "nice" in my overly needy efforts to get along with everybody. I had no hope of genuinely expressing my self in the world (even if I had known who I was -- and I didn't.) The Playful Adventurer in me was constantly at war with the Irresponsible Danger. But I did not know that at the time. All I noticed was that, under stress I began to "stutter all over", and sometimes throw up. How literal our bodies are! By the time I reached my late 20's I shook so badly I could no longer play the organ in church -- and music had been my rock and salvation up to then. I took up acting as a means to self-discovery and expression. That worked as a therapy and led me indirectly to the journey of inward discovery. But the damage had been done. Now, after 6 decades of stuttering all over, my heart has joined in the dance of arrhythmia, and I can feel my brain succumbing to the effects of interruptions to the blood supply.
Resentment, guilt and inhibition take a terrible toll on the perpetrator. They pull us out of the Present, an absence that is at the root of all dissatisfaction in life. Our emotional thermostats are locked permanently in the Dead Past, onto a fiction that exercises an iron control over the Present, rendering us helpless to respond appropriately to anything in the Here and Now.
Resentment inhibits. Resentment ties us to a dead corpse, forcing us to "shy" away from anything new and fresh. Whenever we are challenged to come out into the open, we wonder in advance and rehearse.
Resentment is the death of creative spontaneity.
The Escape Hatch is Forgiveness.
Nothing is worth hanging onto. Nothing.
And I know you are probably going to have to find that out for yourself. I just thought I'd warn you.
That's all.
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