How to STOP Resentment
How to Stop Resentment
I do not believe that we can stop resentment. It would be like trying to stop weeds from growing in our gardens. We can take some preventive measures, such as keeping our hearts soft so that we can release the weeds when God, the Master Gardener, uproots bitterness and resentment from our lives.
For those of you who like Bible verses, Colossians 3:8 says we are to rid ourselves of all things such as these (symptoms of resentment), which are anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language. These are all weeds that can easily grow in our lives. But how do we prepare our hearts and souls for this process to take place?
We want the inside garden of our lives to be beautiful and to be able to say, “Love grows here.” And we can say, “It’s beautiful inside here.” But how do we get rid of those places where we are stuck with the weeds of resentment? It might be helpful to think about how resentment starts.
We usually have resentment when we don’t feel as though we did enough, earned enough, or got enough credit. We feel resentment against people who think they are always right. They may embarrass us or correct us, saying we are wrong. They would rather be right than have a relationship with us. When we feel put down by others so that they can feel in control, we feel resentment.
We can also have unrealistic expectations of others, resenting that they don’t do enough for us. Anytime we feel under-appreciated or cheated, we feel resentful.
If you have anyone in your life who you do not want to look at, you likely are resentful for some reason you may not be aware of. When you do not want to engage in conversation with someone, and you would even go out of your way so that you won’t have to spend time with that person, then you have resentment towards that person. You may be holding onto this resentment for some unconscious reason.
Such actions are indications of being passive-aggressive. Anytime we give someone the “silent treatment,” that is a form of passive-aggressiveness.
Certain people or situations might trigger unwanted memories of wrongdoing, and this can cause you to avoid situations or people who bring up these negative emotions. Resentment is often a way that people protect themselves and their own well-being. If you’ve ever talked to someone who was discussing their resentments, they will seem hard-hearted. It will be difficult to discuss helpful, alternative ideas with them. They will not let your love in.
This is because of past hurts and misunderstandings. When certain people or places remind us of past mistreatment, we can feel invisible or inadequate. And even though the new person that you are engaging with has nothing to do with your past, old feelings of anger and bitterness can reappear and even grow stronger.
Have you ever said, “I don’t like that person,” but you couldn’t say why? It was just a feeling. That’s because a former hurt that caused resentment started to grow a long time ago, and that neurological pathway is still firing and growing stronger. This is why I do not think we can stop resentment. The more we think about what we’re resentful about, the stronger the feelings become. We are making the neurological pathway in our brainsstronger and deeper.
It will help you to label resentment as a pain pathway becausethat is easy to run every time a similar situation happens.
Our first experiences of resentment seem to happen due to fear. When a certain incident happened, we didn’t feel safe. We built up a barrier, and anytime we perceived that fear again, we responded in whatever way we did previously to protect ourselves. That barrier we made became a blockage to our love flowing. Therefore, I have found that the best way for me to deal with resentment is to not examine why I am resentful. It only strengthens the pain pathway in my brain.
If you look at the word, resentment, you can break the syllables down to re-sent-ment. We are re-sending hurt back to ourselves as we re-live that original hurt. The original hurt keeps getting stronger as we lay more energy over that same groove we have had in our brain. We are re-hurting ourselves.
I had a friend who tried to offend me for six months because something I did caused resentment in her. This is a story from a while back. It has become a great teaching tool for me. I had helped my friend with interior design work while she was building her home. We worked together for a year on this project. Before it was finished, I had to drop off the job because my son had a back injury, and he had to lay flat at age 14 for a good while. In the meantime, all the things we ordered for her home were delivered.
A few months later, she invited me over to see the finished product. I saw three small mistakes that we could tweak to make her home feel better. I offered to do these fixes for her at no charge. The contractors had misunderstood what we had decided we wanted, but everything was fixable. Everything else was marvelous.
I did not realize at the time that she was offended that I spoke up about these three things. I thought she had invited me over as her interior designer for one last walk-through. For the next six months, I tried to continue my friendship with her, inviting her to do things with me, but she always said, “no.” I had no idea that she was trying to offend me. I was totally unaware of this misunderstanding she had with me.
This was a form of passive-aggressiveness because she neverrevealed that she had a problem with me over the six months. When she finally did tell me, she forbid me from ever mentioning her home when we talked.
I did not respond to her with resentment. I continued to feel that she was my friend, but over the years, we have lost touch with each other. I think these things happen more often than we realize.
Since then, I’ve grown as a person, and I’ve noticed my own stuck places. I’ve come to realize that everything we do or say is a “call for love.” We want people to understand us, but sometimes, we act in ways that block that understanding. These stuck places are barriers we build up, thinking we love ourselves and want to protect ourselves. But the fact is that the more we think about resentment, the deeper it grows.
We cannot escape our thoughts. Repressed resentful thoughts and emotions have effects on our bodies and alter our chemical state. If we don’t want unhealthy chemical reactions to take place in our bodies due to resentment, then we must change our stories.
Many of our unpleasant thoughts are based on stories about our lives that were from our viewpoint only. And unfortunately,whether the threat or perceived pain was real or not, it has the same harmful effect on our body. We re-send that hurt back to us over and over as we keep repeating this pain pathway through our compulsive thoughts.
Every time we have resentment, we are thinking about a past hurt, and that past hurt, hurts us again – and again – over and over – as we resend it to our body. Resentment is toxic to our bodies, and we need to get rid of it.
One good thing about resentment is that it is the opposite of gratitude and joy. Contrasts like this help us to know what we want. For instance, we know high because we know low. There is also what we would label good and bad, hot and cold. We wouldn’t know cold unless we knew hot.
When my onetime best friend, General Charles R. Fox died, the funeral director told me that joy and sorrow were on each side of my hand. If I knew joy those years when he was alive, then I would know sorrow when he died. He told me the deeper the joy, the deeper the sorrow. He had me look at my hand. He said joy was in the palm of my hand and sorrow was on the back of the hand. They were both part of my experience with General Fox.
Knowing that both of those experiences of life are in my hands, I do an exercise that helps me to stay balanced. This little exercise with my hands is an easy way to distract me from thoughts that I have about things or people I resent. It reminds me that if one side of the hand is joy, and the other side of the hand is sorrow, then in every situation, we have both. The exercise is to flip my hand over, altering it from the palm on top to the back of the hand on top. By doing exercises such as this, I have noticed that over time I am able to forgive the people I had resented. I can see how the situation ended up being something good in my life.
You might have heard a story about a man who had a horse.Everyone said he was so lucky to have that horse. But his son rode the horse and fell off, breaking his leg! Then everyone commented that he was very unlucky that he had a horse. However, a war broke out, and all the other sons had to go to war. But this man’s son did not have to go to war because he had a broken leg, so the man was considered lucky again. This story is an example of how, as life goes on, we can see that each situation we are in has a good side and a bad side.
The saying, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are,” is so true. If we give ourselves some quiet time, we can release that hurt and flip our hands back over from sorrow to joy.
The hand is made so that, if something falls on the back of the hand, it rolls off. If something falls on the palm of the hand, it stays there. We want to release hurts as though they fall on the back of the hand.
In yoga, there is a pose on all fours called “angry cat.” We curve our backs up toward the sky, and it’s as though, when things happen that make us angry, they can roll off. Then we sag our backs, as though we’re catching what’s good. This sagged position is called extension. When standing in extension, we can lift our hearts toward heaven, receiving joy.
When we experience resentment in a certain situation, it’s not the situation that caused the resentment. This is easy to prove because if it was the situation that caused resentment, then everyone would always feel the same way in the same situation.
Healing the past often involves forgiveness and finding a way to make peace with what happened, so we can move on with life. Learning to let hurtful situations roll off my back, like how a duck repels water, has seemed to be helpful to me.
But what do we do about feelings of resentment? I have found that I have a powerful center in my body that I picture as a center of release. It is in my lower abdomen, my intestinal area. Our intestines are constantly releasing whatever doesn’t serve us anymore. Our intestines are the pathway our body uses to remove toxins and get rid of them. Freeing us from them keeps us healthy. The process enables us to eat food, drink water and receive health from these substances, but when we are finished with them, they have to be released or we will become very sick.
If we don’t get rid of the waste, we become constipated, and our bodies can even reabsorb the dirty liquid that was meant to lubricate and send the waste out. This reabsorption of toxic waste hurts us. This reabsorption of toxic ways is like holding onto resentment. Resentment had the potential of being released, but instead, we held onto it and let it hurt us again. This is how resentment resends the hurt back into our bodies rather than getting rid of it.
When I was in my early 40s, I had a girlfriend whose intestinesshut down. She could not go to the bathroom, and she almost died! She had had her fourth baby, and when he was five days old, he came to my house. During his birth, his mom’s appendix broke, and her whole abdominal cavity filled up with poison. Her intestines shut down. We were so worried about her until she could finally go to the bathroom again. To stay healthy, we must release the things that hurt our bodies.
One term that has been important in my life is from Ann Ortland who wrote, Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman. She says we should “eliminate and concentrate.” The intestinal area of my body is the center that eliminates what isn’t needed and allows me to concentrate on what is needed.
I always have two lists in my mind. One side says, “It.” One side says, “Not it.” We must always think of what is healthy and nurturing to our lives, so that we can serve others. Resentment is “not it.”
So, how do we let resentment go? We can’t work to stop it. What works for me is to relax, to let it come up and to let it be released. Release happens when I am resting rather than working on eliminating it. Sometimes, I put my hands on my abdomen and extend compassion to myself so that I can heal and process my pain with mindfulness and kindness. Sometimes, I can uncover potential misunderstandings by trying to see things from another perspective. Sometimes, I try to bring more happiness and positivity into my life by focusing on the things that are going right and thinking about things and people for which I am grateful.
Our bodies have two systems, parasympathetic and sympathetic, that are part of the autonomic nervous system. The parasympathetic is the “rest and digest” system. Sometimes, this system is referred to as the “P” system, as in “peace.” The sympathetic nervous system is for when we work. Fight or flight is part of it, but it’s also responsible for getting us out of bed and doing our “to do” list. We can label the sympathetic system as our “S” – as in “stress” – system.
It’s also important that we balance our “to do” list with our “to you” list. The “to you” list is what we do for ourselves. Much of this “to you” time allows us to be quiet and restful.
We’re supposed to have 12 hours “P” and 12 hours of “S.” We get about eight hours of peace at nighttime, but we need to find another four hours for it during the day. The sympathetic nervous system, the “S” or stress system, balances with the parasympathetic, “P” or peace system.
The “S” system is very important because it causes us to get our work done. There are things we need to do to help ourselves, as well as others. For instance, we go to the grocery store – that’s work. But when we sit down and eat in a peaceful way, that would be parasympathetic as we rest and digest our food. Nice conversation leads to a peaceful time. It’s during our peaceful time that we’re able to release.
Think about your abdomen. We know that the plumbing all works great when we are not all stressed out. So, the way we get rid of resentment is by resting and releasing.
Beyond what we can see in our bodies, there is the spirit, which is light and love. That’s the real person we are. We can talk to ourselves. That is amazing. I can say, “Mary Louise, let’s release resentment.”
Who is the person who’s listening, and who is the person who’stalking? The Spirit of God is helping us to release the weeds of resentment. God’s spirit is the Master Gardener that takes ultimate care of us. But to engage the spirit, we need to take deeper, slower breaths and put more emphasis on exhaling – resting and relaxing – and not fighting against the Spirit’s work in our lives.
To release resentment, anytime that we feel a wee bit disturbed, we can quiet ourselves and let the disturbing feeling come up and go out. The process will be uncomfortable because we stored this hurt from being uncomfortable years ago. Instead of stuffing it back down, we should become quiet and let it come up again. For me, as I am quiet and allow the feeling to pass, it is released, and I am free of the discomfort.
The only way I found to do this is by resting and allowing myself the discomfort, while breathing through it. This process is called, “Letting it go.” It is a form of forgiveness, which means “to let go.”
Leviticus 19:18 says, “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people but love your neighbor as yourself.”
Often, I will say to myself, “Love grows here.” I acknowledge it’s beautiful inside my life. Whatever I’m not thankful for, I release.
Sometimes, expressive writing helps me. I have mentioned at other times my practice of writing in the morning when I first wake up, scribbling whatever comes to mind, allowing my subconscious to talk.
In conclusion, when we first notice a disturbing feeling, it’s best to become quiet, let the feeling come up and be released. If we try to stop it or push it down, we will get stuck again and start hurting ourselves over and over.
We can say to ourselves, “I feel sorry for you that you have this feeling. Let’s honor it and let it go. Let’s be free!” For me, this is the way I stop resentment from making a strong hold in my life. I release it and use God’s process of forgiveness.
If you would like to see me as I delivered this lesson, please go to my YouTube:
Resentment hurts us over and over as we re-send the thoughts of our hurtful experience back to us.
I love your perspective of dealing with this difficult emotion! Thank you ❤️