Managing Resentments

Managing Resentments

My gut is that bringing up this topic makes you think about your resentments.  Just bringing up the topic makes me think of my resentments.  As I have been writing this, my mind went back to all kinds of memories of resentment.

The hard truth is that thinking about your resentments has limited value.   While I don’t agree with everything he says, I am mindful at this moment of Eckart Tolle’s statement in The Power of Now

Die to the past every moment. You don't need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present.  

I think that is far easier said than done for the average human being as dwelling on resentments is a very emotional behavior. The trigger pulls us in impulsively and glues us to the memory for not just minutes, but maybe even hours and weeks.  We relive the memory and rehearse what was said and we attempt to rewrite the memory by what we should have said and done.

There are some people who I have met who do nothing but live in their resentments.  They were or are people who we might call “bitter.”   Talking with them only reveals their anger and bitterness.  Maybe it was related to clinical depression, but some of them do nothing but live in the past to the cost of their present and their future.

Here is where I may agree with Eckart Tolle.  Dwelling on resentments is a behavior in the here and now.

Eventually, our resentments are irrelevant to the rest of our life . . . except that they had happened to us and we are thinking about them now. The rest of the world has moved on and dwelling on resentments amount to us being stuck in the past.

I cannot discount the intensity and significance of hurt and pain of some of the things that have happened to people.  I must acknowledge that many are some trauma survivors who have shaped their lives around past resentments and pain; they trust no one due all the trauma and abuse they experienced in the past.  Nevertheless, you and I . . . we … all have a choice in the here and now what we are going to think about and what we are going to do.

Good . . . and maybe better mental health involves choosing how we are going to compartmentalize our resentments.  Good mental health involves choosing to live and think in the present.  I think that living in the present in these cases means a discussion within ourselves with the question: is it doing me any good to be thinking about this now?   We often must distract ourselves from the past and get ourselves back into the present.