Buried anger and hurt lodges deep inside of us, at least that is my experience.. If growing up we were hurt repeatedly, if that was denied and we were told t ignore it or then learned to focus on others, to not connect to our feelings, if a powerful source of expression from within us is denied us, that can become a defining factor in the way we develop or fail to develop as individuals.. Later in life, we then may become a victim to resentment if we cannot find a way to deal with what happened to us, we may also stay locked in the past, lurching from one upsetting experience to the next because we never found a way to extricate ourselves from the hurts or define a new way of being outside of them.
In addiction recovery circles it is understood that festering resentments mark much of the reason we may drink or continue to self destruct and self harm.. There is also a saying in AA :
resentments mark the place I remain a victim..
Working on our past hurt, anger and resentment, is not at all about ignoring the hurts that happened to us, rather it is a process of honestly facing their impact and effects so we can move out of denial and lessen the potential pf forming more trauma bonds with others who mirror something of our past. Glossing over our hurts will not work, staying endlessly stuck in them leads to a number of dead ends for us and may end up impacting upon us bodily.
I also watched a video by Dr Ramani last night on narcissism and toxic positivity, what she discussed in that video is when we suffer from narcissistic abuse and try to address the issue or talk about being subjected to people who tell us we only need to love the toxic person more, or try harder.. She goes into quite a lot of detail in the video that I will link to at the end of this post.. Suffice to say that denying the truth keeps many stuck in painful relationships for most of their adult life.
There is a process of working with anger and resentments which comes from the 12 steps and is outlined in the book We : The Uplifting Manual For Women Seeking Happiness, written by Gillian Andersn and Jennifer Nadel. In that book in a chapter on courage Jennifer talks of coming out of a marriage in which she experienced a lot of anger, hurt and difficulties but by not addressing it ended up in a severe depression two years later. Working her way out of that depression and facing the truth of her inner life involved a lot of work and she had to be honest in looking at the part she may have unwittingly played in staying stuck.. This is not to say we did something to ’cause’ another person’s behavior, but that we may have unwittingly played a part by things we did not do to take care of ourselves, possibly being told it was selfish to do so or lacking that awareness due to repeating old un-useful childhood patterns.
Jennifer says she did not deal with her anger at the time also due to the fact she did not think that was the ‘spiritual’ route to take.. I am going to post a post on the argument for valid appropriate expression of anger as spiritual later today.. In her video Dr Ramani talks about just this kind of toxic spirituality that does not come to grips with the real negative underbelly of some human behavior and allow victims to honestly acknowledge the truth of so called ‘negative’ emotions like anger.
The process of working on and through anger and resentments outlined by Jennifer and Gillian is adapted from the AA Big Book and involves listing the people we felt hurt by, as well as writing in detail about the wounds. The key is to write honestly from your gut, not from reason but not to get stuck in the resentment, just get to get all of the hurt and toxic residues out onto the page.
The next step after getting all of the hurt out of you and down on to the page (and it may be useful to share it with someone you trust if they exist) is to turn to face your own part in keeping the hurt going or allowing it to happen, (this involves those hurts we did have some power over, which will, of course, not be all of them.) Some examples are : continuing to rely on an unavailable person, having unrealistic expectations, hanging onto something that was past its use by date, being dishonest on some level, or in denial.
If there is nothing you did do to cause what happened, is there a way that you can see that holding onto the resentment is hurting you? Is it keeping you fostering a negative or skewed attitude? Is it preventing you reaching for things that are not painful but make you feel better? Is there something you feel is making it impossible to move on? Are you continuing to let it define you and limit who you are and who you can become? Taking an honest look at our part in things is way of getting free of a victim mindset.. Yes, we were hurt at one time, but we do not have to keep being hurt over and over and over again if we can learn from the past and use the pain and lessons to help us make better choices in the now. And an admission that somethings were outside of your control may also be freeing, letting go of the denial that you could do anything to change the person or people you could not……
The third step of the process is to imagine how you wish things could have been. What was it that you needed that you did not get? What would you like to have happened instead? This exercise will be hard as it will bring up feelings of grief and loss, but to the degree that you can face them you will be able to make sense of why you felt so resentful and why and how that feeling may now be retriggered in the Now and cause you to get stuck in negative spirals again.. This feeling release part of the exercise is about finding a way to let go and move on after grieving the hurt and it will take time.
Gillian and Jennifer recommend you do this exercise each time a resentment gets triggered for you.. Learning about the impact of hurts and resentments gives us a way to find a sense of some kind of power in the Now even if we did not get to have that kind of power in the past. The things that hurt us will not have changed and we will still have them in our lives but they can, in being acknowledged and consciously let go at least begin to lose some of the toxic power they used to and still may hold over us.
Emerging From The Dark Night 