Dealing with feelings of anger and resentment

I really struggled over past days with feelings of anger and resentment towards someone and I must confess it derailed me and gave me a lot of bodily pain. The person is someone I had issues with in the past, judging me over things unfairly, she seemed to change her attitude after we discussed it but when we spoke on Tuesday night she started telling me again how I will never change to become a stronger person and then the issue of my Mum’s ashes came up. This has not been dealt with even after 5 years as I did not feel good doing it alone without another family member but my two siblings are unable to connect meaningfully around it at all and that makes the burden fall to me. I do not think her criticisms were fair she was telling that my mother’s ashes will probably end up in dumpster somewhere because I am never going to deal with it. She also feels I have been weak over not getting legal help over my inheritance. I didn’t react during the conversation but woke about 3 am feeling a huge amount of anger and resentment towards her, not so much only for these comments, but really nasty hurtful things that happened in the past. And I must admit I did not know how to deal with them as when I feel anger I do feel a great deal of guilt.

The truth is not everyone will like us, and people will judge us. An earlier post I wrote talked about not looking to others for our sense of value or a sense of being approved of, but still we do it. I also listened to several long interviews with author Matt Haig yesterday in which he talked about this need for external approval being a major issue he faced in dealing with this own need to be approved of or welcomed for others. He shared that for a long time he felt a real battle with both his self esteem and sense of rejection. In his book The Comfort Book he talks of how a little baby does not need to do anything or be a certain way in order to be loved. So, he maintains, we have intrinsic values simply for existing. One of his novels The Midnight Library also deals with a person struggling depression, anxiety, regret and self judgement and it contains a lovely piece of writing on acceptance and peace that I will share at the end of this post.

I know it would be better if this person’s approval was not a problem and her shaming of me not taken on board by me.. But the truth is I DID struggle not to take it all on. This person is sadly not tolerant, she does not have contact with her daughter due to an argument they had years ago and so has nothing to do with her two grandchildren either. That is not for me to judge but it does make me question why she can judge me. Part of me feels this does not even warrant a post but I felt the need to share it today. I have still a lot of body pain today after just this 20 minute conversation with her on Tuesday night.

Much as we are told not to let others energy affect us, the truth is that as sensitive people or those with wounding, a lot of times things do hit our sore spots. This I guess is the time to be mindful but it also seems to me that I need to be honest ABOUT HOW I DO FEEL. I watched an interesting video interview with writer Michael Singer the other night.. In it he discussed how when we push down or tighten around what reactions we have to hurt or discomfort we only make the thing worse. We end up repressing all of those feelings. Instead we should work to notice or witness with our minds all of our feelings and reactions to the thing in question and then we should relax our body as we allow that feeling some space to move through us, If we do the feeling will be released rather than stored in our body or unconscious. This makes sense but the sad fact is that if, as a child, we were taught anger was dangerous or bad we often do not know how to deal with it..

So its interesting this issue is coming up with Mars retrograde right now. I did not ever see healthy expression of anger modelled growing up, and in AA we were just told to pray for the person we are triggered by.. That is not always only thing we need to do though. We also need to get to the basis of what the hurt may be all about, because for sure, if we are feeling anger, there is a wound or a boundary of self care around it we need to take care of. As Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh used to say, it is so important to take care of ourselves in our anger. Sitting down with our inner child and getting a handle on the hurt while working to undo false beliefs around that anger or those feelings is so important if we dont want to keep suffering from the burying of feelings of resentment and anger.