TRANSCRIPT
Someone asked that I make a video on the subject of how to let go of resentment. Well, when somebody tells me they would like to let go of resentment or resentments and they don’t know how to do it, the first question I ask is, are those resentments appropriate?
So how do I determine, how would I determine if I held resentments myself, if they are appropriate resentments? Well, for starters, I’d want to know if the person or people whom I’m resenting actually deserve my anger, deserve my annoyance, deserve me even holding a grudge against them.
A big part of me coming to this question, this realization, is that I see a lot of people do hold resentments against people who haven’t done anything to them or have done something very minimal compared to the resentment that the person is holding against them. Those inappropriate resentments, or what I would call inappropriate resentments, are really, from what I’ve seen, displaced resentments. There really is a deep and appropriate anger that a person is holding against someone or some people who have really done them wrong, but they’re not feeling the resentment toward the people who deserve it. Instead, they are displacing it onto some innocent party or onto some party who has done some little thing that maybe resembles the original harm, the original hurt, the original violation or trauma, and is a safe person to feel that big resentment for.
I’ve felt some of those resentments at times that are inappropriate resentments, and those are the resentments that really need to be worked on. But I’ve also been the recipient of inappropriate resentments, and sometimes it’s just completely obvious. Going along through my life, I meet someone, perhaps for the first time, a first conversation, and I’m having a conversation with them or having some sort of interaction with them, and they clearly have a very strong resentment toward me. It’s like, wait, I don’t even know this person. I haven’t done anything to them. I’ve just been pleasant, and they clearly have some sort of grudge against me. They hate me even. It’s like, yeah, that person really needs to work on that resentment because I didn’t do anything to deserve this.
Well, why do people feel these inappropriate resentments? Why do they displace their resentments onto blameless or innocent people? A lot of times, well, maybe all the time, what I’ve seen is that it’s safer. It’s safer to find some target for a resentment who is innocent because they can’t do anything to harm you. And also, well, my answer now is going to go a lot deeper, and it’s going to get right into appropriate resentments that often, at their depth, appropriate resentments, well, they’re held toward the people we wished loved us the most. The people whose job it was to love us the most, often it’s toward our own parents, very primal parental figures.
Holding resentments against one’s parents, for a lot of people, holding especially holding resentments in their proper light, in their full dimensions, can be very dangerous to a person. It’s certainly dangerous to a child. It’s dangerous to a baby. It’s dangerous to a toddler. It’s even dangerous to a teenager, dangerous to adults. When we hold resentments, legitimate appropriate resentments, anger about what people have done to us, the harm, the violations they’ve done, their basic failures to do their job as parents or other primary parental figures, when they have failed to do this job and we’re angry at them, well, we are in a way starting a war against a very powerful system—the family system.
And beyond that, the society that’s made up of family systems, the society that exists to support family systems, to support parents that say honor your parents. The religions that are all about pro-parents, not about pro-child. I mean, religions that sacrifice children, they don’t sacrifice parents, and they defend the parents. They even defend the parents who sacrificed the children, and they say these people are holy and they were listening to God, etc., etc. Well, it’s dangerous in a family system. It’s dangerous in any system to hold a resentment against the people who hold the reins of power. They hurt you once, they got away with it, you’re resentful for it, and if you call them out for it, well, there’s a good chance that they’re going to hurt you again, and perhaps even worse. Perhaps they will even kick you out, marginalize you, leave you outside of the system.
It’s funny, I almost never cough. I’m not sick, but I notice sometimes when I talk about these things, my throat tightens up. A direct example of what I’m talking about, it’s dangerous to talk about these things. It’s dangerous to call out the failures and limitations and sicknesses of the people who hold the power in our society. And some part of me, well, some part of me, I’ve broken from my family long ago, broken away from my parents long ago, haven’t spoken to them in 10, 15 years, and yet there’s still some small wounded part of me that lives inside of me despite all my healing. And I’ve done a lot. Well, that still is that little wounded boy, that little wounded baby and toddler who still wishes mom and dad would love me, even though they never will.
The conscious mature adult part of me knows that times a thousand, but to hold resentment against those people, it can be dangerous. It can make our lives worse. And people know this. People know this because what I’ve observed with little kids, babies especially, toddlers, even children, teenagers, is that it’s a very normal and natural and appropriate and healthy thing to call out our traumatizer, to blame them for their faults, to call out our parents for their faults and their limitations and their violations and their inappropriate behavior. Children, babies, toddlers, teenagers do it naturally all the time. Less often as they get older, though, because they’ve learned that it doesn’t get them anywhere. It actually sets them back. They get loved less, hated more, violated more so often, and so they learn. They learn that, well, it doesn’t get me anywhere. It hurts me to hold resentments against these primary powerful figures in my life who didn’t love me properly and still don’t love me properly.
And as the result of that, well, they’ll sell me out if I make them uncomfortable. They had me to make themselves feel more comfortable. They hurt me to make themselves feel more comfortable. Maybe they were displacing their resentment for their own traumatizing parents onto me long ago, and they’re much happier and much more content and much more loving and accepting of me if I displace my resentment onto someone else. Yet people, I think especially if they’re healthier, start to figure out, wait, it doesn’t get me anywhere in life to be resentful of people who didn’t do me any harm, and I would like to let go of this resentment. But often it doesn’t work that easily because the problem is traumas get buried very deep down in the psyche, in the unconscious, in the body, down beyond our memories, our conscious adult memories, down beyond our awareness of where they even came from.
And yet deep down in our psyche, that anger, that fury, that sorrow, that pain, that feeling of righteousness that wants justice, that is a healthy part of us. And well, we can’t just let it go. I think a lot of times, well, the psychology people in the world, the religious leaders in the world, the powerful people in the world who supposedly have wisdom, the wise books, they say let go of the resentment. You have the power within you to let it go. I’ve heard this one. I remember hearing it a long time ago and thinking it was clever until I thought about it more, and then I hated it. Resentment is like swallowing poison and hoping the other person dies, hoping the person who you feel resentment for dies. But actually, it’s killing you. The resentment is killing you.
Well, no, because it’s not like swallowing poison because the cause of the resentment is not me swallowing resentment. The cause of the resentment is the violations that happen. The trauma and the resentments are part of the process of healing, but it doesn’t do any good at all to displace our resentments onto the wrong people, onto innocent victims. Yet some people go on throughout their whole lives blaming and holding resentment toward people who never did anything to them. And that’s, well, society, families, they love that.
Look around. All these people who hate someone else, hate other people who they don’t even know. They don’t know anything about them and often don’t want to know anything about them. Because if they learned more about these people who they resented and hated, often they would find out that these people maybe are perfectly nice people. Maybe they’re a lot more like us than we realize.
So now let’s get into appropriate resentments. Feeling resentments toward the people who actually harmed us, the people who directly caused us the pain, screwed us up, messed us up, twisted our psyche, violated us, traumatized us repeatedly. Often I think of my parents. It’s like just how it was trauma on top of trauma, on top of rejection, on top of denial, on top of abandonment, on top of anger. When I expressed anything, it was like, well, a lot of piled up things that would leave anybody resentful. And yet my job was to let it go.
And really all this “let it go” stuff, let go of resentment, really what it means from the perspective of the traumatizer and the traumatizing family system, the traumatizing society and all their allies, the traumatizing religions, what letting it go really means is dissociate. Dissociate, split off from the feelings, split off from the anger, push it down, be a guru of love and peace, and love your enemies who have destroyed your psyche. And that’s not healthy. It’s not healthy to let people off the hook for what they did to you until you’ve healed from it. And even after you’ve healed from it, well, it’s not your job to let them off the hook. Your job is to heal. Their job is to heal themselves.
Let it go, forgive. Well, I have a bunch of videos on forgiveness. It’s like, no, no. If anything, forgiveness is a consequence of the healing process. Maybe if it feels appropriate after the healing has been done. But the key is, and this is the key answer to my question, or the key answer to the question that I’m having posed to me here: how do I let go of resentment? The answer is to heal the trauma. The answer is not to let go of the resentment, brush it aside, bury it, push it away, or negate it, or tell yourself you’re wrong for feeling resentment. No, you’re right for feeling appropriate resentment. It is healthy, it is appropriate. You need that resentment. That resentment is a little wakeup call that says, look, look inside. Where does it come from? Trace it, study your history, figure out what happened to you, figure out why you are resentful.
Often there’s more resentment inside, and it’s not easy. It’s not easy to feel resentment. I can understand why someone would want to let it go, make it go away. It can be debilitating, can be debilitating socially to be resentful of people in power. They will harm you, they will reject you, they will maybe smear your bad name. They will lie, they will deny everything. Well, you can’t do those things. You can’t deny if you want to heal. If you want to heal, meaning if you want to reclaim the wholeness of yourself and be able to mature and develop and have a connection with the best part of yourself, if you want to love yourself when people traumatize you and you don’t heal from it, and the only way you can survive is to split off from it and forget it, or split off from your feelings and have it seep out in all sorts of different ways, you can’t love yourself in the parts of you that are traumatized.
You have been denied access to self-love, and your resentment is the self-loving part of you screaming out and crying out to be seen and to be known.
Now, is there an easy answer for this? Is there a five-minute cure for trauma? Is there a way to convert this resentment into sorrow so by the end of this video, by the end of this day, by the end of this week, you can work it out and be happy and whole again? You can once again fit into your troubled system, you can get along with your traumatizer, perhaps you can feel normal and function well? No, it doesn’t. It’s not that easy. A lot of times it’s the exact opposite, especially with people who have been more traumatized. Bringing this stuff up, it’s raw energy. All that stuff that was pushed down that had no choice but to be pushed down so you could survive. We could survive. I could survive.
To bring it up, it’s bringing up raw life force, but there’s a lot of negative feelings attached to it. Things that others don’t like. It can be very confusing and hard to fit in. It can be hard to find allies in this crazy world where everybody says let go of resentment. Well, how do you find people who say you’re doing the right thing?
I think that’s part of why it’s so hard for me to make these YouTube videos, why it’s so stressful for me. Especially after I make the video and I say, did I really say such things? Did I really criticize the family system and the world so much? It’s like I have to go out into this crazy world too and survive, and it’s very, very stressful. And yet it’s part of what motivates me to come here because I think of myself when I was younger and had resentments against my traumatizer and found no allies. Even the people who supposedly love me the most, who weren’t my traumatizer, supported my traumatizer. It was very confusing and very difficult.
And you know, I did a lot of trying to let go of resentment and going back to my mom, who did horrible repeated things to me. And I don’t even need to get into all that awful stuff, but going back to her and loving her and hoping she would love me and deluding myself that she loved me. But then she just treated me worse again, and it was like back in the merry-go-round of this crazy system of me not loving myself and selling myself out to be a screwed-up child in a family system that was still screwed up and would never change, and me feeling so unfulfilled.
So how to heal resentments? Well, for me, a massive amount of journaling, getting away from my family of origin in a really big way, and not listening to all their entreaties to come back in. I did go back in many times, and it just made it worse for me. Really, really getting away, figuring out how to survive in the crazy world that we live in as an adult, enough to make my money, to become financially independent so I didn’t need to rely on my family system. Getting geographically away from them, building my skill set so I can function in the world, reading a lot of psychology—99% of it being garbage—but finding a few writers out there early on who kind of supported these ideas: Alice Miller and Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, etc., etc. And all the while journaling more and journaling more and journaling more, and listening to myself and self-reflecting and finding any allies who were supportive. All of them being outside of my family, not all of them being the healthiest people in the world, but some of them got what I was saying and said, “Your mother’s nuts. Your dad, he sounds like a complete creep.” And like, yeah, these are the people, these are the people who I need as allies. Most of them were pretty limited along the way, but they did help.
And then finding some better allies and better allies and building my alliance with myself and getting away from alcohol and drugs and other dissociative things that made me feel good and set me on a delusional path, not into the real feelings of me loving my body, treating my body well. Well, and doing it for a long, long time, analyzing my dreams, looking at what was coming up from the palette of my unconscious, studying it, analyzing what it meant. Yes, having some interaction with my parents, you know, along the way back when in my 20s and 30s, and studying those interactions that I had with them and learning, ah yes, I could see why I would really be resentful of these people. Because the more I grew, the more perspective I got on why I felt the way that I did, and I could relate to myself more and love myself more.
And now in my 50s, have I let…
Go of resentment. Well, I didn’t let go of anything, but I sure have processed a lot. I would say I’m a lot less resentful because I’m so much more healed.
And then through this, well hopefully through a video such as this, I can be an ally for others on their healing process.
[Music]