How to Become Less Resentful | Being Well Podcast 164

hello and welcome to being well i'm forrest hansen if you're new to the podcast this is where we explore the practical science of lasting well-being and if you've listened before welcome back this will come as no shock to you but nobody lives a perfect life even in the course of lives that are generally pretty good we all pick up our share of bumps and bruises many of these arise through our relationships with other people and when we're hurt in our relationships it's normal to experience resentment we don't talk about resentment very much it doesn't get named as an emotion that frequently we're more likely to talk about anger or fear or sadness but resentment is a kind of combination of all of these difficult feelings and for my money resentment and bitterness causes as much harm to our relationships and to our own well-being as any other emotion that's what we're going to be exploring today where resentment comes from what it does and what we can do about it to help us do that i'm joined today as usual by dr rick hansen so dad how are you doing today i'm good and i'm thrilled that we're getting at this topic yeah i think that it is an awesome topic i'm really glad that we're going to be exploring it today um as we were just talking about a little bit before we started the the recording going it's such a contributor and it can be seen in so many ways socially in terms of our relationships our politics and just a lot of other things that are going on in the world right now but before we kind of get into that i just want to give you a quick reminder about my youtube channel actually it's youtube.com c forrest hansen and if you prefer to watch these episodes rather than listen it's actually uploaded over there right now and i've dropped a link to it in the description of today's podcast also you can find us on social media we're on all of the platforms particularly at being well podcast on instagram and finally if you'd like to receive more content from rick you can subscribe to his just one thing newsletter which offers a free practice every week for greater well-being and i've also included a link to that in the description of today's podcast so okay i described resentment in the introduction in the kind of general way and i think everyone listening probably basically understands what we're talking about here but i'd love your own take on it and maybe particularly the functions that you think that it serves for us psychologically when i look at resentment and i am very capable of feeling resentful uh it seems to have these four key elements to it one you feel injured you're wounded something happened to you right and second there's typically a dimension in which you were wronged there was an injustice we don't resent the rainstorm that ruined our picnic we don't we don't particularly resent um things that happen that are just bad luck they don't seem like an injustice of some kind and then third resentment is embedded socially it's a social emotion we don't resent the tree that fell into our backyard we resent the fact true story that our neighbor refused for six months to take care of it and take responsibility for you know what his property had done to us and then last there's an aspect in it and last it's self-referential we take it personally so we have these four elements and people can think about someone that they have a difficult relationship with in which there's some aspect i should say also of anger resentment is a kind of anger it may un have underlying hurt in it but there's definitely some anger there in which there's a sense of okay i was mistreated in a way that is unjust by somebody that i'm taking personally and in some senses i'm angry about that's the crux of the matter and while being a completely normal emotion resentment to quote the saying is like taking poison and then waiting for others to die people can marinate in and focus on and be preoccupied with and ruminate a lot about the dirt that others did them or the ways in which others are not pulling their weight in a way that they should let's say and we resent that it's always up to us to vacuum the carpet properly or to put the dishes away correctly and others are falling short of some standard that we have and that preoccupation though with the wound in which we're seething it's internally directed uh there's a term in psychology basically about internally directed uh problematic emotions or externally directed problematically problematic emotions and resentment is an internalizing uh kind of emotion typically even if it somewhat leaks out so there we are seething away thinking somehow that that will affect other people but in fact they have no idea or they don't care or they've moved on right and they're not gonna die as it were or experience any other form of justice just because you're resenting them yeah totally and i think that alongside that inside of resentment there's often this feeling of helplessness that you've kind of described during that introduction there there's the feeling that maybe somebody else should have done something somebody should have stepped in to prevent this injustice from happening a lot of the time we have a lot of resentments around systemic problems for that reason uh when we're just one individual operating inside of a larger system it's really hard to affect change inside of it and that can lead people to feel really passive and and helpless and like nails rather than hammers to use our kind of typical agency metaphor that we lean on on the podcast a lot also kind of alongside that i think of it as being associated with repressed emotion um something bad happens to us and when i think of just walk through kind of the times where i felt really resentful about something i feel like somebody did something to me i was victimized in some way something was unfair um whatever happened i just i didn't like it and the real resentment part of it comes in when i feel that i'm not able to fully express how bad the thing was to the other person and feel at land to them i'm not able to kind of get my side of the story told maybe inside of the social group where somebody's saying that out force did this bad thing or whatever um and sometimes it arises when our kind of fear response or maybe my fear response in this case cuts off my ability to express myself effectively in the moment where somebody comes at me with something or something bad happens to me and it causes me to like freeze or it causes me to withdraw and run away which i've talked about on the podcast a little bit in the past and that gets in the way of my ability to communicate my emotional experience and and be heard by other people and that kind of like clamming up of the emotion often evolves from fear and sadness and vulnerability into anger and resentment and emotions that are kind of more like aggressive they're more they're more stabbing in nature toward other people as opposed to those kinds of softer emotions that maybe we're just feeling inside of ourselves how do you find that feeling hurt or let down you know left behind something like that left out those softer feelings um how does that develop the add-on of that angry aggrieved sometimes vengeful resentment yeah it's a great question we've talked about anger a lot on the podcast and there are sort of different theories about anger some people like to refer to anger as being a secondary emotion i'm kind of of two minds about that but the basic idea is that anger is normally covering some other emotional experience that it's not so much that we're angry it's that we're hurt or that we're scared or that we're really sad and the anger is bubbling up as a kind of protective defensive emotion that moves us into action out in the world and because of that anger generally inspires our feeling of agency um and i think that the removal of it of agency the removal of the experience that like i can do something in my life and i can change this issue is again a big part of resentment and psychologically we just really want to move into agency a lot of the time i think so i think that that's part of the reason that it tends to kind of bubble up transformatively for me if i have a hard time just kind of sitting and being sad about something um i'm much more likely to move into resentment around it or if it's a situation where i feel like i really can't express out that emotion to the person who is making me feel resentful toward them and that's that's a real recipe for resentment for me i think people who have a lot of power in society let's say maybe are less likely to experience resentment they might be irritated about something and i'm thinking a little bit about myself frankly as someone who could be irritated about something or i could have a critical judgment that other people should raise their game they should try harder or something like that uh but that's really different than resentment and i wonder if part of what's really central to resentment and this is where i can tap into experiences i had when i was younger and i had less power i was more one-down going through school in which we feel that others are lording it over us in some way or they got away with something yeah i think that's a great phrase they got away with something i think that's a major characteristic of resentment experiences yeah and then the anger starts to really come it moves from simply you know being irritated or critical or hurt not saying those are the greatest not saying they're bad either just right there but where does it move into this sense of grievance being aggrieved you know we tend to not resent people who have less status or power than we do we tend to resent people who use their higher status they cheat they get away with something they win the game because they lied or they snuck in something or they bribed the umpire i have no idea what right anyway that i think that's really interesting to reflect on we're going to definitely talk about what to do about it i'm sure but i think just exploring it because you know resentment is one of those emotions or experiences experience altogether uh because there's a cognitive aspect you think a standard was violated right there was an injustice and there's definitely a sense of taking it personally and then there's the wound of it and then there's the anger around it but with all that it tends to get very congealed very knotted up it's like a tightly knotted knot that tends to resist close inspection and therefore us trying to unpack it you know tease apart the threads of the experience of resentment i think it'd be really helpful to people you know what do you think was the standard that was really violated here how bad is or was the injury and can you accept it can you feel it doesn't mean liking it and can you be aware of the social context the framing and can you be aware of ways that you take it personally you think maybe they did it on purpose or they were morally negligent in ways that you take personally and can you be aware of maybe some softer feelings underneath the righteous anger there's a righteousness in the anger as well right so this unpacking of these five elements i think can actually be freeing for people yeah before we go into the kind of what to do about it part of the conversation which you're already starting to sort of lead us into here i want to spend a little bit of time talking about two sides of the coin and the costs of resentment and then potentially some positive aspects that can be associated with what we typically consider a pretty negative emotion i think it's good to spend some time unpacking both of those because it can give us a sense of why we're doing what we're doing in terms of the interventions so starting with the first one what are some of the maybe less obvious costs associated with resentment wow well for one you're preoccupied with the wound i think of it a little bit like eating a pretzel having a cold sore and eating a pretzel in which accidentally some chunk of salt lands on the cold sore and yet there's something in us that wants to keep poking that cold sore with our tongue and i think that's something about resentment we keep returning to the hot coal and there's this saying rooted in ancient buddhism that getting angry at others and i'll just paraphrase it being resentful toward others is like throwing hot coals with bare hands both people get burned so you're if you think of it where's your attention focused it's focused on the wound it's focused on the injury the wrong that was done you and that itself is going to be typically a painful experience it's of course really important i know we'll talk about this to sort out uh the appropriateness of recognizing injustice and standing up for yourself and not just giving others a pass because you don't want to be resentful and you know really honoring ways in which and being self-respecting and being an ally to yourself if you've truly been mistreated no doubt about that but uh to carry around a preoccupation a continual return to the topic of how they did you dirt and got away with it uh that's really right there alone is going to be painful and then second um it creates costs and issues interpersonally i think about situations in which i've had maybe long-term relationships or been in times you know maybe even in my family where in the back of my mind was some resentment of your mom let's say over something or other and i could compartmentalize it but it was there and it cast a shadow right it limited what the relationship could be particularly since it wasn't really talked about at the time later we've talked about a lot of things so i think that's the second cost you know it costs us in our relationships and i think you said something really beautiful too it's it's reinforcing given the brain's negativity bias velcro for bad experiences teflon for good ones it reinforces that sense of immobilization uh they got away with it nothing you could do about it you're helpless and and there's that kind of passive seething that is so characteristic of resentment which reinforces a view of yourself as someone that the world does to uh that you and you can't do anything about it which again it makes me want to underline the point that the truth is the world does to us in a lot of ways and some some of us much more than others and much more unjustly so you know there's a place for recognizing how the world does it to you but then at the end of the day you have to ask yourself if i'm marinating in resentment who is that hurting most and is it actually bringing justice to those who have wronged me no yeah totally no i think those are all really really important points kind of associated with that idea of being trapped in a stuff is happening to me rather than me becoming active viewpoint of course inside of the context where yes socially many people are done to in ways that are both truly horrible and that they have very very little influence over and that's what some of the you know great social movements of our time are really aimed at is reclaiming that sense of agency and that experience of agency which is so important then kind of alongside that with resentment i have this really individualist viewpoint that might have been inherited from you dad i know that you certainly carry this one around as well we're just just personally like i don't want my inner harmony to be sort of at effect by other people too much or add effect by other people more than i wanted to i don't want somebody to be able to enter my life and like cause me to have a really negative emotional experience of course sometimes that happens with the people we're really close with that's part of the game it's hard to have emotional intimacy without a certain risk of emotional wounding as well obviously but i don't want to give that to just anybody if at all possible like that's a very very um intimate connected vulnerable place to be with another person and i don't want and just anybody to be able to make me feel resentment toward them to kind of paraphrase and steal a line also from from a kind of buddhist psychology i don't want to allow them to invade my mind and remain which is one of my favorite phrases and because of that i try to avoid yeah i i try to avoid too much resentment like holding on to the hot coal too long of course it can be very very challenging to separate from that almost out of that kind of individualist mindset that i hold about my own emotional experience so okay we've named all these things about resentment that makes it um have some cost be a painful experience whatever at the same time i don't know about you but i have met so many people who are so resentful um they're resentful toward their parents about things that happened in their childhood maybe understandably they're resentful toward all of these social forces again maybe understandably they're resentful toward their friends toward their relationships i mean i have people that i've been friendly with where you just have to dig a couple inches beneath the surface in conversation with them and all of a sudden you know 20 resentments just bubble out uh that are held kind of just thinly beneath the surface not even directed at me but just kind of directed at people and the world and everything that's going on out there given that it's such like a painful experience and it has all these costs why do you think people really hold on to their resentments so so strongly i have wondered a lot about that forest um yeah and i want to add one more sticky emotional experience yeah i think and there's one more element to in resentment which is a fixation on the past occasionally it's present centered particularly if they got away with something and i'm in the present bearing the cost of that or in the present because they got away with it now they're one up or they you know they got the award but they really cheated as we were rounding the turn in the race and they got away with it and that success now continues to create benefits for them there is sometimes something about that in the present but a lot it's a preoccupation with the past um i suspect that in terms of our evolution now here i'm going to talk about sociobiology and evolutionary psychology which is always fraught with peril but that said you can imagine in small hunter-gatherer bands of 40 people who live together their whole life that forming resentments toward other bands would be a way to promote group cohesion and mobilize effectively aggressive actions and attitudes toward those other bands and when you have a feeling of resentment that you were done wrong then that can often lead to a righteous feeling of being justified in whatever kind of payback uh you know you're moved toward so i can imagine that resentment and the emotion of it uh really had some you know evolutionary selection pressure on it to develop in us there's a little bit of evidence in even studies on rats that rats can resent others for getting a sweet that they don't get themselves and then they'll be more likely to kind of punish that other rat uh for getting that goodie that they the rat one witnessed rat two getting and rat two is rat one is in human terms mad that they didn't get their share of the cookie and they're gonna take [Music] you know neurological machinery uh in them that's very analogous to our deep motivational emotional machinery from creatures from whom we diverged in the evolutionary pathways you know however many millions of years ago yeah yeah a long time ago uh and you know with a brain the size of i don't know a peanut or something in the head of a rat so uh point is we're pretty vulnerable to that now that's at the group level at the individual level gosh i think of resentment as being you know it motivates us to address injustice when we're mistreated i can imagine some conserved basis for that in evolution i think resentment actually can be a kind of a teacher it flags certain things much like shame can be a kind of teacher or a great sorrow can be a kind of teacher or anxiety can be a kind of teacher but it's where we want to start it's not where we want to finish right also i think in a weird way when you are caught up in resenting it intensifies the feeling of relationship with those who wronged you and often those are family members relatives that's really wow x's i didn't expect you to pull that one out dad that's really interesting i'm gonna think about that one geez attachment yeah it pulls here it pulls your relationship with them kind of into the present when it might be a thing of the past if that kind of makes sense that is really interesting wow yeah it's a weird way to be related still even in a way that feels kind of toxic and self-harming even yeah the mind is a mess that's why i love it i'm not ready i'm not prepared with a reaction because i it's uh we generally gin up kind of a show notes thing before we start talking with different ideas about what we're going to talk about and that one's not in there and uh yeah that was a great that is that is a great point i'm gonna have to really think about kind of how i feel about that but my my initial my like first reaction to it is that i think that that's completely fascinating and i think that you're totally right on um resentment is a way of keeping people alive in our life when maybe they are no longer alive in our life and sure there are good aspects of that normally we're resentful toward people when um they've done bad things to us obviously but there's also and i want to be delicate about this because i'm just shooting from the hip here so take anything that i say here with a grain of salt it's a little bit what you're referring to is almost a little bit similar to trauma bonding where people can develop a kind of attached relationship to those that did really awful things to them and maybe resentment is kind of an unhealthy way of reactivating that bond or it's a way that that trauma bond keeps on sticking around even when in our kind of conscious mind we know that this is not a good thing for us we know that this wasn't a good person for us so wow 10 out of 10 on that one dad i didn't didn't think about that one at all wow thank you um and to be clear we're unpacking resentment here not in a way that quote-unquote blames the victim it's more uh offering ways for people to explore their own experience and see whatever rings true that's always the real measure whatever rings true and so i'll toss out another one here kind of along the same lines that resentment in some ways i think can function as a defense against the grief of irrevocably losing a relationship or changing it irrevocably it's a way to kind of keep that person close to you you know what's the godfather line keep your friends close and your enemies closer there's something about that it's a form of clinging that's a defense against really facing that let's say they really did you wrong and they're not going to be with you anymore or you don't want to be with them anymore and also i think resentment can be a defense against the grief of living with the fact that they're going to get away with it this injustice will not be rectified there's no rectification there's no punishment for them you will not be made whole this loss will not be repaired you will not be repaid you will not be properly recognized the glass shattered and was broken and will never be bended and put back together again ah and there's much of life that lands on us in that way inevitably right and it's it's hard to face it it's ennobling going to the ennobling first truth taught by the buddha of the truth of there is suffering there is unsatisfactoriness there is dukkha in the language of pali early buddhism we will not be made whole and i think there's a way in which holding on to resentment can keep that kind of vulnerable maybe sorrowful surrender to the imperfectibility of life by extension and to the recognition of the lack of a just world the world is simply the world unfolding and we are not sheltered from the storm of bad intentions on the part of other people to connect to that and kind of expand it a little bit um referring to something that i said earlier in the conversation i think that such a huge part of it is the way in which just like you're saying resentment shields us from more vulnerable emotions um a lot of people not everyone but a lot of people have an easier time connecting to anger than to sadness i have an easier time connecting to sadness than to anger it's probably why i don't immediately go into resentment although i'm certainly capable of it but it's not like my emotional experience of choice if you will if you want to think about like you know your drug of choice my drug of choice emotionally is definitely like sadness or anxiety um but some people their drug of choice is anger and part of the reason for that i think is because like it protects them from the sadness and the vulnerable emotions that they're they're not so comfortable feeling um so i think that's another reason that people kind of hold on to their resentment maybe a little bit past its expiration date but talking about that for a second there are healthy aspects to resentment as well or at least aspects of it that maybe we could think of as being healthy to start with there are absolutely people who have a very hard time recognizing when they've been wronged uh they tend not to stick up for themselves they might not be in touch with the healthy aspects of that like strong presence that we think about sometimes when we think about anger and for those people feeling resentment can be really useful in some circumstances for starters it's a really good indicator when you maybe should be pissed about something it's a really good indicator when you're dealing with somebody who maybe you shouldn't trust in the future um so if you are somebody who has who is kind of maybe a little bit more in uh in my camp in terms of leaning on anxiety or sadness more than you lean on anger emotionally resentment can be a really good indicator that maybe there's something out there that like you should actually truly be bothered by oh really good um you know often we resent slights or affronts to our dignity and you're exactly right that there is definitely the indicator value of resentment there's also the indicator value of resentment as in a kind of selfing alert in other words it tells us to pay attention to the degrees to which we feel whole as persons because when we don't feel really whole and nourished and fed from the inside out in healthy ways as persons we tend to get prickly and defensive about our status as selves i'm making that distinction between the totality the body-mind process unfolding over time person you're a person i'm a person but then there's that sense that there's some kind of an entity inside that we want other people to treat well and to think well of and the more that we take care of ourselves as persons the less prickly and uh defensive we are about our self so resenting something might be an indicator for people that it's a good time to look to your own roots and to ask yourself if you're feeding your own roots of helping yourself as a person you made an incredible comment uh before we started recording about how if a person more generally feels happy and content in their life and in good relations let's say with other people they're less vulnerable to acquiring resentment or it you know they might feel it briefly but then it doesn't sink in maybe you could speak more to that in the ways in which resentment might be an indicator that hey you know shoring up your own well-being maybe you listen to some of the back episodes of the podcast you know wouldn't be a bad idea i mean hey great self plug dad i like it i love it might as well might as well promote the back catalog while we're at it no i mean you're you're totally right you paraphrased absolutely correctly for me i i was just i was reading through some stuff when doing prep for this conversation and i just thought about it in my life and man it's been it's so rare for me to feel resentful towards somebody else like we were saying at the beginning when i feel like i have more quote unquote power than they do apply that word however you want to apply it but really even more so than that when i feel successful when i feel good enough when i feel like my life is going pretty well i tend not to have a lot of resentment even toward people where i can go through the catalog of the mind and say yeah maybe this person didn't behave so appropriately yeah maybe this person kind of took advantage of me in this way but there the sharp edge of resentment isn't attached to it to the same degree when i feel like i am enough inside of myself when it doesn't invade you and remain so much exactly totally absolutely it's there but but i'm not bothered by it maybe or it doesn't have those costs that we think about i can acknowledge it intellectually but there's no pain there um when i feel not that way when i feel uh unmoored in my relationships when i feel like i'm in a position of weakness when i feel like my life isn't turning out the way that i kind of wanted it to turn out when i feel that my most recent business thing didn't go so well or my most recent relationship is on the rocks or whatever much easier for me to move into a place of resentment toward the people or places of things or things that i used to have that relationship with and all of a sudden the rolodex comes out in your mind and you start going through all of the instances in the past where somebody did a thing and you didn't like it so much um but just like feeling good enough is such an antidote to all of that at least for me personally you know i i heard this line recently that just blew me mind it was just great uh actually i'll give full credit here it was quoted to me by mark stefanski okay who was a teacher a biology teacher in your high school legendary wonderful person a mindfulness teacher as well particularly for youth and just a great guy he said well rick and i think he was talking about some kind of gardening and garden they were developing a garden project maybe he said bad farmers grow weeds good farmers grow crops great farmers grow soil isn't that a profound teaching and you're speaking to the soil total soil the soil is your soil fertile for the weeds of resentment or is your soil fertile for the seeds of well-being tend to your own garden especially at soil as best you can yeah no i think that's a great point shout out to mark shout out to marin academy my uh my old lovely high school so okay let's move on to the part of the conversation because we're already sort of doing it here where we talk about really working with resentment um and i'll start with an idea and then i would love to get some from you uh because this is really just kind of grounding the whole thing i think that whenever we're trying to change an emotional experience we're having we need to start with what do we want our emotional experience to be actually yeah honestly like authentically deep in our core because we can't change it if we don't prefer something else and a lot of the time we might prefer the resentment like you can only release resentment if you actually don't want to be resentful and there are a lot of different ways in to identifying what else you would prefer to the resentment but kind of like we've been talking about throughout the conversation so far for some people there's a place for feeling resentful maybe right now it's not your season to move on from that emotion maybe it's still serving a function for you maybe it's helping you feel powerful maybe it's just not the right moment to to stop having that experience toward another person um but whatever you do with it you have to kind of start by figuring out inside of yourself what you would rather be feeling is there maybe an easy way into having a feeling of happiness for the success of other people or a way in which you can look back on your relationship with somebody and just as you tally up the problems you can spend a little bit of time thinking about some of the ways in which they were appropriate with you they were okay with you whatever it is maybe it could be that they are actually a horrible person you don't want to feel good about them at all but you don't want them to have that kind of power over you anymore that's a really important one for me and i think for many many people who have you know very legitimate resentments with the behavior of others so anyways starting with what do you actually want to be feeling that's so great and i'll mention a psychological technique that i learned from elsewhere a long time ago that's really powerful and basically what you have people do essentially and you could do it here is first um imagine how you'd like to feel or how you'd like to be and even imagine some of the effects of that on others on yourself take a dozen seconds or a few you know a dozen minutes to imagine that and then alternately imagine the status quo your mo your current modus operandi how you are functioning currently how you're feeling in with regard to this particular thing like in this case resentment so you imagine that and you are aware of and you recognize you imagine the consequences that fan out from that for yourself and for others you do that and then you make just exactly what you're saying a moral choice a fundamental commitment which is an existential choice which would i rather walk down knowing that you might get pulled in one direction or another but at least you know your choice is at least you know what's your north star and usually people choose the higher road i'll call it that but it's not because it's the right road it's because they're aware of both those roads and they make a particular kind of choice so that's a bit of an exercise actually that people can do i think um if i could add to that i'm about resentment and this is definitely things that i do myself when i'm working with my own resentment i'm trying to help myself let's take the higher road is you're helping yourself somewhat disengage from let's say the lower road of resentment and there are three things in particular i think that do help us disengage from it and they all kind of mush together but i'm going to describe them separately as three distinct things one is the element of self-compassion it hurts there was a loss something happened it landed what's that feel like and even unpacking the really softer sometimes younger feelings often with turbocharges resentments about something that's occurred these days is the residue of injustices and wounds and grievances and let downs and betrayals and hurts from others that have happened in previous years so you can kind of sense down to maybe the younger perhaps resentments that underlie the current one okay compassion for yourself second naming the standards that were violated naming the unjustice naming to yourself uh the wrong that was actually done and this can help to make sure that you're not overstating the wrong that was done and it can help you appreciate that maybe something that you resented it's just a matter of cultural preference you had your way you grew up maybe in a certain religion certain culture a certain town to think that some things are self-evidently obviously the right way to be and yet maybe somebody else has just come out of a different culture and to them it's not at all patently obvious that doing certain things is the right way to be or that they should never do other kinds of things and sometimes that happens often what happens though is when you name to yourself the standard the the principle that was violated let's say in a funny kind of way it can almost bring you to peace because there and it it's self-respecting to name to yourself yeah they stole something or yeah they cheated they lied or they were cruel or they were negligent in some way or they took advantage unfairly of something in me some naivete or some power differential maybe in our standing they were a sixth grader picking on a fourth grader something like that you when you name the principle to yourself and you really name it clearly there's some way in which it's freeing and easing and relieving and then the third element that's often the case is the feeling of somehow being let down by others who didn't protect you or didn't step in or didn't levy justice on your behalf on the head of the person who wronged you and being honest about that being in touch with that maybe it's just sort of an assumption that other people should have done something but when you look closely at it you know they couldn't other times you think to yourself yeah the referee blew the call yeah the judge was on the take yeah the fix was in yeah my parents should have seen it a reasonable standard for parents they should have stepped in yeah you know so but you kind of unpack that social dimension so those three reflections were processes self-compassion second naming the injustice the standards the principles the norms that were violated let's say and then also the role of other people that can help us to become less trapped in and invaded by the lower road and therefore freer to walk the higher road that's a great group of practices and techniques that actually if you kind of smush all of them together gets to the next thing that i kind of wanted to dave here which is communication resentment is a great indicator that we have a unresolved communication of some kind there's something inside of us that we have that we haven't expressed directly sometimes that's not the case of course but often what i find particularly in relationships with people who aren't like horrible abusers i'm talking about the resentments that we have toward our friends toward our good enough but imperfect family those kinds of close intimate resentments that often can be the most the most lasting for the reasons that we we said in the beginning how when we are inside of those more intimate relationships with people the emotions that we have attached to them are so much more potent um and resentment can be a clue that there is something that we haven't said to somebody else when i've had the opportunity to authentically name my resentments to other people even if i named them and the person ultimately did not come through if they didn't accept responsibility if they didn't see it the way that i saw it if they continued to be a problematic person almost always nonetheless i felt less resentment at the end of the process than i did at the beginning because kind of like you're saying everything had been made clear oh this is just the way this person is you know this isn't a communication problem this is just their nature and i can kind of like lighten up a little bit about it and then make good choices about whether or not i want to continue to be in relationship with that person alongside that sometimes there's not an opportunity to resolve our communications with other people it's not safe for us to do that with somebody but even if we can't do that sometimes we can make that communication as you've talked about many times on the podcast intra personally essentially inside our own minds you've given a lot of practices related to that writing a letter you never know you're going to send and then you know lighting it on fire consigning it to the universe um walking through a clear communication to another person that you know you're never going to speak but you're like this is the last time that i'm going to think through this in my own head and then i'm going to stop chewing on this bone or talking to other people about it in a way that isn't just trying to fullment social discord you're not just trying to gossip you say to a close friend i really need to get this off my chest and i need to kind of make this communication to you the way that i want to to this person where i really can't um you know it's lovely to have friendships like that not all of us do but if you do sometimes you can lean on them in that way and that can be actually a very very fulfilling very rewarding experience in her personally with another person i think tues it's honest to take a look at the social function of resentment in ongoing relationships and to be honest i can recognize him myself and maybe i'm not alone here that by maintaining a certain compartment in my mind that's resentful the resentment room when i put various things in there related maybe to a particular person that it makes me feel one up and so a i need to take less responsibility for their grievances or even how dare they resentments toward me i can hardly believe that they have the audacity to think there's anything they could resent about me given everything i represent about them right so it lets me off the hook there and um it is a kind of preemptive strike kind of like i'm implying that whatever they um you know are holding us accountable for or feeling that we're falling short of i don't have to pay so much attention to because i have this backlog of grievances and i think sometimes people wear their grievances like a badge of honor they hold on to them we could even talk about being really honest about the social function of resentment in structural societal kinds of ways because one of the most powerful ways to deny or dismiss or reign a preemptive strike upon people who have legitimate grievances because they've been held down in society by people who belong to your group even if you're not doing it yourself one of the most powerful ways to preemptively strike against the legitimacy of their complaints is to cultivate fixate upon even manufacture grievances and resentments of your own and we certainly see that i think frankly to name it in certain i'll call it white supremacist circles to really invent resentments and grievances as a way to avoid addressing the incredibly legitimate and understandable resentments and grievances of people of color and other people who've been really put down structurally and historically in generationally consequential kinds of ways totally full agreement um i think that that's a great articulation of it and it's just an indicator to me of how powerful resentment is that if you look at the political landscape in the united states and you know this is a different podcast i mean you know we could do being well after dark one diet where you and i just you know spitfall about this kind of stuff it's a very different podcast though but i mean it's just such an indicator where where resentment politics has become just the most powerful force in politics if you look at the political landscape over certainly the last four years but really you know significantly longer time scale than that which just tells you that resentment is an emotion that is incredibly potent and really causes people to move into action in different kinds of ways often with as you know we've experienced from time to time pretty disastrous results so but transitioning out of you know forest political commentary for a minute i would love it actually doubt if you took a second to kind of just talk about meta because you are you know a buddhist practitioner you are a buddhist teacher yourself um aside plugging our material some more why not rick offers a wednesday night meditation group it's totally free it's drop in it's over zoom i'll include a link to it in the podcast episode as well if you like the podcasts and you're into the practice of meditation you'll probably be into that as well and it's just like a really cool little community that you've built over there so anyways okay meta for resentment well meta is a word in pali and language of early buddhism and it's not buddhist that is translated routinely as loving kindness the root of the word is friendliness and i like that quality in it friendliness seeing you know basic benevolence a basic decency toward other people that meets them with an open hand and an open heart and an open mind rather than you know the closed hand of a fist the closed heart of prejudice and the closed mind of you know rigidity and turning them into its rather than those and so it's interesting that it's challenging to deliberately bring a feeling of friendliness if you will or benevolence broad-mindedness to someone who is truly wronged you it's really hard to do that what can be done is to start with compassion for yourself in the ways that it's landed on you second a wider view and this is really freeing with regard to people who truly have wronged us is to see them without giving them a moral past but seeing them as part of a vaster larger network of causes and conditions that led them to punch you in the stomach that day all the things that launched that person almost like a cruise missile four generations ago and all the causes and conditions that have come forward when we open it wider like that we tend to feel less resentful and then that can third move us into some sense of compassion for them maybe compassion for some inner level in them you might have to go very very inner or very very young to get to something you can feel compassion for they probably wouldn't have done that if deep down inside they were not suffering in some way so maybe you can find some compassion for them doesn't mean you agree with them doesn't mean you approve of them you haven't yet moved to menta you have not yet moved to loving kindness or simple friendliness but you're moving in that direction and then you might basically come to a place that i think is a very beautiful place to come to where regardless of what the others are and what others are doing there is a kind of unconditional will a kind of unconditional uh benevolence or or a blessing orientation to put it in a certain framework that doesn't have to be religious but a kind of field that radiates from you of goodwill of wishing others well that can include wishing also that they experience justice for the sake of wishing even more others well and for the sake of recognizing that it actually can serve people to go through a justice process for their own sake long term so you you sit in a kind of wishing well a kind of fundamental friendliness that's like radiating i think wi-fi from a base station other people move through it but your radiation your radiance your rippling out you know your fundamental attitude maybe if only for yourself because it's freeing and feels good and it disentangles you from others that kind of fundamental attitude of goodwill is not contingent on what others do your actions may be contingent on them you might report them to the police or file a lawsuit or complain to a licensing board or refuse to see them at christmas or the holidays ever again whatever it might be or tell everybody you know about what happened you might do those things but without ill will in your heart without hatred invading your mind and remaining without it corroding you uh without that side of the force you know taking you over and corrupting you if you will so yeah and so you're in that attitude including for your own sake irrespective of what they do and it's really actually a beautiful place um in a very genuine way you can just look at someone who has wronged you and while seeing them clearly while pursuing justice while taking action while protecting yourself while taking care of yourself as a person you look at them and you just kind of shake your head and go wow wow you want to stay away from condescension you want to stay away from subtleties of disdain and contempt but you look at them and you go wow you know i don't know all of what led you to do that and wow you know i'm so sorry that it's like that to be you and again like i said stay away from disdain and contempt but there's something about it that's that's pretty compassionate and and you wish them well anyway that's a pretty good place in which to sit thanks for inviting me into that i kind of blathered on there maybe a little bit but it's a deep deep thing to be able to find that fundamental freedom no i i thought i thought it was great and it really gets us into something that i just want to touch on a little tiny bit at the end here because i think that it's an important umbrella for the whole conversation and it's a point that's really central to what you were saying about meta a second ago you can have meta or you know love and kindness in your heart which includes in a generalized sense all beings without excusing people's behavior and that's a really really key distinction just because you let go of your resentment doesn't mean that you forgive the person for what they did and one of the things that we talked about in the book resilient which we wrote together is this idea of disentangled forgiveness versus full pardon forgiveness it's an idea that you've really workshopped through the course of just your writing you've written a lot on it and to very very quickly summarize that when we forgive somebody in a disentangled way it doesn't mean that we think that they're a great person it doesn't mean that we fully necessarily forgive them for what happened i mean it doesn't even mean that we stop being bothered by it on some level but we want to remove the sharp edges from it we want to kind of have the hands up and just go i don't want to worry about this anymore in the way that i have been worrying about it i don't want to think about it anymore in the way that i've been thinking about it again returning to the line we've said five or six times so far i don't want it to be stuck in my mind i don't want it to stay there and that's the power of disentangled forgiveness it's it's the universal shrug when you kind of come to terms with yourself and you realize look i'm gonna do what i can out in the world to make things right including if that means as you were saying talking to the licensing board or not going to christmas dinner with the family anymore and then i'm going to move on and i'm going to live my life as well as i can and i don't want this person to have power over me anymore so i'm going to forgive them in the manner that i need to in order to get to that point and that could be a very very small matter you know that does not have to include a lot um and i just think that that's so important here because it's easy to get kind of sucked into this idea of well of course i'm still resentful because what they did was bad and it's like well yeah what they did was bad but i don't want you to still be suffering over it and that's like the critical distinction that's so clear for us and uh it's like we give them power over us right bad enough that they wronged us in the first place really bad on us that we give them the power to keep wronging us in our mind again and again and again as we rehash it yeah and that and that preoccupation is the killer and that's really what we're trying to avoid in this whole conversation that we've been having today on resentment so i think that that's a great place to leave it um i think we explored this topic in pretty good detail if you have any questions about it you can reach us at contact being well podcast dot com and today we explored resentment together resentment is a kind of interesting emotion because it brings together qualities of many other emotions often it's based on a feeling of anger directed at another person which you know may or may not have sadness or fear that resides underneath it resentment is also a social emotion it's something we direct at other people we don't generally resent a storm that comes along and ruins our day but we might resent a person that does the same thing it also often tends to involve a feeling of mistreatment or injustice that somebody else got away with something that they shouldn't have and maybe that somebody anybody should have stepped in to help us out because of this resentment is also associated with passivity and helplessness somebody did something to us that we didn't want them to do and there wasn't a whole lot that we could do about it in return we then went on to talk about some of the costs that are associated with resentment rick semi quoted a old saying which is that resentment is kind of like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die we're having this really negative emotional experience inside of ourselves and most of the time the other person is either totally unaware of it or they really don't care that much resentment also tends to keep us stuck in the past and prevent us from moving forward it can also stop us from repairing and reconciling with other people particularly if the feeling of resentment that we're having is covering over more vulnerable emotional states like sadness or fear sometimes not always but sometimes particularly if the resentment is directed at people that actually are fairly good people that we in general have a pretty comfortable relationship with and of course be thoughtful protect yourself through all of this use good judgment but sometimes if we can access those more vulnerable softer emotions with that other person it can actually create a path to repair and reconciliation that might not be available to us if we just stay in resentment and anger then i kind of closed that section by mentioning my very individualist viewpoint where i didn't want other people to have the power over me that resentment implies like i said a second ago often when we're resentful towards somebody else they really don't care about it and they're making us feel pretty bad and they're not experiencing a lot of cost and return and i don't like that i don't want somebody to have that much power over me particularly the power to experience what i experience as a pretty unfun emotion we then talked for a little while about how even though there are all those costs people are really attached to resentment anyway and i asked rick why he thought that was he gave a couple of different answers one of them totally blew my mind and it was that resentment can kind of keep us in relationship with somebody who maybe we're not in relationship with any longer and even if this person was a negative person in our life even if they caused us to experience a lot of suffering sometimes there's a part of us that still has an emotional attachment to that person and releasing our resentment toward them might also be kind of like releasing the last thread of connection that we have with that individual we spent a little while talking about some of the healthy aspects that can be associated with resentment particularly if you're somebody who doesn't naturally move into anchor resentment can be a real indicator that yeah something actually bad happened here and it's really appropriate for you to be upset about it it can also let us know when we have unresolved communications about something and yeah sometimes we can resolve those communications with other people but sometimes it's not safe to do that and when that's the case it can be helpful to kind of find other ways to make that communication even if it's just inside your own mind finally we close by talking about working with resentment and i led off by saying that one of the important parts of that process is identifying the emotional experience we would rather be having because it's really easy for people to say oh i don't want to be resentful anymore i don't want to feel this but a lot of the time kind of deep inside ourselves we really do actually want to be feeling this we want to hold on to the resentment for all of the reasons that we explored during the episode so a critical first step is opening to some other kind of emotional experience and this really connects to two other things we talked about meta and disentangled forgiveness meta is a kind of loving kindness a warm hardenedness directed outward theoretically toward all beings but you can kind of choose how you want to frame that and choose you know who you feel authentic about directing that kind of warm loving emotion toward then with disentangled forgiveness we're not extending somebody else a full pardon we're not saying that what they did with was okay we're not saying that we want to be in relationship with them again in the future we're just saying that we don't want to be thinking about this anymore and we don't want the other person to have that kind of power over us and moving into that form of forgiveness where you don't fully forgive them but you forgive them enough to move on with your life can actually be a really powerful stance from which to operate if you've been enjoying the podcast we'd really appreciate it if you would take a moment to subscribe to it through the platform of your choice and maybe even leave a rating and a positive review it really does help us out also if you'd like to support the podcast in other ways you can find us on patreon we're at patreon.com being wild podcast and for the cost of just a couple cups of coffee a month you can support the show and you'll receive a bunch of bonuses in return finally a few things that we mentioned during the episode rick has a newsletter it's called just one thing and each week he shares a freely offered wonderful practice aimed at improving your well-being i think that the newsletter is something on the order of 200 000 subscribers people really love it and it is a wonderful content offering i've included a link to it in the description of today's podcast also you can find us on social media we're at being well podcast on instagram and rick and i both have our own individual accounts on instagram and facebook that's it for today's episode until next time thanks for listening

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 12,877

Keywords: resentful, resentfull, resentment, Psychology, mental health, mind, brain, therapist, psychologist, being well, being, well, rick hanson, forrest hanson, just one thing, psychological, therapy, mindful, compassion, mindfulness, confident, confidence, resilient, calm, anxiety, anger, intimacy, intimate, forgive, forgiveness, family, meditation, trauma, rick, hanson, self-help, self, help, relationships, relationship, love, brain science, science, fear, Buddhism

Id: W43ddIQKrAM

Length: 64min 20sec (3860 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 26 2021