While there are many reasons why couples struggle in their marriage, there is one particular problem that sneaks its way into a relationship. It’s a sneaky issue that slowly sets about eroding the quality of the marriage over time, eventually leading to marriage and family fragmentation.
I speak here of ‘resentment’. Resentment can masquerade in a range of behaviours such as boredom, sexual withdrawal, emotional detachment, anger, just to name a few.
Nelson Mandela once said that “resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die from it.” Yet always, always, always it is the one who habours resentment who suffers most.
Similar to anger, resentment can give a person a sense of power and control over themselves and those around them. Ironically though, this person is actually giving their power over to others, particularly to the one they resent.
What is resentment?
Resentment is a form of anger where people hold onto an old feeling of hurt caused by someone who “wronged” them sometime in the past.
Resentment is made up of thoughts and feelings that are quite painful to maintain, and typically work against what the person is actually wanting for themselves in life.
The person who harbours resentment has a kind of mind chatter, i.e. repetitive thoughts, that keeps them locked in a place of suffering. It’s mind set where they have a recording in t their mind, of all the wrong things that someone did to them, playing the same recording over and over and over again in their mind.
When a person carries with them a strong sense of injustice that has never been properly addressed, the memory of that injustice can be held firmly by that person, thereby making it difficult for them to move on in their life.
In a marriage, one of the biggest problems when a spouse harbours resentment, is that it often leads to a withdrawal of sexual intimacy, it creates disconnection, they develop a bottling up of sadness, anger or disappointment, all of which lead to a reinforcement of the feelings of resentment. The end result is marriage and family disharmony and/or breakdown.
Seven strategies to help people move on from resentment
1. Practice self-awareness where you gain insight and understanding of how you experience resentment. Awareness is simply information, and information empowers a person through greater choice of how to be in your life and marriage.
2. Gain a sense of how resentment actually affects you. It can be helpful to get the feedback from people who are close to you. Those close to you get to experience you in a way that you don’t experience yourself. So they have some important information about you for you. Be open to it even though you may not like what you hear.
3. Lesson the impact the resentment has on your marriage. Do some activities with your partner that may soften the negativity that has been building with your partner.
4. Don’t allow the resentment and wounds to fester. This is where you challenge yourself. All those negative thoughts, beliefs and hurt feelings that you carry and hold against your partner. Talking with your partner in an open, non-defensive or aggressive manner seeking a shared understanding of each other’s experience is an important step in healing the festering wounds.
5. Forgiveness – a life that is unhampered by past hurts, wrongs and recycled anger. This is the big one and very confusing to get ones head around.
Sometimes people have suffered so much that they just can’t forgive or don’t want to forgive. Forgiveness breaks the cycle of pain, both to yourself as well as to your partner and other family members.
It’s time to stop being in the role of victim, you do have choice here.
Someone once said somewhere, that “forgiveness is not forgetting – it’s about choosing to remember a hurtful past in a new way.
2 big questions to think about…
- What does ‘forgiveness’ really mean?
- How the hell do you do forgiveness?
There seem to be many different takes on what forgiveness is, but essentially it is the letting go of old baggage. The baggage may be made up of hurts, wrongs, injustice, inequality to name just a few factors that people carry with them.
It’s through the letting go of baggage where you gain the ability to heal from their wounds and move forward in their life. It also allows those closest to the person, i.e. their partner and children, an opportunity to have a loving and happy relationship with that person.
Forgiveness is not a single act, rather forgiveness is more of an honest perspective on matters as well as a practice or an approach to life.
6. Focus on the things you can control. If you are familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), you will know the ‘Serenity Prayer’ that offers some wisdom for our modern age. A verse in the prayer says “to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
When we devote much of our energy to the things we can’t change, we use up a lot of ourselves, that is, our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy that could be better used elsewhere in advancing our lives and our relationships.
7. Learning to find better ways to think and feel about everything. One of life’s greatest challenges for a person full of resentment is to imagine how their life could be different than it is now without the resentful thoughts and feelings.
Resentment is essentially a habit of deeply-ingrained thoughts and feelings which ultimately work against the person themselves. Habitual thoughts of anger and hurt gain their power over us through repetition, and it takes a certain amount of courage and effort to have an honest look at ourselves and ask the question “is this type of partner and/or parent that I really want to be?”
It’s in our heart’s that we find both our pain and the solution for our pain. It’s time to move on.