Hello Everyone! Have a great day 🙋🏻
Resentment is a common feeling. We, all must have harboured at some point in life. It is a feeling of anger or a sense of bitterness after an unfair incident, an event that has happened to us. It may happen very often in our everyday lives. Resentment can be felt from as simple as rude behaviour or unfair comment from a friend to as large as issues like racism or religion.
The immediate reaction after we feel resentful is an emotion of anger,hurt, pain, annoyance or even shame. Very often, we get affected so much that we start to harbour a feeling of revenge. The emotion gets trapped when we are unable to express our feeling of bitterness after the hurtful experience. It may come from either a true situation or a misunderstood situation of injustice.
How emotion of resentment get trapped in us from different situations?
Any kind of tense relationship maybe between partners, a colleague with a boss, or between friends.
*A feeling of fear or avoidance to confront the person or similar situation.
*A feeling of regret, low or dejected.
*Continuously ruminating the strong emotion against the incident, person or experience.
- In a normal healthy individual, though there is an immediate feeling of pain, hurt, annoyance after the experience, you tend to overcome the feeling by letting go. Thinking it as a part and parcel of life or just an unfair or bad experience in life. Moving away from the negative situation or the negative person.
- Or maybe, thinking that we have misinterpreted the person or the situation.
But the real problem arises when it started to affect our mental health. The resentful feeling continues to ride over us in spite of trying to let go of or trying to move on from the person or the experience. We started to develop a fear, negative attitude for every similar situation or person in our lives. It affects slowly our every perception of reality. We start looking at every situation with a negative outlook. We start having fear and fail to trust people. It becomes difficult to hope for positive outcomes. We, finally land up in the hands of a Therapist or counsellor.
So, the simple approaches, how we can help ourselves get over it.
1.Practice self-compassion: Compassion over self is a key to all kinds of negative situations, experiences or persons, we encounter in life. Holding self-compassion helps us to give a sense of security which is important. It helps us to restore our self-identity, self-worth which otherwise have the fear of losing if resentment is held up for a long time. Self-compassion helps us to overcome the feeling of lowness or less.
2.Being empathetic: We deal with people every day. There are both good and bad experiences of people with us. So, trying to empathize and understand the other person’s perspective or the circumstances which influence the behaviour will surely reduce the feeling of resentment. Many times, we may have misunderstood or the person who did it may not have realised that it can be hurtful.
3.Practice Gratitude: Practising gratitude and thankfulness for everything, everyone we have in our life is important. It gives us a sense of security and wholeness. So, unfair treatment or unfair incident can be overlooked with ease as they hold hardly any value to the beautiful life we lead. If we focus on how privileged and fortunate we are in life, harbouring resentful feelings look just meaningless.
Thanks for reading !
Blessings and much love to all 💐