Part 3: Resentment, A Slow Poison To The Heart
Mapping Patterns & Uprooting Origins
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In Part 2: Resentment, A Slow Poison To The Heart, I define the complexities and multifaceted layers of resentment. If you did not read it, you may want to before diving into Part 3. In this installment, I address the importance of mapping patterns and potential origin points for the understanding and healing of resentment.
Part 3: Resentment, A Slow Poison To The Heart
Mapping Patterns & Uprooting Origins
Nelson Mandela said,
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of [their] skin, or background, or religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
I invite you to tuck this nugget of wisdom into your heart and join me to explore mapping patterns and the deeper roots of resentment. With this nestled into your awareness, let’s run through a quick recap of the definition of resentment.
Resentment is a complex experience, involving feeling wronged or mistreated by another person, situation, or series of circumstances. It can be described as a combination of anger, bitterness, disgust, disappointment, and disapproval. Some of the triggering factors of resentment are, but not limited too, being ignored, put down, having unrealistic expectations of others, experiencing power imbalances, or feeling like one’s needs are not being met. Resentment creates a wedge to cultivating healthy, emotionally safe and honest relationships. It can be helpful to think of resentment as a dynamic or configuration that cycles in both our individual and collective energy systems.
There is a technique I refer to as emotional mapping that I use when working with clients. During this process, collaborating with the client, together we decode symptoms and patterns of a presenting issue. For example, we can map resentment, among many other issues. This is accomplished through insight inquiry, a method of Depth Hypnosis, asking open ended questions to move deeper to the root of the issue. Resembling Vipassana meditation in action, one can think of the analogy of the onion layers being peeled back in this process.
Mapping allows for the brilliance of the thinking mind to be utilized pointing us near or to the root of the issue. It can be very empowering for a client to piece together their own understanding of the presenting issue in this way. However, while mapping is a very important aspect, it is only one part. We also need to learn how to move past the thinking mind, beyond the cognition to rewire and repattern, and transform resentment.
Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-born Canadian physician and bestselling author who specializes in addiction and childhood development says,
“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and [the child’s] situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created.”
Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past.”
When we map patterns, it is supportive to acknowledge the impact of our world around us and generational influences. For instance, the over-culture and the conditioned parenting styles of previous generations (and even still today) have included ignoring, controlling, spanking, hitting, neglect, name calling, stonewalling, gaslighting and dismissing. These harmful behaviors, normalized in the culture, strongly influence the way we operate in the world and how we relate to our own inner world, to the connection and relationship we have with ourselves. For many, explorative opportunities to know how to be with deeply felt, big emotions in whole, loving and compassionate ways, especially when we felt wronged or hurt, have not existed.
Furthermore, historically, western society has not fostered a kind environment towards openness and healing. Stigma and shame have been threaded into support, therapy, and mental and emotional wellness. While this is slowly shifting, much of the cultural narrative has been rooted and encourages repressing, suppressing, numbing and dissociation in order to cope with the realities of the human life. Understanding the impact of the world around us, the world we grew up in and the way in which we processed and navigated our experiences are helpful tools in mapping and healing, particularly when we are looking at the complex facets of resentment.
Peeling The Onion
Time lining or mapping to the presenting issue, in this case resentment’s origin, often begins with bringing awareness to a situation or time when anger or an intense feeling of frustration was most significantly experienced — when there was an injustice, a mistreatment, even neglect, physically or emotionally. For many, linking back to this time can be buried deep within the subconscious, and yet still operates in present life, driving the way we act, think and behave.
As I stated in Part 2 of this series, an ingredient of resentment is anger, along with bitterness and blame. In my line of work, I am always looking at how someone is in relationship to x, y, z. With resentment, we can look at how we have been in relationship to anger and our understanding of anger. Anger is a natural emotion that we all have had and will continue to have. It is not good or bad. However, the way in which we relate to anger can feel good or bad, and can be healthy or unhealthy. The way in which we express anger can also be healthy or unhealthy. Anger is a strong emotion that when left misunderstood can harden the heart. As we continue to peel the layers of the onion, we begin to understand how the heart becomes poisoned with unresolved anger.
Contrary to how it may feel, especially in the heat of the moment, anger is not considered the primary emotion. It is considered a secondary emotion, meaning that underneath anger are other emotions such as sadness, vulnerability, or powerlessness, like shame, grief and fear. Feeling these primary emotions can be uncomfortable, but more importantly as a small child growing up in a big world these emotions without loving containers to understand them, can be very overwhelming, confusing and quite scary. Devoid of open, compassionately, curious spaces to learn how to be with anger, vulnerabilities, confusion, fear and/or sadness in healthy ways, we learn how to be with them in unhealthy ways.
Robert Augustus Masters, PhD, an integral psychotherapist, relationship expert, and spiritual teacher, explains that anger is an ally and a guardian of our boundaries. When we understand how to work with anger, we can learn to see anger as a pause point, a literal red flag that something else is going on underneath the anger. The red flag signals a need, that has usually gone unmet or is even unknown. Bringing awareness to the way we are in relationship to the anger, and thus with ourselves, can offer insights into how we were taught to be in relationship with our needs, and with the connection to ourselves. When the inner red flag goes up it is extremely valuable information. As adults this information presents itself in the reactions we have to external situations, highlighting how our relationships are truly such wonderful teachers.
A need, especially an emotional need, that is not being addressed, acknowledged or validated by ourselves and others — caregivers, partners, friends and family — has a voice. One that needs to be heard and seen to find healing and resolution. It is only natural that a part of us will get upset, confused and sad when our needs continue to go unmet, our voice unheard. How we cope is revealing to our patterns, to the way in which we have learned to cycle our thoughts and energy around the painful situations we endured.
When I work with clients, we take time to grasp the impact resentment has had on their life with insight inquiry and mapping. The aim is to clearly offer a landscape of where else resentment, anger, and bitterness may show up throughout their life, understanding the thread as a pattern, or an incomplete cycle. As we understand the effects it has had on their relationship to themselves and with others, we begin to see the energy and effort it takes to uphold the pattern. This process is important as it provides transparency to the driving forces of what the client is hoping to get or the client needed when the red flag flew into the air to begin with.
Self Reflection
Remember the nugget of wisdom I invited you to nestle into your heart — that if we can can learn to hate, then we can be taught to love? Let’s expand on it. In this self reflection, please explore with a compassionate curiosity a few of your own inner reactions. Take a moment to ask yourself the following questions, and answer them as truthfully as possible. See if you can allow the first thoughts or feelings that arise to be messages from your inner guidance (even if it doesn’t make sense).
For this exercise, you will explore it in three ways.
First, imagine someone neutral to you, no real attachment or aversion, and answer the questions. Second, imagine someone close to you that you love and answer the questions. Then, on your third round imagine someone you do not like (close or not close to you) and answer the questions. Notice what arises and perhaps, how the answers shift depending on the situation or person.
“When I am harmed, how do I react? Am I prone to fight, blame, shut down, overcompensate (fawn or people please), and/or sacrifice my needs?
“When I have caused harm to another, how do I behave? Am I prone to deflect, deny, shut down, and even defend the harmful way I have behaved?”
You can enjoy Part 4: Resentment, A Slow Poison To The Heart, where I continue to unravel the explorations of resentment through understanding unmet needs and mechanisms of survival.
Thank you for reading Kristina Renée x Medicine for the Soul, and allowing me the opportunity to serve you. If you know others who would benefit from reading this or any of the installments to this series, please don't keep it to yourself - spread the word! You may click the “heart” button, leave a comment or restack so more people can discover whole-hearted, loving, learning and living in action.
Take care of you.
Take care of one another.
Much Love,
Kristina Renée
