Part 4: Resentment, A Slow Poison To The Heart
Understanding Unmet Needs & Mechanisms of Survival
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In Part 3: Resentment, A Slow Poison To The Heart, I address the importance of mapping patterns and potential origin points for the understanding and healing of resentment. If you did not read it, you may want to before diving into Part 4. In this installment, I continue the explorations of resentment through understanding unmet needs and mechanisms of survival.
Part 4: Resentment, A Slow Poison To The Heart
Understanding Unmet Needs & Mechanisms Of Survival
There is a skillset of knowing how to speak into our needs, to create, set and maintain healthy boundaries so that we honor our needs, as well as respect the needs of others. To do so asks that we recognize and know what our needs are to begin with. When we have experienced upbringings void of open hearted and compassionately curious spaces to gain awareness of what our needs were, and how to sit with difficult feelings, our basic impulses step in and we naturally enter into mechanisms of survival. For the nervous system these survival techniques have been categorized as fight, flight, fawn and freeze. They can shift, merge and be confusing to comprehend without support.
Overtime, as we develop, without pausing to inquire, to lovingly ask ourselves the eye opening questions about how we are or have been behaving, thinking, and feeling, we become conditioned by our self-preservation tactics to believe that that is who we are.
We start to identify as the story:
I am the fighter.
I am the runner.
I am the people pleaser.
I am shut down.
But, that is not who you are.
That, is what you have learned to do to cope and manage the painful reality of the disconnection from your needs, from yourself and from others. Coping strategies, also known as defense mechanisms and survival tactics, reveal themselves in different ways. Many of them are learned in early childhood, often in response to unmet needs or insecure attachment patterns.
For example, an unconscious or even conscious technique may be to keep quiet, to not speak up. Perhaps, you learned to suppress or repress your needs, maybe creating a story that you are not worthy enough to have your needs met since you never have had them met before. Perhaps, your needs could be taken away or you would be harmed if you acted or didn’t act in a certain way. With this type of surviving, you may have learned, knowingly or unknowingly, to push the pain away. The painful reality became overwhelming, the grief of your needs not getting met hurts too much, so overtime, parts of you began to numb, to dissociate and even disconnect, not just from others but from yourself.
Another way of coping could have been to become invisible, putting yourself on the sidelines, and placing other people and their needs in front of your own. You also could have learned, again unknowingly or knowingly, to sacrifice what you need, maybe losing parts of who you really are, for an idea of love. Perhaps, consciously or unconsciously, you told yourself you don’t deserve to be happy or know joy. Another way of surviving is to fight, to blame and hate. You could have learned to demand, control or manipulate others, even fabricate and lie — to hide what you are really feeling underneath the anger and fighting.
Rachel Naomi Remen, a pediatrician who gained fame as an author and teacher of alternative medicine in the form of integrative medicine said,
“Healing may not be so much about getting better as about letting go of everything that isn't you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you really are.''
When our needs go unmet and we are disconnected to what our needs actually are, parts of us become seperated to ourselves. Learning what it feels like to be seen, heard and met as we are can be very unfamiliar without caregivers and safe places to process our experiences and gain clarity about our needs. It is only natural that we will grasp to survival mechanisms with the aim of protection, well into adulthood.
When we don’t feel safe, we stay in what’s familiar even when it’s harmful.
Often, without recognizing it, the painful gambit of withholding — attachments, aversions and misconceptions — become etched further into our consciousness, creating the illusion of our identity, slowly severing a healthy, loving and emotionally safe relationship to ourselves and with the world. While coping tactics have an intelligence, one we can respect, it is important to realize that our self-preservation mechanisms are not who we really are. Survival mechanisms can become obstacles to our well-being and authentic connection. Understanding our coping mechanisms, driven by our efforts to have your needs met, to be validated and seen, even to feel worthy, offers valuable information to the origins and healing of resentment.
The twisted ways we have contorted ourselves, knowingly and unknowingly, to try to get our needs met, in the hopes to get our needs met, to feel safe, is astonishingly genius and also, calamitous.
We do not have to maintain living in relationship with our life force in states of coping, defensiveness, and survival tactics.
“…if we can learn to hate, we can be taught to love.”
We can learn to open ourselves up to rewrite our story and rewire our body and mind. Mapping our experiences and our relationship to our unmet needs and insecure attachment patterns highlights the complexities of resentment and the ways it has been cycling in our life, and around our life energy. Mapping offers insightful clarity on one level of our healing. It offers insights to the roots of resentment and, most importantly, it brings awareness to what we do need to feel safe, and the methods we have been utilizing to navigate protection.
Mapping is important, but we cannot stop there.
Often, I witness people getting stuck in the cognition with their pain, cycling it in an intellectual manner rather than going inwards. Inwards to the root of the suffering is where the transformation of healing happens.
In Part 1 of this series I addressed how most emotions naturally last around 90 seconds, as the chemical process triggered by an emotional event typically takes that long to fully flush out of the body. However, without conscious knowledge of the undercurrent of our emotions, we prolong our emotional experience by dwelling on the feeling or situation, creating a story and etching a narrative into our mind and body around the emotional experience. This becomes stored in the warehouse of the body, often as a mechanism of survival for preparation of a next time a similar experience may happen.
The implication here is that while pain is inevitable, suffering is alchemical. Pain, being the uncomfortable emotion, unmet need, etc. Suffering, being the prolonged dwelling and story we created, knowingly or unknowingly, to feel a sense of safety. Entering the root of the suffering is a pathway to illumination and inner healing. By understanding the root of our suffering and transforming it, we can achieve a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. This can lead to a sense of inner freedom and spaciousness, where we are no longer controlled by our pain and suffering — by the narrative.
Poignantly explained by Rumi, a 13th-century poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, he wrote,
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you”
It would be naive to go on a quest without resources and tools to support us along the way, though. Like camping in the snow without gear, or entering a difficult conversation without an inner grounding, there are ways to navigate entering the wound that are safe — that won’t re-traumatize us and continue to etch the patterns of survival deeper into our nervous systems. Our nervous systems can’t heal in threat or overwhelm.
To heal, we need safe spaces. We need to know we are safe to feel the abundance of our emotions and to explore our inner vulnerabilities that are so strategically tucked away in the underworld of ourselves. Learning to familiarize ourselves with being seen and validated can often come in grounded, therapeutic settings, which support the budding of one’s inner trust and self healing power. This safe setting lends to the expansion of weaving the healing into one’s everyday life and in their relationships.
To heal resentment we need nurturing spaces to learn how to authentically feel safe in our body, mind and spirit.
Blossoming safety requires a tenderness, and a deepening of the reservoir of compassion, innate within each of us. Compassion asks us to slow down the experience, the spiraling storm of the story — the attachments, aversions and misconceptions — so that we can see the bottom of the lake clearly. Compassion invites us to titrate, moving at a pace that works for us, out of the thinking mind and into the body, into the senses, and into the powerful transformation of rewiring and recalibrating new pathways of connection. As we welcome this shift, we open ourselves up to meeting our own unmet needs, becoming, again, who we have always been beneath the resentment.
Stay tuned for the final installment of the series, Part 5: Resentment, A Slow Poison To The Heart, where I address entering unknown realms and altered states of consciousness for healing resentment.
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 series on resentment, 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
