How do you get rid of resentments?

[tonystarksrighthand]

I'm 46. I've had trauma in my childhood and adulthood. I've had long periods of therapy, 6 - 12 months at a time.

But I am still so resentful. I am so angry, so fucking angry and I don't think any amount of forgiveness is ever going to help me. Why does it bother me so, so much? It rules my head, my life, and clearly my future and I'm riddled with uncontrollable anxiety.

I'm so mortified by another anger outburst by me today, I'm appalling. Whilst most people agree I have every right to feel the way I do, it doesn't change the situation. It doesn't change my resentments, my anger and frustration. Those family members won't change. They see nothing wrong. They will not change. It's just ME that continues to get upset, hurt and angry.

How do I let go? How?

My rage today was unacceptable and I have apologised for my anger and outburst. But I'm not sorry for feeling like I do.

How do I stop feeling like this?

Happy Easter

Life is too big to stay with old feelings. I had a terribly abused past and made peace with it. I chose a nearby tree, I called it my worry tree. I left things that reminded me of the traumas. I then blessed the tree and literally walked away. It is a beautiful world, join in

This will probably sound too simple, but I find it helps to just turn trauma into boundaries. Issues with father now: I'm not helpless, he has no power over me now, I set a firm boundary, "No, I won't do/allow that." Just factual, no argument about it, no discussion, just how it is. Someone more random who has treated me badly enough: Don't allow them into my life. "Not interested thanks." No emotion. No emotions, just how it is. Take away their power in my life. Works for me anyway.

I would head back to therapy OP. No therapy is aiming for forgiveness, as your therapy is solely about you and how you are functioning alongside other people. There is a lot of codependent speech in your posts, if people are suffering silently then it's up to them to find a voice, if someone pisses you off, it's up to you to communicate that. Therapy will not erase your past, you may always feel angry about your mistreatment, but you may learn to live alongside it. It's there for a reason after all. Your boundaries were massively overstepped and you are still allowing it.

I’m so sorry for you and your situation OP.

I had something similar - I didn’t realise what a toxic bubble the world of my family was until I was much later in life. I just thought it was normal.

2 years of therapy - I had to distance myself from sister and parents - I’ve only seen them once in twenty years now when my mother died and during which was blamed for her cancer. Lol.

i find myself in the acceptance zone - they are who they are - I choose not to have the drama in my life - and yeah it means I am quite isolated in many ways, but I don’t have to carry around that weight. So I am happy, free, and have no negative feelings motions or emotions. When I came to that understanding, my personal failings, anxiety, stress, a pressure to be a certain person, all evaporated and I started my life and have never looked back or been happier.

Good luck

See, all this sounds all nice and simple. But did that literally walking away mean that you were actually walking away from something in the past? Or were you walking straight back into the same toxic family dynamics (and then blaming yourself for not having been zen enough to transcend your feelings)?

The OP here needs to be able to set boundaries and take control of the dynamics in which she finds herself immersed. That’s a long way from being able to bless a tree and stroll off into the sunset admiring the flowers.

Write it all down, write and write and write. Then put it in a drawer. Acknowledge your trauma by writing it down but try to leave it on the paper. It will rise up in you every so often but allow yourself to think about it for 5 minutes and then move on.

Control your own behaviour but do not worry about controlling the behaviours of others.

Not all anger is automatically bad. There is a real culture of shaming anger, and I have been shamed for having a visibly (angry) reaction to having been treated badly. I showed the anger to the same people who'd hurt me and they shamed me for it.

Sometimes, anger is a signal to listen to. Avoid this situation. Protect yourself from these people. Walk away.

So don't accept the default concept that all anger is to be avoided or worked through at all costs.

If the people around you are still minimising and invalidating you then the anger protects you from slipping back in to their narrative.

With my family, there is no way to be in the family without accepting their distorted narratives. so the anger I have felt has protected me from just absorbing a narrative that serves them and erodes me.

I may be able to let go of the anger in time, but it woke me up. So I'm not berating myself for having felt that anger.

More zen stuff that is well meaning but only works if you already have boundaries in place.

All this trite, ‘you can only control your own behaviour’ stuff can make things worse when you’ve got to deal with bad behaviour in your own home.

Setting boundaries to control the behaviour you will accept around you, towards you and in your home is crucial in all this.

All the putting it in a drawer and rising above it, inspirational meme stuff can come after someone has set boundaries so that their not drawn into situations that retraumatise them. But in the middle of it, resentment and anger may well be the appropriate response to unacceptable situations and behaviour.

Finding and channeling anger where it should be channelled can be helpful. Anger serves important purposes as an emotion.

I can only share what has worked for me.

You are not just resentful OP. You are experiencing years of trauma because your parent's serious addictions left you unsafe, unwanted, abused and emotionally injured. You know this, but you still have them in your life making excuses, disrespecting you, blanking your feelings, obliterating you and what you do for them.

You can't get rid of the resentment while still being abused and neglected. It's impossible, you are human. The only way to stop this cycle is by going no contact with all of them. Until you cut from your life the people causing you injury, you won't get past the trauma. You will keep living it.

Anger is a natural, healthy response that happens when our boundaries are trampled on by others. It is telling you, that you as a person are in danger.
Honour your anger by taking appropriate action such as no contact so that you remove yourself from them.

Sorry to hear it op. You've had some great advice above. Only thing I can add is that the power of the mind is a wonderful thing and when you realise that it is in your power to decide how you react to things moving forward you may find that the acceptance comes and the resentment fades.

The best way I can describe it in the simplest terms is that you "decide" from Monday that you forgive your family for the past. And for the future you will accept them as they are. When you find yourself slipping, you remind yourself what you decided. It will take a long time and you will have relapses. But you will recognise that you decided that you didn't want to feel that way anymore and that will give you power

Sending lots of love zx

For me, it was by having and doing things for me that nobody else could ruin or take away from me. Several of them are secret, several are achievements, but it gave me the validation that I never got. I know and that’s all that matters. Also, other things such as stopping a group isolating and bullying someone make me feel good. I changed someone else’s life for the better.

Also, I got hard and stopped doing anything that would sabotage me- I decided it was a luxury I couldn’t afford. So, no angry outbursts, no rants, no cursing injustice. Nobody cares, and it just hurt me. I tried to imagine enemies enjoying me messing up. It worked like a treat.

There is a dignity in saying nothing sometimes.

Perhaps think about a church.
Not for everyone.

But establishing a relationship with a local vicar.

I spent so many years angry and resentful towards my golden child sister and our Mum who has spent her entire life enabling her. The lightbulb moment came for me probably way later than it should have done, but at the moment, I said to myself that enough was enough. Life was simply too short to have that constant level of stress and anxiety, and I went NC with my sister and LC with our Mum. Within 2 weeks, the knot in my chest had gone away after sitting there for probably 30 years.... and although we've had to be in contact recently as our Dad was dying, I've managed it far better than I thought I would.

I am a very firm believer that you only have people around you that are worthy of that place. It makes life so much calmer and quieter.

So, sounds like only one person in the family is allowed to have emotions or needs. Classic.

Have a listen to the Tao of Fully Feeling on Audible. It's read very well. It's soothing. Yeh it acknowledges that eventually you might be able to forgive but you have to ''fully feel'' first.

The things I've forgiven, it's been when I get to a point in my life where they no longer matter any more. My x, I forgave him for destroying me financially when I got a secure job, built up some savings, got a secure roof over my head. Before that, no way, it mattered too much!!!!

With my family, I don't know how I can ever 100% forgive them. They don't see me as a real person. That destroyed me but yet they're angry with me for not playing the role they wrote for me. so, it's not easy to just let it go. Because it still matters. But I'm going for therapy (another round, the third round) soon and I hope this will bring me peace. The last (and second time) I went for therapy because of my parents' projections on to me, I had hope at that point that they would eventually get it, but now that I've realised that they will never get it, I need to go back for more therapy with a slightly different angle.

The last round of therapy during height of covid got me through a really difficult time. Everybody else needed a haircut but so long as the therapist would see me, both of us masked up sitting 3 metres apart, I was ok.

ps, both Jerry Wise, Jay Reid and Patrick Teahan on youtube talk about family dynamics. I'm the family scapegoat which is a bit different I know but Jerry Wise definitely has a list of the rules of a dysfunctional family which blew my mind. I was playing bingo and winning.

Yes but make sure you establish first if you feel.safe talking to the vicar. Don't take that as a given.

Interesting. I'm similar age to you and just waking up to this stuff. Never heard 'nurturing is needy' before but it makes a fuckload of sense. Annoying how muxh of my life and energy has been wasted on 'nurturing' other people and not myself (or my kids).
Although I made a decision a few years ago to give up dating for sake of my own kids and I don't regret it for a minute.
Now the really hard stuff ref giving up on family crap

I'm a single mother too, of course, we all pick the wrong person.
We are all raised to have no needs so we go out in to the World and meet somebody who totally disregards our needs and is focused only on their own.

Cue, disaster.......

I have that held over my head to shame me but in the last few years (literally only in the last three) I 've rejected that shame absolutely. I've grown a lot as a person, although that has caused them to dislike me and cast me out of the family.

My parents relationship is the classic controlling freak in denial projecting everything on to her daughter with a man whose mother died young enabling her every inch of the way. It's so so dysfunctional but they hold their marriage over me as though I've failed to achieve what they have.

I've given up dating too. I'm 52 and gave up in my late forties. Now, a lot of shit men would say ''nobody would want you now anyway'' but I am not going to expend all of my valuable energy looking for a needle in a haystack only to discover, nope, not a needle, start all over again. I do have a much better relationship with my daughter than my mother has with me.

It's ok for single people to value the equilibrium they gain in their single lives by not dating and exhausting themselves repeatedly.

Your brother is toxic and abusive.
Time to go LC and then NC.
You do not need to see him, his behaviour is harmful to you.
You rightly resent his behaviour so it's time to protect yourself