What Is Resentment? Resentment describes a negative emotional reaction to being mistreated. There is no one cause of resentment, but most cases involve an underlying sense of being mistreated or wronged by another person. Experiencing frustration and disappointment is a normal part of life.
Tertiary emotions are emotions experienced as a consequence of experiencing a secondary emotion. Resentment as a tertiary emotion comes after rage (secondary) that comes after experiencing anger (primary).
Feelings of resentment are not linked to any particular mental condition but may instead result from the inadequate expression of emotions after a painful experience. They may come from a true, imagined, or misunderstood injustice.
Resentment has the toxic potential to unwind your relationship because it blocks partners from moving toward each other to repair deep hurts. Many couples who come into counseling find they waited too long.
Allow Yourself to Feel
Healing resentment means accepting our feelings. To do so, take a moment to yourself and not only think about what happened to you but also allow yourself to feel the feelings that accompany the situation. If you're angry, allow yourself to be angry. If you're hurt, allow yourself to feel hurt.
There is no one cause of resentment, but most cases involve an underlying sense of being mistreated or wronged by another person. Experiencing frustration and disappointment is a normal part of life. When the feelings become too overwhelming, they can contribute to resentment.
Acknowledge your emotions about the harm done to you, recognize how those emotions affect your behavior, and work to release them. Choose to forgive the person who's offended you. Release the control and power that the offending person and situation have had in your life.
Empathy as an antidote to resentment:
When we don't experience empathy, we often feel our experience isn't seen or understood. So if the same hurt happens again, it can help build resentment that our partner didn't learn our hurts last time or try to protect us from getting hurt again in the same way.
Unexpressed anger breeds resentment or gets turned against ourselves. It's been said that depression is anger turned inward. Examples are guilt and shame, forms of self-hatred that when excessive, lead to depression.
Resentment is the feeling that you did not get your way in the past. These feelings are therefore based on selfishness (the need to get your wants fulfilled).
Emotions of anger and resentment are often held in our jaw and around the mouth. If you often have a sore throat, mouth ulcers or grind your teeth at night, it could be a sign that there is an excess of overactive or stagnant energy in this part of your body.
Consequently, they tend to be more satisfied with their lives and to have less depression, anxiety, stress, anger and hostility. People who hang on to grudges, however, are more likely to experience severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as other health conditions.
That's probably true in a great many cases. But it is also possible that chronic resentment leads to narcissism.
03/6Anger - Liver
The emotion of anger is associated with the choleric humor and can cause resentment and irritability. It is believed that this emotion is stored in the liver and gall bladder, which contain bile. Anger can cause headaches and hypertension which can in turn affect the stomach and the spleen.
Well, at its core, resentment is the feeling of bitterness or anger that we experience towards someone or something that we perceive has wronged us. It's a natural human emotion that can be triggered by a variety of different experiences, such as betrayal, disappointment, or injustice.
You begin to resent the other person and dwell on what they did to you. The injuries feel unforgivable, and the resentment turns into hate, like slowly hardening concrete. Your attitude toward the other person becomes rigid, and nothing they say or do makes a difference. Hate provides a perfect excuse to stay angry.
Once anger and resentment become part of a defensive system (protecting perceived vulnerability), they cannot be overcome with focus on what makes us angry and resentful. More powerful than triggers of anger and resentment are their internal and relational dynamics.
People often express their anger in different ways, but they usually share four common triggers. We organize them into buckets: frustrations, irritations, abuse, and unfairness.
Can a Marriage Recover From Resentment? Marriages can recover from resentment, but it takes time and consistent effort from both partners. It challenges partners to forgive one another for the behaviors that led to feelings of resentment and hurt. However, that isn't an easy task.
Holding grudges can often mean holding anger and stress. A 2021 large-scale study analyzed the daily emotional responses of over 20,000 people and found that “intense high-arousal negative emotions” such as anger and stress were associated with higher blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) reactions.
In psychology, resentment is when a person has ongoing upset feelings towards another person or place because of a real or imagined injustice. One of the reasons resentments are so hard to get rid of is because there is so much bad advice floating around out there on how to deal with them.
Resentment and anger in love relationships are unlike the variations of those emotions in other social contexts. Many people are resentful or angry only in love. Only those we love can remind us that we may be unlovable or inadequate as love partners.
Scientists have identified a specific region of the brain called the amygdala, as the part of the brain that processes fear, triggers anger, and motivates us to act. It alerts us to danger and activates the fight or flight response.