In this article, you will receive step-by-step instructions on how to forgive and let go of a grudge, as well as learn why you can rejoice in grudges, why you get offended in the first place, and how to stop doing it once and for all. At the beginning of the article there is also a video in which I, as a psychologist, discuss this topic: the causes, consequences of grievances and ways to react differently.
- Step #3: Take Charge
What is resentment
Resentment is unjustified expectations. You expected one thing from a person, but he acted completely differently. Perhaps you didn’t know him well enough to expect something different from him. Each person is unique, and we cannot predict how anyone around us will act in a given situation. There is no need to speculate for others and expect something from them. We can decide what to do and take responsibility for the decisions made only for ourselves.
Watch a video about the causes of grievances and how to stop being offended and start reacting differently:
Biochemistry of stress
Stress, within reasonable limits, is useful, it is an “engine of progress” at the level of motivation, thanks to it we “move” towards our goals, use experience to solve our problems.
But if we do not forgive, then we are constantly in a state of stress. At the level of biochemistry of our body, changes occur at the cellular level; adrenaline is constantly present in the blood. Our body is constantly in the process of “fighting for survival” and is depleted.
Physiologically, in a state of stress, undesirable reactions begin. The amount of glucocorticoids in the blood increases, and they suppress our immunity and toxins are not eliminated, but accumulate in the tissues.
Leukocytes in the blood also decrease, and immunity decreases. When our muscles are tense, they receive less nutrients and oxygen, which also serves as an impetus for cell destruction.
Capillaries expand, and the flow of lymph, on the contrary, slows down, toxins accumulate in the intercellular space, and cell nutrition is disrupted.
The heart pumps blood in an enhanced mode when you just remember the insult. But at the same time, the blood also becomes thick, prone to clot formation.
Psychologically, under stress there seems to be an increase in performance, but then we “deflate like a soap bubble,” our strength is depleted, and we are most often in a state of apathy.
Moreover, it is known that the impact of resentment and prolonged stress affects the quality of blood and, accordingly, DNA
Dantzer R. et al., From inflammation to sickness and depression: when the immune system subjugates the brain. // Nat Rev Neurosci. 2008; 9 (1):46-56
Why should we rejoice at grievances?
Resentment is your growth area. If you feel offended by someone's criticism, then most likely you really think about yourself that way. For example, you were told that you are fat and that it would not hurt you to lose weight. If you are offended by this, it means that you think so about yourself or doubt it deep down. And the offender simply let you see the place where you are unsure of yourself, where you need to grow up. And if you have a completely different opinion about yourself, are always confident in your beauty, or you simply don’t care what kind of figure you have, then you will react to such a statement with laughter. This way, the offender will not catch you on the hook, and his words will fly past you.
If you are offended by something, make a note of what exactly it was. This is your growth zone. The place where you need to learn to love yourself, grow, develop, improve yourself. So smile at your offender and sincerely thank him. Rejoice - he helped you see your growth zone and now you know where you need to change yourself for the better.
Thus, if a person offended you, then by doing so he showed you where you treat yourself poorly. Start to develop in the areas in which you tend to take offense. And over time, no one will be able to offend you.
Your importance
You should describe your manifestations of self-importance.
- I'm upset with her because I secretly expect her to show me attention.
- I deliberately create an image of being offended in order to make others really believe that I am offended, and so that they are guaranteed to show me attention and importance
This is behavior developed and reinforced in childhood. Since childhood, you have become accustomed to creating and cultivating the image of an offended person, which you put on yourself, because you realized that by wearing this image you are more likely to gain attention, support and approval. Your self-esteem is low, so you don’t believe that you can somehow get this attention in another way (again, limiting beliefs. Do you see how everything is intertwined in the psyche?)
- I’m used to being offended that I wasn’t congratulated on my birthday, because a birthday is an important holiday in the life of every person, and if I don’t feel this importance on this day, it’s a devaluation of me and my holiday
Next, write down everything that is important to you regarding the DR.
- It is very important for me to have the attention, acceptance and love of my friends in my birthday
- It is very important for me to be the most important person in my BD
- It is very important for me that everyone loves me on my birthday.
In the process of breaking down the offense into aspects, all sorts of tangents may pop up here and there, such as limiting beliefs that you had not previously noticed in yourself, manifestations of a sense of self-importance, the machinations of the victim, traumas from childhood, etc. At these moments, do not let this valuable material pass by. Take a break from the proposed template, you can always return to it quickly. Everything is intertwined in the subconscious, so you shouldn’t be surprised that at some point something might come out that you hadn’t noticed before.
You can complete the breakdown by listing all the decisions that you made against the backdrop of this resentment.
How to forgive and let go of grudges - 5 steps
Let's move on to the technique of forgiveness. The technique takes about fifteen minutes, but it all depends on the depth of your offense. You will need a pen and four pieces of paper, and a few more in reserve. Take them and sit somewhere quiet where you won't be disturbed. From my own experience and the experience of clients, I can say that if you don’t do it now, you probably never will. Don't let resentment continue to take away your strength and energy, don't give it any more opportunity to influence your life. Free yourself from this heavy burden now.
The main condition of this technique is to be involved in the process entirely. Don’t be lazy, feel and write down everything that is necessary. This is your life, and its release from resentment is in your hands.
So, how to forgive and let go of resentment - 5 steps:
Step #1: Blacklist of grievances
Well, have you already armed yourself with a pen and pieces of paper? If not, do it now. Why put off your happy life until tomorrow?
So let's get started. Take the first piece of paper and write at the top in the middle the name of the person you are most offended by. Below, write a list of all your grievances against this person. Write in as much detail as possible.
It is likely that grievances that you did not even suspect about will be revealed to you. Maybe you will make some discovery. For example, you will finally understand why you have been carrying a grudge all this time.
We do everything in this life with some benefit for ourselves. Sometimes this benefit is unconscious, or in other words, secondary. This means that you, without knowing it, carry resentment with you throughout life, because you subconsciously want it.
For example, in childhood, when you were offended, your loved ones immediately showed increased attention to you and your friends took pity on you. And you remember at the subconscious level that resentment is accompanied by such pleasant bonuses. As an adult, you have learned to cope with many things, but you still love to receive attention and care. And that’s why sometimes you allow yourself to be offended.
Another example of a secondary benefit is pleasant memories. Many people remember grievances from their school years and throughout their lives, mentally returning to their school offenders, they communicate with them in their heads.
For example, at school Masha was offended by a classmate because he did not reciprocate her sympathy. Many years or even decades later, Masha is still offended by him and from time to time mentally returns to those episodes that caused the emotion of resentment in her. What benefit does she get? She liked her classmate. She likes to think about him. He may be one of her fondest school memories. Masha has many mixed feelings for her classmate, but resentment is the strongest of them. And so it seems to her that she is only offended. But in fact, her sweet memories are charged with a huge number of other emotions that she likes to experience. And for their sake, she continues to play these memories in her head and continue her resentment.
Think about what your secondary benefit is for each of the grievances? Write down these benefits and think of a different way to satisfy each benefit. Write it down. And from now on, start getting benefits in a new way you invented.
Step #2: Feel the hurt one last time
Take another piece of paper. Write a letter to your offender on it. Let it begin like this: “Dear (name), I’m offended by you because... I hate you because... I’m hurt because... I’m offended by you because... I feel rage, hatred for what..."
In this letter it is important to describe your feelings, sensations, emotions. And feel them as if it were happening now.
When writing down, reproduce the offense in your memory. Remember everything in the smallest detail: what day it was, what happened before, how you felt at that moment when you were offended. How did you feel the next day? What specific words or actions were said to you that offended you? If another person did the same to you, would it offend you or not? Why was this particular person important to you?
Imagine, remember everything as if it were yesterday. Carry through yourself again all those feelings and emotions that you experienced that day, and also remember everything that you felt towards the offender until today. Replay in your head each of the grievances that you once had against this person.
Perhaps those memories and sensations that you have long forgotten about will emerge. Describe them too. Feel your hurt like never before. After all, today you say goodbye to her forever.
Injustice
The feeling of injustice should be eliminated in principle. If you divide something in this world into fair and unfair, you actually mean unfair to you
.
This is exactly how the victim thinks. From all thoughts of this kind, whether conscious or not, it is necessary to eliminate the emotional charge.
Describe your feeling of injustice.
- I always congratulated her, so why didn’t she congratulate me?
- It's unfair that she didn't congratulate me, because I'm her friend, and not just someone there
- I was offended by her, which means she is more important to me than I am to her, this is unfair
Next, you need to answer the question why you need this offense.
For those who want to become stronger
In order for you to be guaranteed to forgive your offense and stop being a person who tends to take offense, I wrote for you the book “From Victim to Hero: The Path of a Strong Man.”
It consists of practices aimed at ensuring that you stop holding anything to yourself and gain the determination to immediately talk about everything that does not suit you.
After reading it, you will learn to live as if it were your last day: your head will become clearer, doubts, resentments, fears and excuses will cease to make sense. You will begin to understand what is truly important. And you will gain the determination to change everything that does not suit you in life. You will learn to take responsibility. You will take an active life position and will easily express everything that you do not like. You will become stronger and naturally, instead of being offended, you will immediately look for and find a solution.
You can read the full description of the book and reviews of it, and also purchase the book using the link.
Step #3: Take Charge
And we continue the technique of forgiveness. Third step and third leaf. Resentment is your choice, which is most often not realized. Between stimulus and response, there is always a choice - how to respond. So, between an insult and being offended by this insult, there is a choice: to be offended or to pass by. The problem is that, as a rule, you do not have time to realize this and are immediately offended. The first time you choose your response to abuse is as a child. For example, a neighbor boy called you a fool, and you were offended. Since then, year after year, whenever a similar situation happened to you (you were insulted or criticized), you unconsciously chose to be offended again and again.
Have you ever noticed that some people are not offended when they are criticized? They consciously chose this. Or they were lucky - their parents taught them not to be offended by criticism in early childhood. And you start learning this now. It won't be easy, and it won't work out right away. But gradually, with patient effort over and over again, you will get what you want.
Whenever someone says or does something unpleasant to you, take a mental break. You have a choice how to react. Make this choice. While you are offended, you follow the offender's lead. But this is your life, and it’s up to you to decide whether to follow someone else’s lead or live the way you want.
So, the third step and the third piece of paper. Start it like this: “Dear (name)! I understand that I myself chose to be offended by you then. I bear full responsibility for being offended, for hating you...” Continue on your own. In this letter to your offender, write why you chose to be offended. What exactly bothered you then? All this time you have been transferring responsibility for the offense to the offender. But now you take responsibility. You were not offended, but you were offended. It's entirely possible that your abuser had no idea he was saying or doing anything wrong. But even if he did it intentionally, it only means that he achieved his goal. He has you hooked. You were offended, and all this time you were thinking about him and his action. You followed his lead.
From now on and forever, take responsibility for your grievances. You choose to be offended. This doesn't mean you have to take the blame. It is the offender's fault that you were treated this way. But you are responsible for reacting the way you did. There is a big difference between guilt and responsibility, and the key difference is that only by taking responsibility can you be able to forgive.
Resentment is the position of the weak and small. Responsibility is the position of the strong. I talk about this in detail in the book “From Victim to Hero: The Way of a Strong Man” and help you learn to take the position of a strong man.
Step #4: Forgive and Let Go
Start the fourth piece of paper like this: “Dear (name), I forgive you for that...”.
Write everything you wanted to say but couldn’t. Put all your love into this letter, all the warm and pleasant feelings that you feel for this person. Imagine him sitting in front of you and talk to him in your mind. Surely, he will be glad to hear that you have finally forgiven him. He will accept your kind words and reciprocate. Imagine all this while you write your letter of forgiveness.
Thank your abuser for giving you the opportunity to see your growth areas. Now you know where you need to grow and develop, what qualities to improve.
After performing the suggested technique, you should feel better. During the technique, you should feel unity with the offender and the completion of what was not completed then, on the day when you were offended. The main condition is to relive your resentment, all the emotions and feelings that fill you, to the maximum using this technique. Do it sincerely and with all your heart. Only you yourself can free yourself from this heavy burden.
Now you can do this technique with all the people and grievances that you have accumulated. Resentment takes a huge amount of energy and strength, so after performing the technique you will feel filled with energy. She comes back to you.
If by chance you ever mentally return to that unpleasant episode in the past that you just worked with, I recommend that you go through the fifth step.
Resentment is a very deep feeling that does not go away in one day. To do this, you need to work with yourself, you need to know yourself, be able to talk to yourself, recognize your feelings and emotions, and not deceive yourself.
Step #5: Anchor Exercise
You have completed the forgiveness technique presented in this article. But suddenly it happened that you again, perhaps out of habit, remembered your old grievance. In this case, add one more to your memory. After the abuser says those nasty words to you (or does those nasty actions), he comes close to you, looks you in the eye, takes your hands and says, “Please forgive me. I didn't mean to hurt you. Do not feel angry with me. Let go of your resentment."
Every time you mentally return to that offense, add this new episode to your memory. Over time, the new episode will become fixed in your thoughts along with the offense, and they will only be remembered by you together. Rest assured, you will soon be able to forgive.
Childhood
All our psychological problems, in one way or another, stem from childhood, with all the childhood grievances and traumas that we carry with us all our lives until we begin to work through them.
The first thing you should write down is all the episodes from childhood related to your current grievance, when someone made someone else feel guilty.
We are talking here about parents, your brothers and sisters, grandparents, etc. If you perceived as a child that someone was making someone else guilty, you learned all these games from there, so they need to be written down.
- As a child, they congratulated you on your birthday or did not congratulate you
Here you can write down all the vivid memories from his past about when someone didn’t congratulate someone on their birthday, and what stuck with you in connection with this.
- As a child, they made a big holiday out of their birthday.
Here you should write down your entire opinion regarding your birthday and why, when you were little, it was such a big and important holiday for you.
- I didn't get enough attention as a child on my birthdays.
Here we come close to the fundamental subconscious root of resentment - the victim mentality.
All our grievances from the past (especially childhood) forced us to start playing the game of sacrifice, which many of your friends and relatives continue to play to this day, and will play it until they go to their graves.
As we accumulate more and more grievances, we begin to play the victim more and more, and playing the victim forces us to have more and more grievances. It turns out to be a vicious circle, but elaboration is what can break it over time. The first step is to write out your charges. The victim always blames other people or circumstances for the fact that they feel bad, but in this case we are not actually blaming, but describing aspects of playing the victim in order to then remove the emotional charge from them. He releases his victim “to freedom”, and let her express everything she thinks.
- On my birthdays I was given a lot of attention, but on other days I was sometimes a nobody to my parents, they didn't care about me
Maybe that's why you attach so much importance to DR. As a child, the gap between DR and everyday life was too great.
- The only day when we received attention, love, warmth, care from our parents was our birthday
- Birthday is the only day when we could not be afraid that we would be punished
- Birthday was a day without fear
- Birthday was a day of absolute acceptance of us as we are.
- We were forgiven for everything on our birthday.
- We saw someone else say goodbye on our birthday
Now we can touch on another possible reason why you are reacting this way to this incident. It is possible that as a child you learned that people do not congratulate someone on purpose in order to hurt them or because they do not respect you.
- We perceived that someone deliberately offended another in childhood in order to rise above him, to bully him
- My friend deliberately did not congratulate me in order to mock me, to rise above me, to show that she is taller than me
- She specifically wanted to hurt and unpleasant me by not congratulating me
- She wanted to mock me without congratulating me on my birthday, she wants to make me suffer
If you really think so, you can remember all the moments from your childhood when it was you
deliberately bullied someone by not wishing them a happy birthday or because you didn't respect them. You are used to the fact that you yourself perceive such behavior on your part as bullying, and now you think that she behaves with you the way you once behaved with someone.
- As a child, not being congratulated on a birthday was the worst thing for me, because on this day we are used to having maximum attention, and it is on this day that lack of attention is the most painful
- Since childhood, I’ve gotten used to the fact that not everyone congratulates you on your birthday, but your friends will definitely congratulate you as a whole class. And if someone doesn’t congratulate you, it means he’s not a friend at all
Here we come close to another subconscious root of resentment - limiting beliefs.
Deep and guaranteed elaboration of grievances
I sincerely hope that the technique I have proposed will help you forgive the offense that you have held within yourself for so painfully long. In order to do this guaranteed, and also in order to change yourself and stop being offended, restructure your personality and become happier, you can contact a specialist.
I am a psychologist and provide consultations via Skype. In addition to the fact that I can help you forgive your biggest offense that brought you to this article, I will also help you understand specifically your reasons why you have learned and become accustomed to feeling offended. Together with you in consultation, we will be able to figure out how you can learn to react differently, express all those emotions that you are currently holding within yourself, and feel happier and more confident. I will help you forgive once and for all and breathe deeply, letting go of the heavy burden of the past.
Sign up for a consultation via Skype
You can sign up for a consultation with me through VKontakte, Instagram or the form on the website. You can find out about the cost of services and the scheme of work here. You can read or leave reviews about me and my work using the link.
Incident
Here you simply describe what happened in the way you perceive it.
- She didn't wish me happy birthday
- I waited all day for her to congratulate me, but she never wrote
- Moreover, she saw that everyone congratulated me on VK, and did not write
- I saw that she was online on WhatsApp this morning, so why didn't she write?
When writing, imagine that you are now at a meeting with a close friend or girlfriend, and you simply state the problem as you see it. You throw out everything you have: anger, tears, resentment, aggression, hatred, rejection.
After the incident is described (the more detailed, the better), move on to emotions.
Why forgive?
The first step you need to take is to want to forgive . Motives can be different: for the sake of one’s own health, freedom and spiritual harmony. Or to stop suffering, let go of old connections and open the door to new love. Or perhaps you want to reconcile and give the relationship another chance. It is important to realize why you are ready to forgive.
An essential motive is that by forgiving, we cleanse ourselves not only mentally, but also physically . In order to understand this, conduct the following experiment: imagine your offender and the situation that caused your indignation, worry or pain. Record your bodily sensations: you will probably feel how your heartbeat has changed, or it has become difficult to breathe, or the blood has rushed to your face. Perhaps you wanted to shrink, shrink, or something went cold inside. If you think about revenge , your nervous system will shake even more. Now tell the imaginary offender: “May you feel good...” If you feel that it has become easier, then you have taken the first step towards liberation. Someone will say: this is unrealistic, how can you wish good for, say, a rapist or murderer? What to do if anger torments your soul, and the pain cannot be expressed in words? Remember that this phrase works like a boomerang - you wish “good” first of all for yourself. And you need to repeat it until it becomes easier.
What types of forgiveness are practiced by psychologists?
- Meditative practices of forgiveness
- Forgiveness through prayer
- The Ho'oponopono method is well described in the book "Life Without Limits" by Joe Vitale
- Forgiveness using Louise Hay's Golden Triangle method
- Forgiveness according to the method of Liz Burbo “I look with my eyes into the heart”
- Method of writing “I forgive you, forgive me”
- Breathing practices of forgiveness from Sviyash
- The practice of forgiveness from Inna Murashova
- Eastern practices of forgiveness
And many options for other practices. They do not work for everyone, since a person is not inclined to understand that he is causing direct harm to himself with this insult.
How to take control of the situation
- Understand that cultivating a problem and feeding it with negative emotions is a dead-end path that only leads to self-destruction.
- Consider the situation from different angles and learn lessons, take the offense as self-motivation. For example, lose weight, read books, learn a language, improve professional skills (depending on what the problem is related to).
- Determine for yourself why the person offended: if it was not done on purpose, then you should forgive your friend, and if it was done on purpose, break off the relationship. And in general, if possible, avoid toxic people.
- Continue to work proactively: prevent situations that could end in negative emotions, and do not allow yourself to be drawn into them. Smile, ignore and remain silent. At first it is very difficult to do this, but if you practice, you will succeed.
