Advice from a psychologist: how to overcome resentment and resentment?

How to work through grievances against parents, how to stop thinking and remembering injustice or lack of love in childhood?

We will talk about all this today in this article. And if you want to take the question “How to work through grievances against parents” seriously, then I will meet your expectations and share super useful information so that you can forgive your parents and move on with your life.

Let me introduce myself a little so that you take the information seriously. My name is Natalia Gnezdilova, I am a psychologist. Almost 15 years of experience.

How to work through grievances against parents?

Why is working with grievances considered one of the most difficult?

Because when we talk about grievances, we affect a person’s worldview. Worldview, feeling, values ​​are located deep in the inner world, which we often are not aware of.

And if you are already an adult, then the events that happened in childhood influenced your worldview, and resentment or a sense of injustice has become ingrained in your character and in your views on the world and others.

Working through grievances against your parents is complicated by the fact that they are relatives, they gave birth to you, and according to all the laws of society, they must care and love.

But unfortunately, it is not customary for us to take maternity and paternity exams, and therefore, sometimes people become parents who are completely unable to love and care for their children.

Resentment towards parents most often comes from childhood or adolescence. This is the most vulnerable part of any person's life. As a child, we do not have the opportunity to influence others in any way, and therefore we have to obey against our desires.

Resentment is a feeling that arises in response to someone's unfair treatment of us. But it is especially painful when the closest people do not treat the child well enough.

I don’t want to go into details of possible grievances, I’m sure that you can already list on your fingers why and what you’re offended by?

Why do I need this resentment?

This is a very useful question. You need resentment for all sorts of hidden benefits from it.

Here are examples.

• I take offense on purpose so that later I won’t forget to remind my friend that she did this to me.
• I was offended in order to see how she would later apologize to me
• I was offended in order to attach importance to this event
• I needed importance from her and I didn't get it, so I have to be offended to compensate.
• I have to protect my pride and self-esteem, which she dealt a blow by not congratulating me on my birthday, and that’s why I was specifically offended by her
• I was offended by her because this way I can compensate for her unfair treatment of me
• The more I am offended by her for not congratulating me on my birthday, the faster I will receive approval, acceptance, attention and love from this

Regarding the last point, we are not necessarily talking about receiving all these things from the abuser. Perhaps you are counting on receiving them from fellow victims. After all, grievances improve communication. If you are offended by someone, you and your friends can harp on the offender and harp on your grievances. You can say what the offender did to you, and your friends will widen their eyes in surprise and say: “What are you, what an asshole! How dare he behave like that with you!”

And pay attention to how sweet you feel from such words from your friend. This is the same validation that your ego craves. This is the same approval, acceptance, attention and love that you did not feel at that moment when your friend neglected your birthday.

And you took this neglect as a slight at your own expense. The reason for this is your importance, and now a few words about this.

What working methods are there to work through resentment towards parents?

During my life, I have come across many different methods, meditations, practices for working with grievances, but there are practically no ones that really work.

On the one hand, you do the practices, forgive diligently, and at the time of implementation you feel liberated from resentment. But, as soon as it comes to meeting your parents, or they make some remark to you, a storm of emotions immediately flares up inside you, and it turns out that the resentment has not gone away.

Resentment, not some object that is inside you, resentment, cannot just be taken out and taken out.

The feeling of resentment consists of 2 layers:

Layer 1 - your feelings, emotions, thoughts and memories.

Layer 2 is a deeper one, which has a decisive influence on working through feelings of resentment; these are your beliefs about the world and about yourself, in other words, attitudes (programs) for certain behavior, feeling emotions in a given situation.

Any practice only works with the first layer – emotions. To get to the second layer, you need to work with beliefs, you need rethinking, awareness.

Therefore, visualization, speaking words of forgiveness, imagining parents as small children, or working with your inner child do not provide decisive and final forgiveness of parents.

It is difficult to work with beliefs on your own, therefore, you need to contact a specialist so that they can help you discover the attitudes that have a decisive influence on your behavior and feelings.

After all, by and large, when there is a resentment, it has a strong impact on a person’s life, this is both personal and professional life, even the attitude towards oneself, and then it suffers because strong resentments live inside.

Offense Test

Answer the questions by checking one of three options:

1. Is it easy for you to ruin your mood?

1. How long do you remember the times when you were offended?

1. Do you worry about small troubles? (late for the bus, broken shoes, etc.).

1. Do you ever have such conditions when you don’t want to communicate with anyone or see anyone for a long time?

1. Do extraneous noises and conversations distract you when you are busy eating?

1. Do you often spend a long time analyzing the situation that happened and thinking through the events?

1. Do you often have nightmares?

1. Do you compare yourself to other people in ways that are not in your favor?

1. Are your moods variable?

1. Do you yell during arguments?

1. Do misunderstandings from other people irritate you?

1. Do you often succumb to the influence of a momentary impulse or emotion?

Let's summarize:

Count the number of options “Yes”, “Sometimes”, “No”.

Exercise 2 to work through resentment towards parents

Start working with resentment towards your parents by working through your emotions, you need to bring them out, feel them, live them and release them,

What is hidden behind the feeling of resentment?

Most often, this is anger and rage. These feelings are suppressed, they are under great pressure inside you because, once upon a time, you were still a child and did not have the right to express your anger. If there were a lot of grievances, then there was a lot of anger.

Society says that being angry with your parents is bad. And therefore, a child most often does not have the opportunity to feel and live these feelings.

Now that you are an adult, you can recognize and accept these feelings. Thus, you will let them go and you will feel better. You need to become aware of your anger.

What does it mean to be aware of anger?

It's simple, you dive a little into yourself and think about those situations in which grievances arose.

You feel your feeling of anger and say to yourself - yes, I feel all this anger, I feel it, which means it is in me. You need to feel it, it’s an unpleasant feeling, I want to tell you.

You can do an exercise to release anger and any other emotions.

A complete and detailed description of the exercise is in the article “Relieving Emotional Tension”

As I wrote above, by doing this exercise, you will work and release 1 layer - the emotional one. Perhaps, to completely free yourself from anger, you will need to perform the exercise not just once, but 2 or 3, maybe 5 times or more.

Techniques for dealing with grievances. Finding an inner resource

What is resentment?

First of all, I want to say that being offended is a completely normal human trait. Every person feels resentment, anger, rage, irritation, love, hatred, tenderness, care, anxiety and other feelings and this is normal. It does not happen that one person feels only love and tenderness, and does not feel anger, anger, hatred at all. This doesn't happen! If a person suddenly does not feel and assures everyone that he does not feel anger, anger, resentment, then he automatically does not feel love and tenderness - these are completely interconnected things! And here we can talk about suppressing feelings. But read about this in my article “The Muscular Shell of Indifference. The path of somatization of the body." Therefore, even after working with this technique with grievances, you may feel resentment, but at new circumstances and people. And this is completely normal.

Why work with grievances?

You ask me: “Why then work with grievances if this is normal and I will still experience this feeling?” Having worked with this technique, you will not get rid of the feeling of resentment, as such, this is impossible, but you will stop being offended by past circumstances and they will stop pulling you into the past, you will have lightness in relation to the past. What does this technique provide? First of all, this is a review of your accumulated grievances. Dealing with accumulated grievances can take you to another level. This is a kind of resource that you don't know about and suppress it.

How to start working with accumulated grievances?

So, in order to work with grievances and bring them to a conscious level, you need to stay alone in the room so that you are not disturbed for a while and take sheet A 4 and write point by point all the grievances that you remember, starting with words: “I’m offended.” If you have an addressee with whom you are offended, then before the words “I am offended,” put the name. For example, "1. Mom, I’m offended...", "2. Dad, I’m offended...", "3. brother, I’m offended...", "4. husband, I’m offended...", "5. director, I’m offended...", etc. List all the grievances you have accumulated until they run out. At first, you will have the feeling that you have so many of them that you cannot list them all. Then there will be a rush and you will write them one after another, unable to keep up with your thoughts. And then you will sit for a long time and remember what else you are offended by. Even if you don’t have 1 A4 sheet, take another one. I assure you that all grievances are final. Even if you write 10 sheets. But honestly, I very much doubt that I will have to write as many as 10 sheets. Just start writing.

The process of working through grievances

When you write down all your accumulated grievances, in this way you bring them to a conscious level. That is, not just the feeling that you are offended, but what exactly you are offended by. When you wrote an insult, you determined and designated for yourself that this situation offends you. Now comes the most important work. You're looking at offense number one. Think about what positive things gave you this situation that traumatized you? What benefit did you get as a result? What is the positive grain in this situation that causes you resentment? And so, point by point, look at the list of grievances that you have described and perform this exercise - look for benefits in every situation that is offensive to you.

How does resentment affect the body?

Resentment is like a ball that has been clenched tightly into a fist, which wants to finally take its shape, but the hand that is squeezing it with force does not allow it. It is impossible to keep the ball in this state indefinitely, because after a while the muscles begin to shake from overexertion and the hand itself wants to unclench the hand. If you don’t believe me, test it yourself on any ball that fits in your hand and squeeze it as hard as you can and see how long you can hold out. Now imagine how the body feels in this state? That is, when you were offended, you clenched the ball into your fist and this helped you for the first time, then your muscles begin to shake, but you still hold your fist with all your might, which ultimately leads to somatization of the body, since the body wants to relax and relax your grip. In order to relax your grip, you need to let go of the grudge.

What resources does resentment hide?

This exercise gives you the opportunity to open your fist on your own and allow the ball to take its shape and you will finally relax and your muscles will regain their tone. Working on every grievance and understanding that behind every situation there is its own benefit, its own lessons, that thanks to some unpleasant situation you have achieved more. Perhaps after this work you will have a completely different point of view on these situations and sincere repentance for these people and gratitude for the lesson, and I assure you, if you reach this state, it will be easy for you to forgive all these people on your list, and also sincerely mentally ask them for forgiveness. And it will come from a pure heart. You will finally come to the realization that everything is for a reason and that these situations are engines for you. You may have tears and that's okay. After such work, you may feel calm and light in your body - this is a very good sign. You may want to lie down to sleep after this, if possible, do so. This means that you have gotten rid of this resentment and the process of relaxation has begun.

This work will help you realize, cleanse and free yourself from the negative effects of resentment. It will also help you find new opportunities that open up for you and free up resources.

What results can you expect after working through grievances?

This work will help you understand that you are aware of the lesson that certain people taught you and, thus, rise a step higher in your personal development. Your level of consciousness will gradually begin to rise as soon as you find the seed of a positive lesson in a negative situation, assimilate this experience and integrate it into your life. In the future, you will be able to see in every situation that you would have been offended by in the past that it carries not only a negative charge, but also a positive one. And a good result on your part will be when you begin to react differently to a similar situation that you encountered in the past, you either don’t notice it, that is, it does not cause you painful feelings of resentment, or you find another way out, another behavior without feeling offended. This means that you have truly integrated the experience and the situation will not repeat itself in this manner.

After working through grievances using this technique, you may also feel offended by new events and people, but you will be able to relate to this differently, you will be able to understand that behind this there are not always negative emotions. The main thing is to always admit that a given situation offends you and immediately note what exactly offends you - this will help you take action immediately and you will avoid the accumulation of grievances. And understand, it was you who decided to be offended and this is how you perceive them; perhaps the other person did not even think of offending you. This understanding can change your attitude towards people in a completely different way. Nobody wants to offend you! This is what you decided!

Methods of forgiveness and acceptance of parents and any other difficult situations in life

The next step in working through resentment towards your parents is working with your beliefs. Your task is to rethink, realize - why did you need this situation? What did you have to learn?

You see, considering yourself a generous, good person, but at the same time, the other person who offended you is bad, this is a position that never gives sincere and complete forgiveness.

If you want to radically work through your grievances against your parents, then I suggest that you definitely work with the article “3 steps: accept, let go of a grudge against a person and forgive” , for the article, I recorded a video on the same topic, which you should definitely watch.

Beginning of work

First, you should recall in detail all those moments that cause you a feeling of resentment.

No matter how painful and unpleasant it may be, you must try to completely restore and write down on paper the situation that happened to you and the offender. This will be a mental block of information that you will have to work with in the future.

At first it will be difficult to remember everything. The fact is that our brain, in order to protect the psyche, often “erases” part of the information. And, if such difficulties arise, then it’s worth starting to write down just the thoughts that came to mind when thinking about what happened. Then the brain will gradually reconstruct the event itself - and you will be able to write everything down.

At the same time, there is no need to try to write down thoughts correctly, logically and beautifully. Just write what comes to mind and comes to mind. As you record, emotions will appear - they are the key that will help you get rid of bad memories.

Video: Technique for working through resentment. How to survive and get rid of resentment

What do you expect from working through resentment towards your parents?

If you do the exercises that I gave you above, you will feel that there is less negativity inside. But there is still a long way to go until complete recovery.

Now I invite you to think about what will happen to you after you are freed from grievances and can forgive your parents with all your heart?

Answer these questions, or better yet, write them down on paper:

• What will happen to you when you forgive your parents?
• Will your life change in any way after forgiveness?
• How will you feel? What feelings will settle inside you?
• Will your relationship with your parents change?
• Will you treat them differently? How exactly?
• What feelings will arise instead of resentment and anger towards your parents?

These questions definitely need to be answered, is it important for you to imagine what forgiveness itself will give you?

If your grievances against your parents create in you a chronic feeling of a lack of unconditional love, then it is not a fact that forgiveness will give you these feelings.

If my mother doesn't love me, in this article, you will find ways to find unconditional love.

How to forgive, or the story of a would-be traveler

Imagine a tourist. He is going on a long-awaited dream trip, smiling to himself. He is waiting for adventure, and adventure is waiting for him. The adventurer puts the things necessary for the journey into his suitcase. The hero is ready to go towards his happiness.

And then the traveler remembers that he always carries with him a heavy backpack with grievances. With such a load, it will be difficult on the way, and the emotions from the upcoming trip may not be so positive. How can you rejoice when you have such a burden behind you?

If you have also had to carry something heavy, then you understand this traveler. Remember, for example, how they dragged bags full of groceries from the store. What were you thinking then? Probably about where is your hallway, counting the steps to the doors? In such situations, it is impossible to think about anything other than the heavy packages in your hands. Especially about happiness. Do you agree?

Now let's return to our hero, who was at a low start towards his dream. What is he doing?

It’s paradoxical, but the would-be traveler sighs heavily, sits down “on the path,” opens that same backpack and puts another insult there - against himself. Yes Yes! Another insult!

Just think about it: he doesn’t throw away anything that prevents him from achieving his goals and moving forward. The hero simply adds another stone to his collection because the dream is not destined to come true again. After all, he is used to collecting stones in his backpack.

The tourist does not shake out the heavy boulders and stones, but continues to collect them - feeling sorry for himself and accumulating grievances. Even if these regrets are an obstacle to your dream. Yes, resentment can become a bad habit.

Well, let's let go of the image of the traveler, wish him to get rid of self-pity and achieve his cherished adventure. Or maybe even a few magical trips.

Now do you understand why a light backpack on your shoulders is cool? Do you already want to make room for bright impressions and happy moments in your backpack? Soon I will share with you the practices of forgiveness of grievances that I successfully use myself.

How to work through grievances against parents on your own?

I want to talk to you from the position of an adult, and as an adult. My words may seem harsh to you, but they are very true.

If your parents did not love you as a child and offended you, then most likely they could not love, they do not know how to love, which means that no amount of forgiveness will help you.

Your task is to accept the past with all the difficulties, hardships, problems and everything else that happened to you in childhood. Do you understand what I'm talking about?

Accept and leave in the past. The feeling of injustice that you have when thinking about your parents or when comparing with other people must be accepted.

Tell yourself:

- yes, this is my past,

- yes, it was hard for me,

- yes, they didn’t love me and didn’t treat me the way I deserved it, but I survived it all.

Working independently with grievances against parents is very difficult; a small offended child constantly breaks through and switches you to the position of a victim. And you don’t even notice it, and you easily leave the position of an adult. Therefore, it is much faster and easier to work with a psychologist who can bring you back to the here and now.

Is there any benefit in resentment?

After thoughts have been recorded on paper, you should evaluate what was written down from the point of view of the existing benefits .

The fact is that it is not only unpleasant for an offended person to experience this feeling, but there are also certain advantages in keeping this offense to himself. Most often, this is a reluctance to take responsibility for what happened , a reluctance to change and solve one’s problems on one’s own.

If there is someone who is responsible for your troubles, on whom you can pin your guilt and resentment, then why do anything yourself in this situation? Let this “villain” fix everything and try to change your life. And your task will be simply to accept or not accept his work in this regard.

That's the easiest way, right?

Easier. But it’s not more effective.

Moreover, this most often does not bring any effect - or even has the opposite effect. The offender does the wrong thing, or does not do what you expect, and becomes an even greater “villain” than before.

You drive yourself into a corner and surround yourself with even greater grievances, growing over them like a head of cabbage with new leaves.

Therefore, you should honestly assess the situation - and, if the offense is really beneficial to you, then accept it and start working with it . Because the offender in this situation - no matter how hard he tries - will remain an offender, and you will still leave this destructive feeling inside you.