2023 Author: Jessica James | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 03:31
Natalya Pavlik, a psychologist at the Izmailovo family center, talks about how to understand what resentment is, to understand what causes it, and most importantly, to learn how to cope with it.
“Resentment is a person's reaction to unjustly caused grief, insult or suffering, causing negatively colored emotions, such as anger, self-pity, anger. If you feel that it does not go away for a long time, you constantly return to it, emotionally immersed in the situation and continuing to experience negative feelings, then these experiences are a signal that something is wrong, and this cannot be ignored,”the psychologist warns.
Because of what we are offended:
- Unjustified expectations. A person, entering into a relationship, brings his views, attitudes, beliefs about how the other person should act. But this other person cannot read our thoughts and behaves as he sees fit, which sometimes does not correspond to our ideas about beauty.
- About the value of the offender. The more close and significant a person is to us, the more negative and positive feelings and emotions he causes in us. That is, we often feel a long-term feeling of resentment towards our relatives, loved ones, friends, acquaintances, as well as towards those whom we consider equal to ourselves.
- With tress. A person in a stressful situation and experiencing a feeling of fatigue aggravates all negative emotions, including becoming more resentful.
- And the aggressive behavior of others. Here we can talk about constructive resentment: insults, violations of agreements, manifestations of any types of aggression towards a person.
- With a public level of justice and morality. We do not give ourselves and others the right to make mistakes. And vice versa: what we allow in our behavior, we more easily forgive others.
- Fucking possible consequences. When we are faced in interpersonal relationships with people with greater power, power or status, we do not have the possibility of direct collision and manifestation of real feelings. In this case, there is an accumulation of negative emotions and the transfer of feelings to another person, communication with whom we consider safer.
How it works?
Sometimes the offense is obvious - they got nasty on the subway, a friend promised, but didn't, her husband was rude and did not apologize. But often they lie much deeper and affect us in the most unexpected ways.
“The mother of her 5-year-old son Maria turned to the family center, she is raising a child alone. She complained about her son's "bad" behavior. But in the process of working with the family, it turned out that it was not about the boy: Maria had low self-esteem, because of this she constantly chose abuser partners. During the session, the woman suddenly started talking about the fact that she did not feel love and unconditional acceptance from any of her relatives, and this caused her a feeling of resentment against her mother, sister and other relatives.
As a result, the psychologist worked not with the child, but with the mother: after Maria realized emotions and feelings, worked through the feeling of resentment that burns from within, everything around changed. Relations within the family improved and the issue of behavior was no longer raised."
An exercise to help you cope with resentment yourself:
- it is important to tell, or better - to write a description of the situation on paper, write down what exactly happened (dates, place, participants, details of the situation);
- describe in detail the emotions and feelings that have arisen;
- state your opinion of how the "offender" should have behaved so that you do not feel resentment;
- try to explain the reasons for another person's behavior without justifying him;
- find out if the person knew about your expectations and could meet them;
- try to accept the person as they are if you intend to continue the relationship with them.
