Resentment: emotional and spiritual meaning

What resentment is

Resentment is the grievance that stays after the injury. You feel a deep bitterness toward a person or a situation, and a taste for revenge. A memory of being wronged is human. Resentment is what happens when you cultivate it, and organise your story around it.

The reading below does not say the injury was nothing. It looks at the cost of keeping the grudge as an identity.

The emotional meaning of resentment

You see yourself as the person who was thwarted, wounded, a victim. Life should have been better. You should have reached a higher place, "but someone stopped me". You make others responsible for your own life. The source asks why you would spend your energy hating someone.

If you do not accept events with the heart and turn toward the future, and if you ruminate on the past without stopping, the heart is said to harden, and the body to answer with a discomfort or an illness. That is why this page is linked with the heart. It is a picture of what hardening costs. It is not a diagnosis.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to forget a real wrong on command. The emotional perspective invites you to stop building a life around the person who wronged you.

• Notice the revenge. A wish to get even is the centre of this reading.
• Check the story of prevention. "Someone stopped me" can become a way of not living your own life.
• Take the responsibility back. Other people cannot carry it for you.
• Turn one degree toward what is ahead. Rumination is what the source says hardens the heart.