Becoming an Un-Resentful Person

I hold space for several different people every week, and watch recorded Emotional Healing Processes, and from time to time different patterns seem to emerge across the week.

This week the theme was resentment.

One person has been wrangling their resentment for months and months, and this week hit a wall, realizing that she was using her resentment to give herself a full time job of revenge on her ex-husband.

Another had uncovered resentment as a surprise, of a group she held space for. She had become laissez-faire on the surface, but underneath was resentment, because she had had an unconscious expectation that had not been fulfilled by the group.

Yet another person for whom this theme was showing up, was me.

I have a Box. I am not my Box. Neither are they.

I play and study in a Next Culture gameworld called Possibility Management. The Map of How to Dismantle a Resentment is the map (of literally hundreds available, and counting) that I worked with first.

I knew I had resentments: against my mother, my ex-husband, my former housemates and some friends and other ex-es who had “done me wrong.”

As I worked with the Resentment website, I gained more distinction about the anatomy of resentment and how resentment works, and how I kill intimacy by having them. I felt deep sadness, some anger, fear and then joy, as I processed resentments.

I became a resentment hunter, finding them under every frown, sigh and rolled eye gesture I made for months and months.

After a time, I moved on to other relevant maps and processes. There are over 500 websites (and counting, this is a rapid learning gameworld) that comprise Possibility Management’s StartOver.xyz massive multiplayer on and offline game of transformation.

You can become a StartOverxyz Gameplayer, too. More links below.

It’s been about two years since my first go-around with resentment.

Apparently, this week, it was/is time for another.

This time round they are harder to spot.

My frowns are less obvious, as are my sighs, and I don’t think I’ve rolled my eyes in ages.

I have had to turn up my resentment detector to notice the behaviours I use to cover my resentment with, like:

~ changing the subject

~ ignoring an impulse

~ letting things slide

~ following an internal parent ego voice that said, “just let go”

~ celebrating something while going small inside

These strategies in and of themselves are not right or wrong, good or bad. There are, however, consequences of using them, notably to unconsciously using them.

I have clarity that I do not want to create the consequences of creating and maintaining resentment.

It takes but one resentment to kill intimacy.

It is so clear to me that resentment kills intimacy, and I have had enough of that in my lifetime.

Yet my behaviours prevail and intimacy is killed, and so here I am again, starting over about learning to catch and dismantle resentment.

I set up a time and study space to do this. I invited others. No one came. I did it anyways.

Using the mystrikingly website again, I honed in on this paragraph:

Anyone can create the experience of resentment for themselves by mixing:

• Emotional Anger about someone doing something that you expected them not to do, or they failed to do something that you expected them to do, mixed with
• Emotional Sadness about losing something that one part of you wanted, mixed with
• Emotional Fear that a previous wonderful condition will never be found again, mixed with
• Emotional Gremlin Joy from killing the possibility of intimacy and therefore returning to aloneness so that nothing will change. By keeping your Box patterns safely unchanged, your Gremlin thinks it is doing a good job keeping you safe.

I turned them into questions:

1. I expected ___(name)___ to ______ and not do _________.
2. I lost ___________, and it was ___(name)____’s fault.
3. I’ll never again get to _________, and it is ___(name)___’s fault.
4. I am alone because of ____(name)_____ and ________.

I wrote out each line at the top of a blank page, and started to write.

26 minutes later I ran out of things to say, which is to say, I started sounding repetitive to myself.

I write fast, there were five full pages of writing…all about resentments I have been holding, some for decades, and the people I have been holding them against. Between the lines I can see the ways I justify making others wrong, while I make myself right.

Do I want to be right? Or do I want intimacy?

I have resentments against myself, where part of me (which part?) makes another part wrong.

I kill intimacy between parts of myself. This explains a lot.

Five pages of what keeps me from intimacy, keeps me in a “losing” position, as a victim, while unconsciously using anger to build and maintain walls between parts of myself and between myself and the people I care about most, and …humans at large.

That was the bad news.

I started, after going numb for a few beats, to feel joy, because for each person I had identified as someone I hold resentment against, I can break it down.

I can become an un-resentful person.

Each resentment had begun with an assumption.

I believed my assumption was true and it became an expectation.

When my expectation was not met, a resentment grew. And it continued to grow and exist as I did nothing about it but justify that my assumption was right, and my stories about the person who did me wrong were true.

Each resentment story is held in place with the help of a secret benefit.

I get to avoid feeling the pain of loss. I get to avoid taking responsibility. I get to avoid transformation. I get to be superior. I get to be off the hook. I get to play small, and it’s not my fault.

I have committed to experimenting further with the next steps of the resentment dismantling process. I have begun to ask (in the EHP Collaboration Group on Telegram*) for key Emotional Healing Processes, and finally, the last, scary step: asking to speak to each person on my list to put the resentments on the table, own that I created them, and to what benefit, and take back the expectations. Forever.

As I write this I feel cold fear, fear that I won’t be brave enough to do these things, fear that I will be judged if I do.

Fear that I will not do it, and continue to have the walls stand, until perhaps even death. I fear I will not create the intimacy I long for.

Ah, yes, here comes my anger. I will need my conscious anger to ask the dangerous questions, and to show up, present and grounded in my own bubble of space, to be Radically Honest, and unhookable.

If I can face my resentments, dismantle and remove them, so can you.

No one can stop you. No one can do it for you.

I wish us all way-making to lives full of extraordinary intimacy.

Love, Nicole

Become a player of the StartOver.xyz game beginning with the Resentment website, or find another doorway, here.

*To learn more about, possibly join, and effectively use the EHP (Emotional Healing Process) Collaboration Group on Telegram, book in for a 30 min free consultation with me: www.calendly.com/NicoleHartleyBradford