3 best ways to get rid of resentment towards your ex-husband - tips from love coach No. 1

Published: August 07, 2020 71356

“The offender sins not as much as the one who allows the offense” - Basil I the Macedonian

The famous grandfather Freud noticed that everything comes from childhood. Our dreams, fears, complexes and doubts are formed under the influence of external and internal factors in the first years of life. I am of the same opinion and agree with him.

Let's start with the fact that the feeling of resentment is not innate, but acquired. Babies have a feeling of anger in their arsenal, and they have to learn the feeling of resentment from about 2 to 5 years. It is most often formed stereotyped or adopted from other children and adults. For example: “If you don’t do this, I will be offended.” Agree, we adults often use this kind of manipulation.

Let's figure it out: where do grievances come from? Why do we experience this feeling? How to deal with it, and is it necessary?

Psychology of resentment

A state of resentment occurs when one person, when communicating, says or commits actions that go beyond what is permissible in the opinion of the other. Characterized by the following conditions:

• hostility;
• irritation;
• mental pain;
• annoyance;
• feeling of betrayal;
• the desire to inflict the same trauma on the interlocutor;
• exclusively subjective assessment of the situation due to blocking of consciousness;
• anger.

In psychology, the basis of resentment is the state after unfulfilled expectations from the interlocutor:

• real - I expected you to keep your promise;
• imaginary - I thought you would act this way and not differently.

The reaction occurs regardless of the nature of the expectations. Then it follows one of the paths: it breaks out or hides inside the personality. The first path in most cases leads to conflicts, the second - to an internal state of emptiness and prolonged coldness towards the offender.

While one of the parties to the conflict is offended, the other feels guilty. If this does not happen, the state of resentment becomes useless. It is impossible to experience a feeling of resentment towards an object that cannot react: animals, unfamiliar, inanimate objects. Those who will definitely avoid remorse and refuse to correct the situation will not cause feelings of resentment. Their words will most likely leave a reaction of anger, annoyance, and insult.

How to deal with grievances?

The reaction to an unpleasant situation depends on the personality type:

• Persons with increased expressiveness, choleric people, active extroverts splash out their emotions on their opponent. The misunderstanding that arises affects relationships, can quarrel, make enemies;
• People of a melancholic nature prefer to keep a negative reaction inside, putting pressure on their opponent’s conscience with hidden levers. The feeling of injustice of the interlocutor causes depression. The conflict may not have a strong negative connotation, but such people can be offended for years, hiding their view of what happened and not trying to correct the situation.

Knowing your personality type, you can predict your own reaction and prepare psychologically. Attempts to foresee how the interlocutor will react to certain words will also help to change the vector of the dialogue in time and avoid conflict.

If an unpleasant situation does occur, you should not keep it inside or vent it on others, seeking justice. This destructive feeling is a subjective assessment, amenable to control and transformation.

Psychology tells us how to deal with resentment: first get rid of the state of resentment, switch, change the point of concentration of attention. Then - learn a lesson from the current situation. Analyze what led to the annoying reaction: unfulfilled expectations, incorrect assessment of the situation, or misunderstanding of the interlocutor.

Talk

The first thing you need to understand if you want to know how to deal with feelings of resentment is that the person who hurt you is not a mind reader. Often he has no way of knowing that you didn't like what he said or did. Therefore, first of all, you need to try to suppress your childish ego at least a little in order to make room for rational thinking. How can a person feel guilty if he does not know that he is being blamed? Naturally, he will not come to you to ask for forgiveness, since he has no idea that he should do so. Therefore, you should definitely talk to this person. Tell him that you were offended by a specific remark or behavior of his. In most cases this works flawlessly. The person who offended you, if you approach him calmly and not with direct accusations, will also look at the situation from a rational point of view and understand what exactly he did wrong. This is the simplest way to cope with a grudge against a person. However, there are other methods that some may find more convenient or effective. They can also be used when the first method did not work.

Psychology of personal resentment: how does this feeling arise and what is it fraught with?

The basis of personal negative reactions is considered to be incorrect ideas about the interlocutor, comparison of one’s picture of the world with his worldview.

Over time, each individual develops his own set of ideas about the surrounding space. It’s good if the acceptable behavior patterns of the interlocutors are approximately the same. Disagreements, with a biased assessment, lead to the reaction: “I thought you would do it differently,” “I think your words are wrong.”

The causes of occurrence are conventionally divided into three groups:

1. Unconscious manipulation due to inability to forgive. A common cause of grievances according to psychologists.
2. Conscious manipulation in order to make the interlocutor feel guilty and then get what he wants.
3. Frustrated expectations. If you perceive your picture of the world as the only correct one, then the expectations associated with other people will sooner or later not be met. The reasons can be both significant and trivial. A colleague forgets to give him a lift home (“But I gave him a lift several times! He should have offered me the same!”), a friend from social networks forgot to congratulate him on his birthday (“And I congratulated him. I’ll add him to a special list, then he I’ll deliberately ignore the name day!”) - this is how resentment happens.

If a person is constantly offended, psychology promises him the following consequences:

• loss of communication with others. Not only that, not all friends are ready to feel guilty for someone’s destructive logic when trying to restore relationships. It may happen that the offender will tell others about the conflict, after which they will begin to shun the offended person;
• not everyone is ready to analyze the reasons for the aggressive behavior of another, to guess whether he was offended by something, and if so, then what exactly. Most people just don't care about it. The offended person has to keep the destructive emotion inside, not understanding how to get out of the situation;
• resentment (unexpressed, especially) undermines physical health, as it is directly related to the nervous system. Experiences due to the loss of harmonious communication with loved ones and harm to one’s own interests can affect one’s physical condition.

Another option

Recently, NLP has become increasingly popular, so this article will present another method that relates to this technique. You need to write on paper the name of your offender and what exactly he did to you. After this, you need to write that you forgive him for this. Repeat this several dozen times a day until your resentment goes away due to the fact that you program yourself for forgiveness by constant repetition of the action. Naturally, this approach should only be used if you are unable to forgive a person without any outside help.

Resentment from a psychological point of view

As psychologist-hypnologist Nikita Valerievich Baturin notes, this is one of the most common reasons for seeking advice. It happens that a person formulates his problem completely differently, incorrectly building cause-and-effect relationships. During the consultation, it turns out that the cause of the current situation was precisely resentment. Therefore, if you have serious difficulties interacting with others, it is recommended to seek help from a specialist.

The psychology of resentment identifies several types of this feeling:

• Imaginary - based on a conscious desire to manipulate a loved one, to attract his attention. There is an exact calculation: “now I will show that I need to be treated differently, and he will make amends, for example, make a pleasant surprise.” This is often abused by children, thus demanding from their parents what they want;
• Random - occurs when disagreements arise between interlocutors. Instead of a reasoned dispute, a negative reaction appears. The conversation immediately changes direction: attempts begin to make amends, gain forgiveness, a conflict occurs, or communication simply stops;
• With an erroneous vector - for example, parents rewarded a sister with a sweet gift for getting “A’s” in her diary, but her brother was not doing well in his studies, so he was left without a gift. Instead of learning a lesson by improving his grades, the brother begins to take offense at his sister and behaves accordingly towards her. She, despite the lack of guilt, feels remorse;
• Hidden - does not appear externally. There are many reasons for this: a person is not ready to admit to himself that he is experiencing this feeling, he was raised with the attitude “being offended is bad,” he simply does not want to conflict at a particular moment, etc. Sooner or later, the emotion will find a way out. But all the time while it is inside, the person experiences the smallest details of the conflict over and over again, continuing to put a strain on the nervous system.

In psychology, a feeling of resentment is a state of victim, characteristic of most people. But some people rarely get offended for really serious reasons, while others make it their lifestyle. They are ready to look for reasons in everything, and then obediently wait for the world to apologize and have a beneficial effect on their self-esteem.

“Symptoms” of resentment, anger, anger

Resentment is stopped anger. If so, the muscles of the face and body will be tense. Look in the mirror when you have been rude or acted differently than you expected. You will see a man with a stony face, an upturned chin and eyes full of tears. A feeling of bitterness gets stuck in a lump in the throat, the annoyance of a deeply undeserved insult wraps a tight rope around the chest, and a lightning-fast decision shoots into the head: “you need to be proud.” A blind defense begins: thoughts are torn apart inside, and there is a wax mask on the face.

The difference is that anger as a basic emotion helps a person survive, while resentment takes away emotional and physical health. Anger, for example, motivates action. A person begins to get angry with himself, gets irritated and as a result proves to himself and others that he can do anything. This is why wives, after a divorce, begin to get involved in extreme sports, learn new professions, and lose 20 kilograms of excess weight.

What happens when a person gets offended? The condition in question is accompanied by compression of the chest and throat muscles. Moreover, the deeper the resentment sits, the stronger the pressure. Some time passes, and the lump in the throat disappears, the person again begins to breathe deeply. In muscles that often contract, blood circulation worsens, and this is the cause of illness.

An offended person says: “resentment is choking.” This indicates that eternally offended people suffer from bronchial asthma and coronary artery disease. Add to this myocardial infarction and malfunction of the thyroid gland. Even a prolonged cough can be the result of accumulated grievances. As you can see, resentment is harmful to health.

Psychosomatics of the emergence of feelings of resentment

This emotion provokes diseases and disruptions in all body systems. The most vulnerable organ may be damaged.

Aggression, as an integral component of any negative reaction, rarely finds a way out in full. Part remains inside until the person gets rid of the memories of the situation, turning his attention to other topics. While inside, an aggressive reaction has a destructive effect on:

• nervous system: headaches, discomfort in the solar plexus area, problems with the spine;
• endocrine system: hormonal balance is disrupted due to anxiety, which provokes other diseases.

Most often, according to psychology, touchy people suffer from heart disease. The heart muscle takes the blow of any experience. Unexpressed or unfinished grievances aggravate chronic diseases and add new ones. For example, gynecological problems, including infertility with an unknown cause, may be associated with misunderstandings between partners. Depression and depressed states often appear. Particularly difficult cases transform accumulated negativity into cancer or suicide attempts.

Timely work on character will help to avoid particularly serious conditions. Psychologist-hypnologist Nikita Valerievich Baturin claims: it’s never too late to start building a harmonious personality:

Analysis

This paragraph is a kind of combination of some of the previous ones, since it will ask you to analyze the situation. If you want to learn how to deal with resentment and negative emotions, you need to think clearly and not give in to the manifestations of intense feelings. Analyze the situation: if you were offended by a stranger whom you will most likely never meet again, then you should not think about this offense at all. Forget about it and never remember it so that it does not interfere with your life. If the offense was caused by someone close and this is not the first time, then you will have to use other measures. Just remember that in this situation, your main weapon is a calm conversation, and not harsh accusations.

Positive and negative manifestations of resentment

By its nature, such a reaction is only one of many feelings that a person is capable of expressing. But the impact on relationships with the outside world is so destructive that it is recommended to get rid of touchiness and reduce it to a minimum.

Negative manifestations:

• spoils relationships with loved ones;
• makes the touchy person unbearable;
• creates a negative image among friends and colleagues;
• affects physical condition;
• takes a lot of time.

It’s curious: for the “victim” himself there is nothing negative in this bad habit. Why does a person get offended by trifles? Psychology provides the answer: this is a simple and effective way to manipulate others. If you were offended, you got what you wanted. The goal has been achieved.

In fact, the positive manifestations of these reactions are different:

• a chance to identify your weaknesses. Words and actions hurt when they touch a nerve. Is it possible to somehow protect, work through, strengthen the weakened “bastion” of the personality in order to avoid repetition? By the way, this is one way to distract yourself: start working on ways to protect yourself in the future;
• a defensive reaction from the pain of breaking up with a loved one. There is a respite, time to switch from the very fact of separation to the feeling of injustice;
• one of the ways to cleanse yourself of accumulated negativity. In the process of getting rid of negative attitudes, a person clears away the “blockages” of frustration, anger, indignation and despondency that have been quietly accumulating.

NLP

There is such a technique as neurolinguistic programming, abbreviated as NLP. With its help, the most difficult problems that people have are often solved, and it also allows one to cope with grievances. One of the most striking examples is the burning of a sheet of grievances. You need to write down on a piece of paper all the insults that a person has caused you, throw out all your emotions on paper, and then burn this sheet, imagining how they burn in the fire. It looks quite strange, but in reality it turns out to be an extremely effective method. You program yourself for your own happiness, and listing grievances and burning a leaf is just a symbol that allows you to convince yourself as simply as possible that you are the master of your own happiness.

Why get rid of feelings of resentment?

Touchiness in psychology, if it does not show signs of a conscious bad habit, is, in fact, a subjective assessment of someone else’s life beliefs. Because someone thinks differently and does not live up to expectations, the victim suffers. Responsibility for suffering in most cases lies with her.

Getting rid of the feeling of resentment brings to life:

• calm;
• relief of the soul;
• physical health;
• psycho-emotional well-being;
• inspiration and success.

There is no point in wasting your time on frustration and anger that a loved one or colleague did not do something or did it in their own way. At the first sign of a negative reaction, you need to take control of the situation and get rid of destructive emotions.

In the process of getting rid of it, it will be important to analyze what is happening in order to prevent a recurrence in the future. For example, if a loved one did not give a gift on the occasion of a certain date, you need to figure out why this happened. He forgot? This means that next time it’s worth reminding him in advance, preferably in a gentle form, so that he won’t be offended.

Are all people equally touchy?

Statistics from psychological surveys show that all people are offended in one way or another. But some of them are able to carry resentment and anger for decades, while others forget even the most severe betrayals within a month. This happens due to special vulnerabilities of the psyche and consciousness. The so-called “pain points” arise from complexes, childhood experiences, and some unpleasant experiences. For example, calling a girl who spent 5 years losing weight from 120 kg to 60 fat (even as a joke) can seriously offend her. After all, she had a difficult struggle with weight in the past.

How to forgive an insult?

Touchiness is an acquired character trait in psychology. We learn this from the adults around us, adopt it as a bad habit, and then spend a long time looking for ways to get rid of it.

Two pieces of advice for victims:

• throw these experiences out of your heart;
• learn to forgive.

It is difficult for someone who has been accustomed to taking offense at others all their life, manipulating them consciously or unconsciously, to follow these tips. Psychologists' clients often misunderstand what is meant by seemingly simple phrases.

Remove resentment from your heart

There is a good exercise for this: emotional isolation. It is based on a simple example. The offender is perceived by the victim as a source of conflict. If she sees him every day without the opportunity to physically isolate herself (for example, colleagues working in the same office), she should try to turn off any emotions towards the offender. A notepad, pen, paper on the table do not evoke any emotions. The same neutral indifference must be formed towards the offender. It may be difficult at first. But over time, the quarrel based on subjective perception will be forgotten, the conflict will be settled. Neutrality is the best assistant for those who want to get rid of the negative consequences of communication.

How to achieve neutrality? Work through the conflict situation once with yourself or a psychologist, come to the conclusion: the negative reaction is caused by unjustified expectations in relation to the opponent, who could not reach the set bar. Let go of the offender along with his internal perception of the world, norms, and attitudes.

How a psychologist can help: teach you how to train stress resistance. Emotional stability is the key to a harmonious, successful personality.

Learning to forgive

Forgiveness is a conscious state, sincere, always coming from the heart. Only such a deep feeling really helps to deal with conflicts faster, as well as control the situation, promptly stopping attempts to offend and the desire to be offended.

To learn to forgive, you need to work daily with your life attitudes and change them. This can be done in any state, even if at that moment there is no resentment in the heart.

Five steps to the ability to forgive and love:

1. Live in harmony with your emotions.
2. Learn to let go of the past and live for today.
3. Control states, choose them consciously (“I choose forgiveness, not revenge”).
4. Learn lessons from each situation and use them in the future.
5. Forgive yourself, give love and light to others.

How a psychologist can help: There are training exercises for each step. A written statement of one’s own views, positions, and attitudes, followed by analysis, helps a lot. If you have a strong desire to follow this path, sign up for a consultation with psychologist Nikita Baturin. With its help, it is easier to learn to get rid of grievances.

Old grudge against ex-husband

When entering into marriage, lovers swear loyalty to each other, but after a couple of years there is no trace of love. Cheating on your husband, betrayal, accumulated anger and pain - all this is food for resentment. It accumulates and grows more and more. The time comes when a woman can no longer cope with the pain and files for divorce.

New relationships heal, but not always. A third of women do not remarry after divorce. It is important to let go of the offense against your husband, since an offended woman is not able to accept a man and love him.

The ex-husband does not help around the house, is not interested in the children, and the woman is angry with him. On the other hand, after a divorce, how often can you notice that the mother turns the child against the father, manipulates the children, and does not allow the father to see the child.

Sometimes divorce is preceded by the husband's infidelity. It’s hard to forgive your husband for his betrayal, but if you don’t do this, then over time the woman will become angry with the whole world and ruin her health and life.