You are loading the dishwasher again. Nobody asked you to, and nobody else noticed it needed doing, and somewhere around the third plate a small hot feeling rises in your chest. You put the plate in a little harder than necessary. Then a cup, harder still. If anyone walked in now and asked what was wrong you would say “nothing,” and you would almost believe it, because the feeling you are having is not one most of us are proud of. Resentment. Good women, we were taught, are generous, give without counting and never keep score, so when resentment turns up we push it down fast, slightly ashamed, and get on with the plates, banging them only a little.
I want to suggest that resentment is a messenger, and that it has usually travelled a long way to reach you. It tends to arrive when we have been saying yes on the outside and no on the inside for a long time, when we have given more than we wanted to without saying so, or when a line has been crossed that we never drew, or drew so faintly that nobody could see it. In that sense resentment is simply what an unspoken boundary feels like from the inside. It is not a sign that you are mean. It is a sign that something has gone unsaid for too long.
The usual response, swallowing it, seems tidy, but it has a cost. In a large set of studies, Gross and John (2003) compared people who habitually managed their emotions by suppressing their expression with people who tended to reappraise, or reinterpret, the situations causing them. The habitual suppressors tended to experience less positive and more negative emotion, reported lower well-being, and had less close relationships, with others rating them as less likeable on some measures. This describes broad tendencies across many people, not what will happen to any one person at any one sink, but it suggests that the habit of swallowing what we feel is not as neutral as it looks (Gross & John, 2003).
So what if, instead of swallowing the resentment, you opened the letter it brought? When you feel it, the hot flare at the sink or in the car or halfway through a meeting, pause before you act. Don't shout, don't slam the cupboard, don't send the email. Just ask it one question, as if it were a messenger standing at the door with its hat in its hands: what are you here to tell me? The answers are usually very plain, almost disappointingly so. You are doing too much of this. You want help and haven't asked. You said yes to something you didn't want. You are tired. You need this to be shared. You are not being seen. None of these messages is shameful, and most of them are perfectly reasonable; they have simply not been allowed to speak in words, so they have been speaking in heat.
Once you have heard the message, you get to decide what to do with it. Sometimes the answer is a conversation. Sometimes it is an unwrapped no, next time. And sometimes it is simply knowing, and then choosing to finish the dishes anyway, but as a choice rather than a silent sacrifice, which turns out to be a surprisingly large difference. Resentment is uncomfortable, but it is loyal. It will keep coming back to the door, again and again, until somebody takes the letter. You don't have to be ashamed of it. You only have to listen. And on Saturday we'll look at the other side of the door: what a no can make room for.
Ritual Invitation
The next time you feel resentment, pause before you act and put one hand flat on your chest. Ask silently, what are you here to tell me, and wait for the first plain answer. Write it down later, without judgement. At the end of the week, read the list and notice what the messenger has been trying to say.
Your Turn
Where does resentment turn up most often in your week, and what has it been trying to tell you?
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References
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
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