Resentment Spreads Like An Air-Born Virus
By Steven Stosny, from Psychology Today Blog
Our smallest emotions (low intensity, largely outside awareness) are the earliest guardians of the most important things to and about us. (What Stosny calls Core Values. Jim)
Unless there is palpable threat in the environment, those subtle emotions tell us relatively little about the world, compared to the volumes they speak about the current state of our values.
If you experience sustained interest with occasional enjoyment over time, you are being true to what is most important to you and about you. If not, you are either thinking of loss and failure or trying to avoid their discomfort by eating, drinking, shopping, working, care-taking, or something else that you either think you shouldn't do or shouldn't have to do.
If the holes that failure and loss gouge in the heart do not fill with more value, they fill with resentment.
A first-time client makes a casual, off the cuff complaint as she stuffs the mail she had been reading in the waiting room into a small purse. She wants to start right in talking about her "anxiety problem," the reason she made the appointment. But I need to know more about this little gesture, despite her dismissal of any significance in it. It turns out that one of the letters she was reading is from her son's school.
"The pressure about stupid soccer games," she shakes her head in feigned disbelief and a self-conscious smile. A single mother with a stressful job, she's just too busy to take greater interest in her child's soccer play. "If he helped around the house a little, I'd have more time for his games." It seems so unfair that she has to worry about soccer, on top of all the other things she has to do. "He expects me to drop everything and go to every game, like my time means nothing. He gets that selfish streak from his father."
Her focus on the "unfairness of it all," which began a couple of weeks before this appointment, had subsequently expanded, quite unconsciously, to include the "cult of soccer moms," the school board, and the community-at-large for feeding the soccer monster. She was starting to think the world inflicted her with increasingly bad feelings for no good reason. Her emotions were becoming instruments of punishment and harm, rather than guardians of her deeper values.
Of course, fairness, the school, and her child's expectations were not the cause of her anxiety. Her feelings of discomfort were not telling her about an unfair world; they were trying to tell her that she was violating the most important thing about herself.
Resentment and other bad moods warn of a value system in trouble.
That's why no one resents or worries or gets depressed about just one thing. Moods generalize, in subtle and inexorable ways, to form chains of many varied links. Were she not resentful about a lot of other things, the not-quite-soccer mom would have been interested in her son's game naturally, because she valued him. If she couldn't attend his games, she would have made it clear to him that she very much wanted to, instead of blaming her guilt and regret on his "selfishness."
Her chain of resentment obscured her deeper core values and robbed her of the sheer joy of them.
I know from using this example in presentations that it's easy for people to see her resentment, while remaining oblivious to their own. (They never wonder why other people's resentment drives them up a wall.) The unconscious nature of resentment is what makes it so hard to regulate.
Resentment spreads like an air-born virus. If you get near a resentful person, you are likely to become resentful without noticing your mood change. If someone comes into work resentful, by lunchtime, just about everyone seated near that person is resentful.
Like individuals, even larger communities and organizations also use bad moods to avoid the discomfort of self-doubt. A neighborhood rife with resentment can make a whole community devalue some of its citizens. Just like the reluctant soccer mom, resentful communities lose sight of their deeper values of respect and tolerance.
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Steven Stosny, Ph.D., treats people for anger and relationship problems. Recent books: How to Improve your Marriage without Talking about It, and Love Without Hurt.
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God bless your family and your marriage.
Jim Stephens
