Resentment: Feeling of displeasure or indignation at someone or something regarded as the cause of injury or insult; pique; irritation. Indignation or ill will stemming from a feeling of having been wronged or offended. A common synonym is anger.
We are all familiar with the idea of resentment. Realizing it in ourselves is a different matter. And appreciating its corrosive nature is yet another. The antidote to resentment is forgiveness, yet often we are directed to forgive, but forgive what? Christianity has long advocated forgiveness: it is enshrined in the Lord’s prayer. “Forgive us our (sins, trespasses, debts), as we forgive those who (sin against us, trespass against us, incur debt).” As I recite the Lord’s prayer, I often scratch my head and search for the sins or trespasses for which I am responsible. The words don’t immediately translate to my personal experiences.
However, as I think about it I realize that trespasses pertain to violations of a boundary; they are actions that get us into trouble, or cause trouble for others. The next phrase in the Lord’s prayer, “lead us not into temptation,” has to do with cognitions. I think that rephrasing it to say “lead us away from temptation” is more accurate. So where do temptations come from? I think temptations grow in the rich soil of resentments.
Early encounters
My first encounter with the idea of resentment occurred when I was a medical student at UCLA. In the early 1960s, the medical school had a very strong Department of psychosomatic medicine. I strongly sensed that many physical maladies originated in the mind, but the Freudian psychoanalytic principles advocated at the time offered little credible evidence or ideas about the bridge between mind and body. I happened on a book about rheumatoid arthritis, authored by Loring Swaim, a professor of rheumatology at Harvard Medical School, titled Arthritis, Medicine, and the Spiritual Laws, published in 1962. Practicing medicine in the 30s and 40s and frustrated with the inadequacies of medical treatment, Swaim turned to psychosomatic medicine and underwent psychoanalysis. His patients’ analyses did nothing for their rheumatoid arthritis. As he struck out on his own, he noticed that many of his patients were resentful, chronically so. After getting the resentment on the table, dealing with them and applying the age-old anodyne of forgiveness, the patients got better.
My next encounter with resentment was at a gestalt therapy weekend marathon. In our group of about 25 people, one man stood out. About age 50, he radiated such an aura of suppressed seething anger that all the participants in the group avoided him. About halfway through the weekend he announced, “I want to work!” The therapist was a PhD psychologist named Jerry Greenwald. Next to Jerry was an open seat called the “hot seat.” In front of the hot seat was a stool. Taking the hot seat, the man said he wanted to work on a dream, and he was directed to recite the dream in the first person present tense. The dream had something to do with Indians wanting to scalp him, and as he relived and enacted the dream, a look of recognition swept across his face. “I know what this is about. I want to put Joey on the stool in front of me.” He proceeded to dialogue with Joey, who it turns out was a roommate in an orphanage that our man had grown up in. Joey had visited unspeakable acts of violence on the smaller boy. “Joey, I’m looking for you, every time I turn the corner, every room I enter, I scan the faces, and someday I’m going to find you!” Jerry allowed him to vent his rage, but the guy didn’t seem to be able to get anywhere, so Jerry said quietly, “what do you think about forgiving him?” After a long pause, the man said in a soft voice “Joey, I am going to let you go. You were a dumb schmuck like I was, stuck in frustration and isolation. At the time you seemed like the devil himself, but I can now admit that you got your anger out on me. I don’t like it, but I’m tired of letting the anger eat me up.” His entire countenance softened, and the whole room breathed a long sigh of relief.
Get well, or get even?
I next encountered resentment in psychoanalytic training with James Masterson, who, in his conferences and writings about personality disorders, spoke of the necessity of the mastery of the Talonic impulse (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth). Masterson would say to his analysands, “Do you want to get well, or do you want to get even?” Impressed, I underwent supervision with his colleague Ralph Klein for my patients at the addiction medicine service at Vista Del Mar Hospital. Ralph pointed out that often the substance user is shooting up or drinking as a way of telling the world to go fuck itself. Ralph’s direct and violent language resonated with my patients. In one instance, a 35-year-old heroin addict checked in at about 4 AM. When I saw her at seven, she was preparing to leave AMA. Realizing that I had about 30 seconds of her attention before she left, I used Ralph’s words with emphasis. Without a word, she threw her things into a bag and left. Eight months later she returned to the hospital for depression, not drug use. She told me that she had been eight months clean! Astonished, I asked her what happened. She replied that the words I used had resonated, and she had had no desire to use. About that time, in my readings about suicide, I encountered the same dynamic, the suicide often a proxy for homicide.
The microscopic corrosiveness of resentment
But the event that brought home to me the microscopic corrosiveness of resentment was a sex therapy training conference that my wife and I took part in. The conference was experiential in nature. We were directed to ask, before starting an intimate encounter, “do you have any withholds?” In other words, are you withholding or not expressing something, even the slightest grievance? It was amazing to observe in ourselves that even the tiniest and most inconsequential grievance impacted our sexual responses. I began at that moment to read the body language and voice inflections of those with whom I was interacting, to spot the seeds that if left unrecognized would corrode the relationship.
Based on these experiences and learnings, and on the experiences of my own personal psychotherapies, I came up with the questions on the PSSU. I appreciate your efforts to find a suitable scale to validate the resentment scale on the PSSU. It is interesting and instructive to note the paucity of valid scales that are out there.
What do you do about resentment in your work as a therapist? Assigning letter writing as a task is my favorite solution. I will elaborate on this in my synopsis on resentment, which will be part of our treatment package.