As the conversation with Emma today dug deeper, I remembered a process someone explained to me a year ago around working through resentments. It goes something like this:
- Who am I resentful at and why?
- What does this affect in my life?
- Am I willing to try to show this person the same tolerance, pity, and patience that I’d give a sick friend?
- What’s my part in this situation? How did I add to it?
- Have I been telling myself that I’m right and they’re wrong? (Yes…)
- Am I using this sense of superiority to gain self-esteem or power? (*sigh* okay, yes….)
- Am I doing this because I’m afraid that the “regular” me is not enough? (i don’t want to admit this, but, yeah, sure, okay, that’s one way of looking at it…)
- They didn’t act right. What values could they have been acting with instead?
- How can I work on strengthening those values in my own life?
- I’m grateful that I have this obstacle to practice on.
Questions #8 and #9 go together and require a lot of thoughtfulness, honesty, and humility (which I can tap into if I paid attention during #4-#7). If I can find an overlap between What They Suck At and What I Probably Oughta Work On, I’ve hit on where I need to put my focus. Then something magical happens (or I need to lather, rinse, repeat), and the resentment starts to fade away.
Try it sometime. Let me know how it works for you.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Wow, this works pretty well! I think it’s really helpful for me to write out each step, not try to answer it in my head. I like seeing it in B&W, and I spend more time on each answer.
Doing this I realized that I resent people because they are not doing something that I don’t want to do either, but think I have to. For instance I want to appear indefatigable (because my regular mortal self is “not good enough”), and then I am angry at the other person and criticize them for not working hard enough.
Oy. I can tell this is a big area for me to work on. Thanks for the tool!
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Yep – done that. Very helpful, and ALWAYS worth revisiting. I really like how you’ve laid it out here — it goes into some great, thoughtful, and sometimes annoying detail. Thanks.