One of the biggest challenges for me in learning and maintaining healthy boundaries is letting other people own their own reactions, rather than taking them personally.

I was reading a booklet on managing separation for children, which sums this up nicely under a section on reassuring them. One of the key points is “Just listen, don’t feel you have to fix their feelings; it’s painful and you can’t change that”.

However well placed that advice is “don’t feel you have to fix their feelings” telling me (or anyone) not to feel something is not helpful. I feel what I feel. It has been more helpful to me to explore why I feel the need to fix other people’s feelings.

In particular, in the last few years I’ve become aware that my people pleasing tendencies have deep hooks. Usually the more critical a relationship is to me the more I’ll bend over backward to please, not just to be nice or considerate, but rather as a response rooted in trauma.

That said, I have also always had a critical mass where I eventually get fed up and blow up about injustice and exploitation, which Complex PTSD expert Pete Walker says is typical of people who have codependent relational tendencies.

Codependency is the continual state of being focused on the needs, wants and problems of others in order to gain approval and attempt to control outcomes. It's very intertwined with enmeshment trauma and people pleasing.

Enmeshment is when there is no real recognition of self in the family or relationship. The signs I have learned to recognise are when I find myself confusing my emotions with those of a person I have a relationship with, and the cost of individuality feels high.

This means that when someone who is important to my perceived survival (be it in personal or professional relationships) has a negative opinion of me or a negative reaction towards me it can elicit a trauma response within me.

Once I understood why I felt this way, which began in childhood as I explored in Are You Overly Responsible? Actually Seeing Yourself Through Fresh Eyes, then it was a matter of starting to recognise my reactions in the moment and changing my response.

None of this is comfortable, not by a long way. In Perpetua Neo’s article on Fawning: The Fourth Trauma Response After Fight, Flight, Freeze, she talks about stress responses and trauma responses. She says “These are ways the body automatically reacts to stress and danger, controlled by your brain's autonomic nervous system, part of the limbic system. Depending on our upbringing, we can sometimes learn to rely too heavily on one of these responses and this is where the trauma comes into play”.

A critical part of healing is learning to reset my limbic system to, as Perpetua puts it, “update the timekeeper in your brain to understand that then is not now”. This way old trauma can stop replaying in my body in the present.

It sounds simple, but rewiring my brain is a matter of consciously catching what’s going on in the moment and actively working to regulate the nervous system while changing how I react. This is no easy task when, by the very nature of these triggers, the frontal thinking part of the brain shuts down.

To give an illustration of just how challenging this can be in everyday life, I only have to look at what relationship expert Terry Real refers to as the Core Negative Image (CNI) we have of our partners. He says it’s an exaggerated version of our partner at their worst.

For example, Terry’s wife Belinda has a CNI of him as an irresponsible, selfish, undependable, charming boy. His CNI of her is a demanding, insatiable, critical, micromanaging witch.  As Terry says, it’s not their baseline, it’s certainly not their best, it’s not even an accurate description of them at their worst, it’s more like a caricature of them at their worst.

So, in action, Terry might leave the milk out of the refrigerator on the kitchen counter, just as he used to do years ago when their kids were growing up. This triggers Belinda’s CNI of Terry, so she starts talking to him like he’s an irresponsible child. This would trigger his CNI of her and he’d react saying something like “Oh come on it’s just a milk carton, don’t be such a witch” and so on it goes.

Most people react to the exaggeration and fight against it. To break this cycle, Terry says our CNI of our partner is something we want to learn take with a grain of salt. What we should really take notice of is our partner’s CNI of us.

Most people know exactly what this is without asking, because it’s the characteristics and behaviours that get thrown at us like bombs when the other person is triggered.

He says “The beauty of knowing their CNI of you is, instead of fighting, you can duck under. The more you push against it the tighter it gets, so move under or into it instead of opposing it. That would mean, instead of opposing Belinda’s opinion about him being irresponsible, he could own it and say “I know I can be like that at times, I just forgot sorry (and puts the milk away).”

I suspect anyone putting themselves in these shoes can appreciate how tricky it could be to do this without getting sucked into the CNI wrangle. While it is very disarming to know and own the CNI someone has of me, there’s still that deep tap root that feels owning something that is not only negative but perhaps untrue (or at least grossly over exaggerated) feels really unsafe in my body.

For this reason Terry recommends firstly having a modicum of self recovery around self esteem and good internal and external boundaries. Once good boundaries are developed a person is then better placed to observe and think “Mm, so this is what my partner is making up about me. This is their CNI of me, isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that important information about my partner?”

What I notice in going through a separation, if not careful, the predominant interactions can be a tango between each person’s Core Negative Image of the other, making all the sensible advice I was reading extremely challenging.

Even with something that doesn’t elicit a trauma response though, it can still be a challenge to let others have their own reactions. This week I was talking with a close friend who is going through what I can only describe as an existential crisis.

My heart aches for all the challenges life has thrown her way over the last few years, it’s been incredibly intense. My tendency is to want to find words to help, to at least sooth. Nothing I could think of felt adequate. Then I remembered some words I’d read in an email from Teal Swan about self love:

“When people tell you about themselves, receive them without trying to fix them or change their minds. Provide a safe apace to connect.”

So I focused on just that, stopped thinking about it and spoke from the heart instead just acknowledging where she was at and that it’s okay to be there. I just wanted her to feel seen and held.

Then I realised, that is my job, it’s not to fix anything, I simply want the people I love to feel seen and held (emotionally) by me. And, when dealing with negative reactions directed towards me, I want to feel seen and held – by me first and foremost. That is where my boundary work comes in.

There are lots of wonderful boundary statements I’ve read but I’ve found that, in that moment of fire when the frontal lobe of my brain closes up shop and ducks for cover, the only statement I’ve been capable of is the raw observation of the emotional reaction I’m witnessing.

But the great thing is, instead of getting stuck for words, pulled into the line of fire, pushing onward in frustration through the emotional blast determined to make my point, or exploding in fury, I reflect what I am observing and retreat with dignity.

While I’d love to do some deeper somatic work, I know that by calling out the reaction and retreating I’m rewiring my brain and retraining my body to feel more confident and less threatened in those situations. It just takes practice.

​Are you able to see how your nervous system reacts in response to someone else’s difficult emotional reactions? Ultimately becoming aware of why it is happening and when it is happening, then starting to change your reaction is the work to empower yourself instead of allowing it to throw you into a tailspin. 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Space to me feels like opening, expansiveness, finding my centre. But it can also be terrifying when the cosy world of my making seems suddenly blown apart and I find myself freefalling through the vast darkness of an unwelcome space.

My friend asked me to name the three biggest moments in my life when things felt out of control, she recognised my trauma and distress. It was hard to prioritise just three if I’m honest. 

There were the days, weeks, months and years that followed when the person I loved with all my heart told me our relationship was over; the same when I had my first experience of death and both my paternal grandparents died within a couple of months of each other. And there was the day I started at university, alone, and had to navigate my way to a lecture theatre holding three hundred students I didn’t know to study a subject I hadn’t a clue about (computer science), to name just a few.

Then there was, of course, the childhood memory of the day I accompanied my dad to the hospital when my brother was born, all excited, to be left on the stairwell alone while dad went to visit mum and new baby. Children were not allowed in the wards, so I waited unaccompanied, age three, and recall hearing every set of footsteps, watching the door open in hope, anxiously awaiting my dad’s return.

I remember thinking “What if he doesn’t return?”

Circumstances beyond my control that shake the foundations of the reality upon which I’m standing are not new to me. The feeling of being in freefall is not new to me. The fear of the huge space that opens up uninvited can be overwhelming, but I’ve been through this enough to know that the space which appears can also be my growth and expansion if I will befriend it.

As Sarah Blondin says “We walk invisibly cocooned with all the things we wish to control, we think that by keeping these things close that we will be able to manage them. If we keep our worries in plain sight we will have less of a chance of them coming true”.

I have always believed that, once children were involved in a relationship there is no backing out. Of course, that is my belief and a relationship consists of two people. Having had the experience of being jilted before, I was well aware that I actually have no control over whether the other person will stay in relationship with me.

So, since having children, it is fair to say that I have always harboured a fear about this. No more so than since leaving my career, and my financial independence, to be at home with my kids.

In Learning to Surrender, Sarah says “The more we constrict, the more worry and burden we pick up along the way. The denser we become, the more we sink like rocks to the bottom of our river. We then ground ourselves in the turbulent waters rather than allowing ourselves to be carried to the cool, calm waters”.

When I listen to Sarah’s captivating voice her words come from a place far beyond her lips and far beyond the reaches of my mind, the words carry truths that only my heart instantly recognises:

There will be moments in my life where all will seem in chaos and disharmony, and in those moments I must remember the universe is reordering my life to match more of what I am calling forth. Fear is useless in these times; trust – however - is paramount.

This is what I know above all else, I have known this with certainty for a long time.

So while I rage and feel helpless against this dramatic change in my circumstances, it is a dance of the mind versus the heart. My body, knowing this sense of abandonment, begins its trauma response.The mind, in trying to keep me safe, plays out all the “what if” scenarios and, meanwhile, my friend asks me to remember because – in remembering – I also remember the vital part: this too shall pass.

At some point I will stop freefalling through the empty black space and start to construct a different reality. In fact, I can see the glimmers of it now, the many positives that could exist on the other side of the many changes afoot for me and for our kids.

Some words Teal Swan wrote this week in relation to self love caught my interest. She said “The tension you experience is a sign you are giving away your power. It is calling your attention to the areas of your life where your free will is needed as a necessary agent for progress.”

Tension was the word that reeled me in, having chronic tense headaches, shoulders and neck. It will be no accident that in Learning to Surrender, Sarah Blondin also says “These places of tension are where you are holding a secret fear that you are not supported, you’ve been forgotten, that life does not love you, and that you are failing. Imagine cutting the ties to these tense places and allow yourself to be carried into the mysterious and rushing waters raging around you”.

She explains that this does not mean I stop trying to create my best life. It does not mean I give up in the face of stress or adversity. It simply means I let go of the hold it has on my physical body.

I can do this, I know I can, I just need constant reminders right now. And they come in many guises and forms, through the friends who love me, and the wise sharing of people like Teal and Sarah, whose work I love.

It occurs to me that the space that feels like freefalling through the vast darkness and the space that feels like opening, expansiveness and finding my centre, are one in the same. It’s all about perspective.

I hear Sarah’s words “You are being asked to surrender to the beauty trying to unfold, the beauty of that far off land of dreams you have been looking outside yourself for. Understand that it has been trying to take you there all along. Now get out of your own way and allow it to.”

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Even in Grief There Are lessons to Be Learned, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will?, The Soul’s Yearning – How to Recognise Your Inner Work, and Make the Invisible Visible - Celebrate the Gold in Your Emotional Reactions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

In a podcast called Making Money, Making Change, Rha Goddess said “For a lot of us, we’ve been taught that we have to do certain things in order to get love, and that love is just not forthcoming, When we feel that anything we want to do, or feel passionate about, isn’t important or doesn’t deserve to be sustained, we are in the wounding of indoctrination”.

The wounding of indoctrination basically points to the way my inner world was shaped by my upbringing and the unhelpful beliefs I developed about myself and others along the way.

For example, Lisa Romano, who specialises in co-dependency and enmeshment trauma, makes the point “If a child does not know they have a self, how can that child love, honour, respect or care for the self it does not yet have conscious awareness of?”

Codependency is the continual state of being focused on the needs, wants and problems of others in order to gain approval and attempt to control outcomes. It's very intertwined with enmeshment trauma and people pleasing.

Typical codependency behaviours are compulsively wanting to fix others problems, perfectionism and doing for others things for that they should do for themselves. A great statement I read is "High functioning codependents may find themselves believing they are acting out of love, when in reality they are acting out of fear"

Enmeshment is when there is no real recognition of self in the family or relationship. The signs I learned to recognise are when I find myself confusing my emotions with those of a person I have a relationship with, and the cost of individuality feels high.

Lisa talks about common situations where this arises: if one parent is narcissistic, or one is self sacrificing, or parents live in denial, or addiction is the go-to, chaos is the norm, or poverty the reality.

She says “Yes, emotional, verbal and financial abuse all count; demeaning, devaluing and demonising a child counts; being conditioned to be your parent’s therapist, caretaker or pseudo partner counts; and being raised in any form of chaos, unpredictability and instability counts. Unless something changes within us, patterns continue to unfold outside of us”.

Rha, in the podcast, paints a beautiful picture of possibility when she says “There are, however, others who have been loved and love positively, especially in the formative years, who hold maybe a different belief system. They see love everywhere, they have no problem receiving love and participating in the laws of reciprocity, the giving and the receiving”.

For someone like me, who in Lisa’s terms suffers from codependency post traumatic stress syndrome, I aspire to see the world in this way. I can and do for short bursts, but I want to be able to sustain it, that is my work because I truly believe there is only love and resistance to love.

Lisa asks “Imagine if within every atom of your being you felt and believed you are enough and it’s your birthright to imagine the life you desire, in spite of any unwanted experiences?”

Yet those unwanted experiences can be traumatizing, bewildering and downright distracting. I’d go so far as to say they have completely consumed my existence for the most part of my life. In my relationships I’ve often attracted people who are very different to me, opposites in many ways: I find myself being the giver in relationships with a taker, the internaliser with the externaliser. Why does this happen?

“Understanding and changing is healing” Annette Noontil

If part of healing is understanding I am pretty sure I have that part down pat. While I’ve written in the past about What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People, I recently read a fictional novel by Santa Montefiore that helped me understand this dynamic more deeply from a soul perspective.
The Secrets of the Lighthouse is focused around a wife and mother who has died but, rather than following the light, she remains tethered to the earthly plane unseen by the people she has loved and lost.

In life she had constantly set her husband challenges to prove his love, and nothing he ever gave was enough, eventually he inevitably became weary and resentful. He had given her everything he had to give and still she wanted ever increasing devotion.

As she watches on she initially delights in her husband’s misery at her death but, eventually, she begins to see the light, and reflects:

“I know I have little love in my heart that is not tarnished by jealousy. I also know that light is love and it is strong enough to slay the snake. I realise then that I do have the power to raise my vibration, after all the only thing capable of transmuting negativity is love… I recognise that this pain that weakens my jealousy and fills me with guilt is compassion.

This new longing to take away his pain makes me feel strangely uplifted. How odd it is to feel pleasure in this way. I have only ever thought of myself. My love was a selfish love and therefore not love at all, but neediness. I realise now my whole life was driven by this desperate need – and my death a result of it.

I wanted more and more and went to terrible lengths to get it. I never felt loved enough. If only I had thought of what I could give and not of how much I could be given, I would have been happy. If only I had shown him love, I would have felt loved enough, that’s the irony of it.

I am not as powerless as I had previously thought; I am powerful if my actions are motivated by true love. Why does it take so much unhappiness to make us realise there is nothing of value in our lives but love? … It is all that I am, I just never knew it.”

Having given everything I had to give in my relationships, I could identify with the widower. While it was useful to see a possible return to love from the other perspective, it was also a useful message in the futility of hanging on in the hopes someone will change and validate and love me by just doing more of the same things.  

So identifying the parts of me that were self sacrificing and over giving, and why, has been a huge part of the journey. As has recognizing that these are not patterns I’d want to perpetuate in my own children.

Changing is the harder part, and for that I have worked consciously to define and start to hold my boundaries and to ask myself in more situations “What would someone who loves themselves do in this situation?”

To end on another quote of Rha’s “We do have to, on some level, make peace with the fact we are here to grow. Sometimes those lessons feel yummy and sometimes they feel lousy. But if we can get the insight, if we can pay enough attention to get the gift of the lesson, we do become more of who we are meant to be. This work is all about the invitation to become more of who you really are, then you are free.”

Do you yet recognise your inner work?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

When I was growing up, I tried to minimise the exposure I had to any kind of negative emotional reactions towards me, having been at the sharp end of many of those from my mother. I did this by trying to be good, and thinking ahead about the consequences of my actions on her emotional state.

How that has translated to my adult life is an over developed sense of responsibility towards the way other people feel. It is one thing for me to be considerate, another to lose myself in the process. This of course points to learning about having and communicating healthy boundaries, something that was a foreign concept to me until the last year or two.

I was under the impression that being in relationship meant doing things I wasn’t actually all that comfortable doing in order to make other people happy, and them doing things for me in return. Making sure other people were not unhappy with me is what felt safe for me within my body, when they were unhappy it made me feel anxious and out-of-kilter.

While I have a huge capacity to do a lot for others, and a high tolerance in not necessarily receiving much gratitude, there has always been a limit to my martyrdom. Inside, I’m sure my soul has been screaming, and when this limit had been reached – albeit when I’m way beyond an already unhealthy threshold – that expresses through me in anger and resentment.

Then I read Annette Noontil’s life lessons and I had lots of ah-ha moments. Annette Noontil was involved in looking after others for a large part of her life, first in caring for her father, then in nursing before having a family. Later she took what she had learned about healing and, with more research and determination, she began to share the wisdom she had gained, summed up as “your attitude is reflected in your body”.

This resulted in one of my favourite do-it-yourself books The Body is the Barometer of the Soul 2 which helps people recognise the concepts that limit them, how they show up in the body and how to look within for answers and activate change. In her very Aussie ‘to-the-point’ way of describing things, here is what jumped out at me initially:

• We only see what we need to see and grow from, so what we see in others we have in ourselves. If it aggravates you, you have that attitude or concept quite badly. “Wow, that takes a lot of swallowing” I thought, “but it kind of rings true”.
• Treat others as your equal, we all have good points. Take note of everything positive in people as they reflect you also. “That also takes a bit of swallowing, but if it’s true of the bad stuff then it makes sense it’s true of the good stuff too right?”
• You attract what you need to learn. “I’m starting to get it”
• We have all come here to learn from each other. “Okay, it makes sense”
• Respect people for where they are at and accept them when they challenge your patience. Notice their good qualities and just get on with your life. Nobody needs to be saved. “Really? This is kind of taking away my excuses to be mad at people.”
• Understanding and changing is healing. “Gotcha!”

Then there were the parts that popped out and helped straighten my thinking around this issue of responsibility:

• We love to be of service but nobody loves being a servant. “You got that sister!” I thought
• It is best not to do more than 50% for people because you take away their opportunity to learn and grow. “Um, yes, okay that makes sense, oops!”
• If you have to do for others make sure you learn something for yourself from what you have done and then you will not be drained. “Drained, yes, that is how I feel”
• Ask for what you want instead of waiting for permission. “Really? But shouldn’t people who truly love me know what I want?” Uncomfortable realising dawning...
• Your life is your business and you have to take responsibility for it. “Oh crap, I’ve been too busy taking care of everyone else’s business.”
• If you are about to do for others, make sure they have asked for your help. “Really but am I not just being nice? Mm, light bulb moment, on occasions when others do do something for me I can feel like they think I’m inadequate. Drats!”
• By doing for others what they could be doing for themselves you are taking away their opportunity to grow. “Oh, I didn’t think of it that way.”
• Learn to receive as well as to give. “Receive? How?”

This was a bit of a wakeup call. While I didn’t have a name for it then, she also said a lot about boundaries:

• You need to be caring for yourself then those others will begin to respect you because you will have respect for yourself. “I didn’t think of it that way before but it makes sense.”
• Beingness is using all your inner power to be yourself and in your own energy, no matter what negativity is around you. It is living in your feelings and letting others do the same. When you are in control of your power you do not want to control others. “But I often don’t know how I feel until I get mad.”
• The compassion you seek is mostly for yourself, so when you learn to show it to yourself, you will then show it to others and more loving relationships flow. “That sounds good, but how?”
• You need strong boundaries to practice detachment, but life is so much more relaxed when you do. “Strong boundaries sound exhausting” was my first thought.
• Be married to the process of looking inside yourself for answers and divorced from the result – what people do with your information is none of your business. “Mm, I might have to work on my delivery then..and what if they still get mad? Oh, how they react is not my business. Lightbulb moment!”

From there I started to read a lot more about boundaries, Evette Rose’s Healing Your Boundaries book was great for helping me define my boundaries, and Terri Cole’s book Boundary Boss for giving me tools and words to help communicate my boundaries and hold them in difficult situations.

This hasn’t been a linear learning path, it’s been more like one step forward, two to the side, five back and finally another leap forward again. A lot of my old stuff got dragged up out of the murky waters and continues to as I react to situations, reflect and relearn.

In my experience it’s often the very thing I try to avoid, or to resist, that needs to be faced in order for me to grow and fulfil my potential. Relationships that aren’t working, or jobs that are miserable, I plough on in a state of discontent, fear and anxiety. That is what it comes down to, a deep seated fear that the real me, my real needs and desires won’t be accepted. I’m trying to avoid rejection. And yet,in the process I’m rejecting myself.

Eleanor Roosevelt said “Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility.  For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.”

When I was taking responsibility for other people who gladly let me, I used to think of this quote smugly. But now I realise I was a co-conspirator in that and the quote applies equally to me.

Ironically for someone with an over-developed sense of responsibility (towards others), it’s actually taking responsibility for me that matters most. Each time I come back to myself after taking responsibility for what I really need and asserting my boundaries, I wonder why I hadn’t done it so much sooner.

Have you caught a glimpse of yourself anew in reading this? Are you ready to take a helicopter ride high above the canopy and see yourself from a different perspective? To see that all you desire awaits
if only you can take more responsibility for your own needs? Are you ready to face your fears?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was listening to relationship expert Terry Real recount a conversation with a client whose partner had really changed his ways. He had become a nice, thoughtful, connected guy; having previously been a “prize jerk”. Despite this, his client was still stuck in resentment, what he calls “her dysfunctional stance”.

So Terry asks his client who the resentful one was in her family growing up, where did she learn this from? He knows that his clients are either reacting to this, or learning to repeat it, or some combination of the two.

She responds “My mom, she was resentful for breakfast, lunch and dinner. She hated my dad and made it perfectly clear”. Rather than enlisting her daughter as a co-conspirator against her father (one possibility), she had instead been very narcissistic and had little connection with her daughter. So the client’s stance in resentment was actually a way to be close to a parent who did not want to be close to her at all.

He observes “So resentment is the family business. You are in union with your mother by sharing a vision of what a relationship looks like. If you let this new man in, you’re going to be leaving your mother.”

In short, she unleashed a lot of grief as she let go of the last vestige of unity with her mother and embraced her husband. And, so far at least, the resentment hasn’t resurfaced.

While I didn’t have that same dynamic growing up, I recognise the ugly truth of resentment in my life.
I grew up with a mother whom I felt resented having to take care of me. She was often tense and overwhelmed, especially when on her own with my brother and I (which, since she was the primary caregiver was often). And if we “weren’t being good” it would throw her into fits of rage.

In short, I grew up feeling that my needs and desires were secondary to ensuring that my mum’s emotional landscape was smooth and even, and I was responsible for that. This developed into a pattern of being a co-dependent people pleaser with no idea about boundaries and – as I grew – I resented my mother for putting all that on me as a young child.

In How to Let Go of Resentment Teal Swan defines resentment as “a state of being in pain as a result of perceiving you have been treated wrongly, unfairly and unjustly”.

She makes the following key points:

• Whether something is right, fair or just is subjective
• Whether circumstances were such that a person was or was not treated fairly, either way resentment can be present
• Resentment is one of the strongest hooks that anchors a person to the past
• Resentment immediately converts itself to distrust (when you feel you’ve been treated wrongly you cannot rely on the person to care for your best interests)
• Resentment is almost always fuelled by years’ worth of earlier experiences of being treated unfairly
• Letting go (or forgiving) can give people the feeling that they have to let go of the unmet need to be treated fairly and justly, and so to honour this need they will not forgive
• Resentment may be kept as both a boundary and a personal reminder as if to say “no one will ever do this to me again”
• The ego can feel a sense of itself being right and good when it is in the victim role with someone else in the perpetrator role
• In close relationships being the one who was wronged puts the other person in a role where they have to “make it up to you”, creating a power imbalance
• Resentment kills relationships but it is not a monster or enemy, just the natural by-product of a lack of resolution.

I can attest to all of that. Resentment is the toxic by-product of the unhealthy cycle my children’s father and I were stuck in for years. Coming into the relationship we were two people seeking to find ourselves and to have a family. Both those things happened, and both are true blessings. But they happened painfully because we were both unconsciously stuck in unhealthy patterns of behaviour and unable to express our personal truths.

We were two symbiotic dysfunctional beings, one accustomed to taking on too much responsibility (especially for others), the other accustomed to having others take responsibility for them. Putting this another way, I felt safe and like I was fulfilling my duty to love by doing for him things he was capable of doing for himself. He felt safe and entitled to those things in a love relationship. Yet both of us were resentful.

Annette Noontil says “By doing for others what they could be doing for themselves you are taking away their opportunity to grow.” Both souls were calling out for a healthy balance, replaying ingrained patterns in hope of a resolution.

From a broader perspective I definitely feel happy to have arrived at a point of being able to express my truths, and he his. But – as with all growth – I often shake my head in wonder at why it took so long and had to be so painful.

Terry Real says “What we long for is the divine... the gods and goddesses that are going to complete us...and what we’re stuck with is an imperfect being. What we’ve lost in our culture is that it’s exactly the collision of your particular imperfections with mine (and how we manage that together) which is the stuff of intimacy...that’s what drives us deep”.

In her article (which is also available as a video) How to Let Go of Resentment Teal gives a wealth of information which she then sums up as “Focus directly on resolution and the by-products of non-resolution – including resentment – will cease to exist.”

So what remains unresolved in your life? Where do you still feel pain as a result of perceiving you have been treated wrongly, unfairly and unjustly? Has resentment become your family business? And what are you willing to do to let it go?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Take Heart - It Takes Courage and Tenacity to Step Into Your Power, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, Are You Aching to Be Accepted By Someone Who Doesn’t See You?, Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity and Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.