Bitterness: Part III

Bitterness and resentments reside in two place: our brain and in our heart. It takes up a lot of space that it does not leave room for us to love or to let others in to love us. We are so wounded that we cannot even consider the thought of someone else taking up residence in these places. We carry around those persons who have deeply hurt us. They are living in us without paying any rent or offering us anything more than looking back, being held hostage in the past. We can base our current and future views of life based on that template of immense pain. Those folks hang on us like balls and chains, keeping us stuck in the past, stuck in the pain and stuck in the story, our history.

We can define ourselves based on this pain and our past, keeping this bitterness and resentments alive. For as much as we can close our hearts up to keep people out, we bemoan how no one can love us, wants to be around us, we have no friends. We are miserable and then we wonder why.

When there is a trigger, people can go off on a rant mostly tinged with how it isn’t fair that someone else has caught more breaks than they have, that we had it much easier than someone else. Often it will go in the direction of something outside of what has occurred in our own lives. It can be easy to be hijacked when it continues to feed the bitterness and resentment like traveling around and around on the hamster wheel or the roller coaster.

It seems the older we get, the bitterness and resentments can age us even more as we hold on with tenacity and righteousness. Why are we holding onto that? Where has it gotten us? If we let go of it, does it mean the abusers have won, that what they did did not matter; that WE do not matter? It is a way to keep score.

We have carried this around for so many years that it is a part of our daily living. How would we decide who we are without that pain? Who would we be without those defining childhood injuries?

When we hold onto to those, we are actually strapping those painful people around with us carrying them with us everywhere every day. How much energy does that take? They suck the energy right out of us so we have too little to use to move our lives forward into the present and even the future. They take up so much space in our brains to think of new dreams and possibilities. It stays in our hearts keeping them TOO SMALL (Grinch-like) to care about anyone else or even caring about ourselves.

We do get to decide how much of our time, space, energy, money, wishful thinking that the past will be different if we complain and go back often enough. It does not change. By continuing to hold on bitterness and resentments gives the abusers and others who have hurt us our power, sapping our ability to move forward. Holding on to that does not punish them; it punishes us.

You can decide how much longer are you putting your life on hold while others live theirs.