Grudges
Many people hold grudges that can last a life time.
Every day I see people around me who are stuck. People reluctant or struggling to move forward from a past relationship whether romantic, family or work related. It is easy to identify that someone is holding a grudge when they are unable or unwilling to forgive the other person. Sometimes their behavior related to the situation doesn't seem to match the reality taking place. It is an anachronism to respond to a current problem with a solution from 1998. Often we hold onto our grudges unwittingly, while wishing we could drop them and live in the present, without the injustices of the past occupying so much of our mental space.
So why do we hold onto grudges when they interfere with our lives and cause us great distress?
Why do we keep wounds open and active, living in past experiences of pain?
What keeps us stuck when we want to move on and let go?
Most important, how can we let go?
Grudges come with an identity or a purpose.
With our grudge intact, we know who we are: the person who was “wronged.” As much as we don’t like it, there also exists a kind of rightness and strength in this identity or purpose. We have something that defines us—our anger and victimhood—which gives us a sense of solidness and reason. This grievance that carries weight. To let go of our grudge, we have to be willing to let go of our identity as the “wronged” one. We have to be willing to let go of whatever strength, solidity, or possible sympathy and understanding we receive through that “wronged” identity. We have to be willing to drop the “I” who was mistreated and step into a new version of ourselves. This new version of ourselves is one we don’t know yet. It gives us mental space. This space allows the present moment to determine who we are, not the past injustice.
What we are really wanting is the love and compassion that the past event may not have given us. We want extra kindness that we believe victims can receive. The problem with carrying around the grudge is it becomes anger and bitterness. Grudges keep people at arms lengths and they keep us from connecting with ourselves. We end up being the ones that suffer.
Now how do I let go of the grudge?
The path to freedom from a grudge is not so much through forgiveness of the other person (although this can be helpful), but rather through loving our own self. To bring our own loving presence to the suffering that crystallized into the grudge. The pain that was caused by the other person is what ultimately heals the suffering and allows the grudge to melt. If it feels like too much to go directly into the pain of a grudge, we can move toward it with the help of someone we trust, or bring a loving presence to our wound, but from a safe place inside. The idea is not to re-traumatize ourselves by diving into the original pain but rather to attend to it with the compassion that we didn’t receive, that our grudge is screaming for, and bring it directly into the center of the storm. Our heart contains both our pain and the antidote for our pain.
To let go of a grudge we need to move the focus off of the one who “wronged” us, off of the story of our suffering, and into the felt experience of what we actually lived. When we move our attention inside, into our heart, our pain shifts from being a “something” that happened to us, another part of our narrative, to a sensation that we know intimately, a felt sense that we are one with from the inside.
In re-focusing our attention, we find the soothing kindness and compassion that the grudge itself desires. In addition, we take responsibility for caring about our own suffering, and for knowing that our suffering matters, which can never be achieved through our grudge, no matter how fiercely we believe in it.