The idea of a justified resentment can seem to be very comforting and yet be quite damaging at the same time, often leading to a somewhat distorted emotional response to an event or a situation.
Power of Resentment
The book, Alcoholics Anonymous, uses very strong language to describe the power of resentments.
It says resentment ‘destroys more alcoholics than anything else’ and ‘from it stem all forms of spiritual disease’.
People sometimes get a bit confused or even analytical about what is a resentment as opposed to simply being angry or having a beef with someone or simply being a bit fed up with life.
Analysing what a resentment is or is not in terms of an emotional response can easily drift into the realms of theory, which is probably not that helpful.
Many people in recovery will have had what they might refer to as ‘their angry years’ either before their drinking, during their drinking or even after their drinking. Quite often people in recovery who have been sober for a while but have not really done much ‘recovery stuff’’ are referred to as dry drunks, and often their level of anger is incredibly intense.
Lived Experience
The point of the above is to stress that a theoretical discussion of what a resentment is is to an extent not really that relevant, most people’s understanding of anger comes from a lived experience of their own anger or rage.
Many people in recovery will understand what this lived experience actually means, and many will have come to realise the danger of how this makes them feel.
Whilst it can be somewhat unwise to speculate as to why people drink or not, it is probably fair to say that if someone remains consistently angry at this level for any period of time, that is a reasonable chance they will pick a drink up.
Drinking is quite often a sort of reflex action to someone not being able to live with themselves sober, and the power of resentment or someone’s lived experience of anger should be seen in this context.
Inventory
Perhaps the easiest way to understand how AA suggests dealing with resentments, and as such the myth of a justified resentment, is to look at the process of taking inventory as outlined in step four of the book Alcoholics Anonymous.
The chapter How it Works outlines a specific process for getting a resentment out of your head and onto paper in a very precise way. To some people this can seem a bit clinical, even a bit unemotional, and there is good reason for this.
The book compares a moral inventory to a commercial inventory of a business. If someone owns a business and has 100 tins of baked beans, some of which are out of date, the shopkeeper is simply going to look for those that are out of date and not be concerned with those that are still current.
A moral inventory is in many ways a similar process. At this stage in someone’s recovery, it can be helpful to see this simply as a practical process to help them deal with what can be quite extreme levels of anger or rage. A more detailed emotional understanding of these issues may well come later in recovery.
An inventory list as detailed above has a number of important elements, perhaps two that are worth pointing out at this stage.
Blame
Firstly is that by having a resentment against someone, you are blaming them for how you feel. This may seem very natural to a lot of us, which is why a conscious look at a situation can lessen its power.
When blaming someone or something else for your feelings, you give them power over you. You give them a level of responsibility for your own life that is simply not true.
Whilst a person or situation may well be a trigger, sometimes a very powerful trigger, moving from seeing that personal situation as a trigger to owning your own emotional state can be an incredibly freeing experience.
Not to say that it is easy to do at times, it can depend on the nature of the trigger.
Context
One of the other important things that the book talks about is context. Seeing a resentment simply from your own point of view actually gives you a fairly distorted, very narrow and very powerful sense of anger, that can seem very justified and very black and white.
This idea of a resentment seeming to be very black and white can be very attractive for most people. It gives them a sense of certainty and a degree of self righteousness that they are right and the other person is wrong.
What putting a sense of context into the resentment does is to lessen its power. It provides some background as to why the other person or situation may have developed the way it did, and makes the issue more three dimensional.
Whilst this does not usually completely deal with the anger or resentment, for most people it makes it much easier to deal with, and makes the reasons for it much clearer.
Justified Resentment
In the context of all the above, the idea of a justified resentment can probably seem to make more sense. When a resentment is ‘justified’ the person is saying to themselves that it is reasonable to feel this way because of the other person’s actions or behaviours.
Whilst ignoring the two areas mentioned above of blame and context, it also deepens the idea of certainty and self righteousness. The price of this is that the person is likely to hold on to the anger more deeply, more intensely and for longer as a result.
It is somewhat of a cliche nowadays to point out that the only person who is really being damaged by this is the person who has the resentment, but it is nevertheless still a real truth.
Being really angry or resentful, whatever the causes or triggers, damages the person themselves and those close to them.
For someone in recovery this can be a somewhat dangerous path to tread, given the experience in AA, and other fellowships, of how unprocessed emotional trauma can often have the result of making some one more vulnerable to drinking again.
Neutral Feelings.
It is often said in recovery that the good news when you get sober is you get your feelings back and the bad news is that you get your feelings back.
Like all sentiments in recovery, there is quite a large element of truth in this, and people will need to come to their own sense of how to manage and understand their own feelings about any person or situation.
What is perhaps important in terms of a ‘justified resentment’ is to realise that feelings are themselves are neither good nor bad, they are neutral in that sense.
There is often a tendency to view emotions as been good i.e. gratitude or bad i.e. anger, whereas in fact they are neither, they simply are.
Coming to understand the importance of emotions, that they are your way of telling you how you feel about the world and about other people and about life is really important in recovery.
Understanding that feelings are neither good nor bad is equally important. The danger of a ‘justified resentment’ is that it stops this process happening, stops the person looking at and dealing with their own anger, and actually leaves them more vulnerable to the power of the other person or situation.
