How to Clear Your Resentments and Redeem Your Relationships

In my last essay, I detail the process by which a relationship between two people fails.

To recap:

• You partner behaves in a way that makes you resentful.
• You express that resentment by behaving vengefully toward your partner.
• Your vengeful behavior makes your partner resentful of you.
• A feedback loop is established, and the relationship spirals downward.

People try to repress, justify and rationalize their resentment all the time, but it only makes things worse. The relationship freezes into a Cold War, slowly degenerates, and eventually collapses.

The only thing that can clear resentments and redeem a relationship is the Truth.

When I speak of “Truth,” I’m not talking about a simple account of facts and opinions.

When two people are arguing and resenting each other, the situational facts of the matter are tip of the iceberg. There’s always something way more consequential operating deep underneath the surface.

The Truth is about the terrible nature of your deepest desires, fears and shames.

If you’re curious to experience the Truth directly, sit down with a pen and paper, then think about the person you’ve been complaining about the most recently.

Then follow the journaling exercise below:

Step 1: List out your Resentments

Bring your relationship with that person to mind, then ask yourself this question:

What do I dislike about the way (person’s name) behaves?

Start writing down whatever comes to your mind. Likely, your complaints will come to you as broad, often exaggerated character descriptions:

• “She’s selfish.”
• “He’s a flake”
• “He doesn’t care about me.”

The next level of clarity comes in the form of specific behaviors:

• “He always talks about himself.
• “He never texts back.”
• “He never asks me about my day.”

What you really want to get down to is specific scenes from your episodic memory. For each of the unique character descriptions or behaviors, list out specific situations where the person acted that way. Don’t finish listing out examples until you can’t think of any anymore.

By this stage, you should already be feeling a shift in your psychological and even physiological state. Much of the stress of resentment comes from the ambiguity of it. It all feels like so much when it’s all blurred together in your head at once.

But once you get it all out on paper, you start to see patterns and realize that what felt like 50 things was actually just the repetition of 5 different themes. Still a problem, but now it’s way more manageable.

The tension will start to loosen a bit in your muscles, perhaps around your shoulders and your chest. Now you will feel more ready to dive deeper into your experience.

Step 2: List out your Desires

You should have a few themes in the frustrating behaviors of your partner. For each one, bring to mind a single episode that is most representative of that situation, then ask yourself this question:

How did I want (person) to behave in this situation?

Here, you get a sense of what your core relationship values. Sometimes, you will realize you were demanding too much from the person in the situation, and thus can’t fault them for their behavior.

Other times you will discover a fundamental value you didn’t realize you had. It required you allowing someone to compromise that value for you to realize how important is was to you.

This is where the self-discovery begins, but where it really takes off is the next exercise.

Step 3: List Our Your Fears

Next, you reflect on your fears, since every desire to have something is attached to a fear of losing something.

Bring these episodes to mind again, but this time ask yourself these two questions:

(a) What do I fear will happen if I continue to tolerate this behavior?

(b) What do I fear will happen if I tell (person) everything I’ve written so far?

By this point, the experience may be a bit more intense. You may cry at this moment. If you do, keep pulling on whatever thread is attached to the tears, because tears are primary signals of Truth.

List out your Shames

In the final piece, you want to take a breath and ask yourself this question:

Which of my behaviors and desires in this relationship give me a feeling of shame?

Shame is the emotion we feel when we know we were supposed to behave a certain way and consciously chose not to.

Once you’ve stripped down and catalogued, you’ll pretty much spent emotionally. But no one ever goes through the process and doesn’t think it’s worth it.

The exercise is extremely powerful for wiping the scales from your eyes and seeing your relationship for what it truly is.

But this is just where the fun begins.

The real adventure begins when you share your Truth with the other person.

I explain that process in the final essay of this series: how to look your partner in the eyes and speak your deepest truth.