Mal12345
Permabanned
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2011
- Messages
- 14,532
- MBTI Type
- IxTP
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
I'm trying to understand the nature of resentment, regret, and anger, and what these feelings tell us about ourselves. We all have these feelings, but we either don't share them with others, or express one while hiding the others from the external world, or we aren't aware of their existence in us at all by hiding them from our inner experience.
There are two ways to analyze these feelings: either as normal and healthy, or as neurotic and compulsive. I'm not interested in exploring the normal and healthy experiences. We have all done things we regret, such as taking the wrong freeway exit and getting lost. And we can properly resent an unfair statement made about ourselves or others. These are isolated events and they don't evince any compulsive pattern in and of themselves.
A neurotic, compulsive pattern occurs over time. An example would be always resenting authority whenever it tries to impress a demand upon us. Resentment tries to give the illusion that we are more powerful than the authority. We're always bound to some authority or other, and that's just the way it is in society. To always resent authority, when taken to extremes, makes for a difficult life, because it leads to hating authority: leaving jobs because of hating the boss (while believing that it's the boss who hates you), fearing to confront others when the opponent is obviously stronger than you (which means you haven't bothered trying to find the inevitable weak spot in the opponent's defenses), and suppressing anger which is then translated into a generally defensive/dismissive attitude toward others. This leads to the next part of the analysis.
Regret is in some ways the opposite of resentment. People don't seem to mind feeling resentment. But regret in this context carries an overtone of guilt, an emotion people generally don't want to feel. Because it's not the regret that comes from taking the wrong exit, unless there is something morally incompatible with that action. People sometimes regret not taking an action that they should have taken ("I wish I had done x"), but more often they regret getting angry. They don't feel it at the time of anger, they feel it later when the consequences arise. Anger is almost always an inappropriate reaction. It implies "I must destroy something" as opposed to "I must heal something." For example, when someone in a relationship gets fed up with the partner, there may be an angry attempt to destroy the relationship. It may not be a conscious attempt to destroy it, but that would be the most likely outcome when taken too far. Eventually the anger is gone, and it may translate into regret, sex, or something else. But the anger remains because no real healing has occurred, just a temporary truce, because nobody has bothered to trace the anger to the source. And that source is the person who got angry to begin with (whether one or both partners were angry). If there is regret, then there is hope because regret is not a pleasant feeling. If there is no regret, then it is because the regret has been repressed out of conscious awareness. That person has regret but doesn't feel it, or isn't aware of feeling it.
If regret and resentment aren't felt, when they should normally be felt, then that person needs therapy to overcome emotional repression. Commentaries such as this one won't help at all because they are given outside the context of any need for therapy. If you feel regret and resentment but haven't conceptualized them, then it is first necessary to identify them and understand what they are. The next step, the first toward healing, is to understand their source in the psyche. Second, is to practice the healing. Third is to make a commitment to practicing it.
A common pattern involved in keeping negativity alive is over-thinking. Often times, when confronted with unwanted emotions whose source seems to be (but isn't) outside of us, we think long and hard about ways to make the emotions go away. We may consider violence, berating, or intellectualizing the situation into compliance. Intellectualizing is one of the hardest to overcome because it reduces the world to a harmless abstraction, and some people come to the conclusion that they have overcome their negative impulses. But all they have done is sublimated them into something non-threatening. The result is that they have lost the ability to function appropriately in the world in terms of emotional responses. At least an angry response can be addressed. But an intellectual response is more subtle, and is in fact a sublimated form of anger. The locus of control is still external. People who withdraw from the world are implying that they can't deal with it. To withdraw all the way is to lose touch with one's own anger, resentment, and regret. By disowning the external world the self also becomes disowned.
Over-thinking will always involve over-planning and black-and-white judgments in an attempt to control oneself or others. It is the opposite of understanding and healing. A pattern of over-thinking situations is a pattern of frustration and relief. The relief comes when the situation that led to the problem somehow resolves itself, usually by the whim of incidental emotional responses. But nobody has really taken control of anything because emotions rule over all.
And yet emotions are the key to the healing process when they are expressed while getting to the root of the problem internally, not externally (in the other person or a situation). The person may be (perhaps usually) feeling overwhelmed, but doesn't want to admit it as if it's a weakness. So this reveals an internal striving to appear tough, as an ideal, both to oneself and others, which conflicts with an actual feeling that needs to be recognized and taken seriously. Keeping busy in the external world is one way to avoid recognizing the fact of being overwhelmed. And many times, being overwhelmed is simply the effect of trying to take on too much at one time, or trying to over-think a situation where the solution is relatively simple and obvious.
There are two ways to analyze these feelings: either as normal and healthy, or as neurotic and compulsive. I'm not interested in exploring the normal and healthy experiences. We have all done things we regret, such as taking the wrong freeway exit and getting lost. And we can properly resent an unfair statement made about ourselves or others. These are isolated events and they don't evince any compulsive pattern in and of themselves.
A neurotic, compulsive pattern occurs over time. An example would be always resenting authority whenever it tries to impress a demand upon us. Resentment tries to give the illusion that we are more powerful than the authority. We're always bound to some authority or other, and that's just the way it is in society. To always resent authority, when taken to extremes, makes for a difficult life, because it leads to hating authority: leaving jobs because of hating the boss (while believing that it's the boss who hates you), fearing to confront others when the opponent is obviously stronger than you (which means you haven't bothered trying to find the inevitable weak spot in the opponent's defenses), and suppressing anger which is then translated into a generally defensive/dismissive attitude toward others. This leads to the next part of the analysis.
Regret is in some ways the opposite of resentment. People don't seem to mind feeling resentment. But regret in this context carries an overtone of guilt, an emotion people generally don't want to feel. Because it's not the regret that comes from taking the wrong exit, unless there is something morally incompatible with that action. People sometimes regret not taking an action that they should have taken ("I wish I had done x"), but more often they regret getting angry. They don't feel it at the time of anger, they feel it later when the consequences arise. Anger is almost always an inappropriate reaction. It implies "I must destroy something" as opposed to "I must heal something." For example, when someone in a relationship gets fed up with the partner, there may be an angry attempt to destroy the relationship. It may not be a conscious attempt to destroy it, but that would be the most likely outcome when taken too far. Eventually the anger is gone, and it may translate into regret, sex, or something else. But the anger remains because no real healing has occurred, just a temporary truce, because nobody has bothered to trace the anger to the source. And that source is the person who got angry to begin with (whether one or both partners were angry). If there is regret, then there is hope because regret is not a pleasant feeling. If there is no regret, then it is because the regret has been repressed out of conscious awareness. That person has regret but doesn't feel it, or isn't aware of feeling it.
If regret and resentment aren't felt, when they should normally be felt, then that person needs therapy to overcome emotional repression. Commentaries such as this one won't help at all because they are given outside the context of any need for therapy. If you feel regret and resentment but haven't conceptualized them, then it is first necessary to identify them and understand what they are. The next step, the first toward healing, is to understand their source in the psyche. Second, is to practice the healing. Third is to make a commitment to practicing it.
A common pattern involved in keeping negativity alive is over-thinking. Often times, when confronted with unwanted emotions whose source seems to be (but isn't) outside of us, we think long and hard about ways to make the emotions go away. We may consider violence, berating, or intellectualizing the situation into compliance. Intellectualizing is one of the hardest to overcome because it reduces the world to a harmless abstraction, and some people come to the conclusion that they have overcome their negative impulses. But all they have done is sublimated them into something non-threatening. The result is that they have lost the ability to function appropriately in the world in terms of emotional responses. At least an angry response can be addressed. But an intellectual response is more subtle, and is in fact a sublimated form of anger. The locus of control is still external. People who withdraw from the world are implying that they can't deal with it. To withdraw all the way is to lose touch with one's own anger, resentment, and regret. By disowning the external world the self also becomes disowned.
Over-thinking will always involve over-planning and black-and-white judgments in an attempt to control oneself or others. It is the opposite of understanding and healing. A pattern of over-thinking situations is a pattern of frustration and relief. The relief comes when the situation that led to the problem somehow resolves itself, usually by the whim of incidental emotional responses. But nobody has really taken control of anything because emotions rule over all.
And yet emotions are the key to the healing process when they are expressed while getting to the root of the problem internally, not externally (in the other person or a situation). The person may be (perhaps usually) feeling overwhelmed, but doesn't want to admit it as if it's a weakness. So this reveals an internal striving to appear tough, as an ideal, both to oneself and others, which conflicts with an actual feeling that needs to be recognized and taken seriously. Keeping busy in the external world is one way to avoid recognizing the fact of being overwhelmed. And many times, being overwhelmed is simply the effect of trying to take on too much at one time, or trying to over-think a situation where the solution is relatively simple and obvious.
