The Truth About Resentment: 6 Types, Why It Stays, and How to Actually Heal It

Most people think resentment is something you just need to get rid of. Not all resentment is the same, and if you try to release something without knowing what it is, you're not going to be able to do it. Resentment is the perception of being treated unfairly. I want you to sit with that word "perception." Not the reality of being treated unfairly, the perception of it. But perception is actually one of the most empowering things you can hear about resentment. I want to talk about six types of resentment today, and the way you work with each of these different types is different, depending on where they're rooted in. So this is why two people can go through the same betrayal, and one carries it for decades, while the other eventually finds a way to move on. You hear all the time, let it go. For given forget, holding on to resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Hey, there's something useful in those ideas, but they do skip an entire step. They tell you what to do with resentment, without helping you understand what you're actually holding on to, and where it came from. Because not all resentment is the same, and if you try to release something without knowing what it is, you're not going to be able to do it. Or worse, you're going to release something you actually kind of needed to keep, which I'll get into in a little bit. Today, we're going deep on resentment, what it actually is, why it forms, why it lingers, and why in some cases, letting go too quickly is the wrong move. Let's get into it. I want to talk about six types of resentment today, but before we get into the types, I want to start with a definition, because most people are working with a kind of fuzzy understanding of the word. People might have different subjective meanings of resentment. For today's definition, resentment is the perception of being treated unfairly. I want you to sit with that word perception. Not the reality of being treated unfairly, the perception of it. Now, let's not a dismissal of your experience. I'm not saying, "Oh, you're perceiving that you're being treated unfairly, and that's just not reality." I'm not saying that at all. But perception is actually one of the most empowering things you can hear about resentment, because perception is subjective. Perception is workable. Perception is something you have agency or control over. It's a mindset. It's a lens. This is foundational to cognitive behavioral therapy, so CBT. The premise is that your suffering is not just about what happened, but in how you've interpreted it. Your perspective, your beliefs, your lens, your lens which you look through the world. Victor Frankl was a psychiatrist from the 20s and 30s, and greatly influenced the development of CBT. One of my favorite quotes from him is this, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing. The last of the human freedoms. To choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. To choose one's own way." So this power of perspective isn't really a new idea, but it's the foundation of working with resentment. As CBT posits, think of it as a triangle. Your feelings, let's say resentment, are a result of your perspectives or beliefs. For example, I resent my spouse because they don't care about me. The emotion, resentment, comes from the perspective. They don't care about me. This is the power of CBT. It is your thoughts, perspectives, your lens, creature feelings, and they also influence your behaviors. So instead of focusing so much on, I want to feel less angry or I want to feel less sad or I want to stop drinking so much or I want to do this new behavior, stop getting angry so much. It's easier to go to the root, which is working with the thoughts and beliefs that drive those two things. So let's go back to this example of, "I resent my spouse because they don't care about me." The emotion, resentment, comes from the perspective. So when I work with clients, I spend less time on, like I said, the resulting feelings and more time on these perspectives. What's at the top of the pyramid? They're the triangle. The perspectives that drive the feelings. My spouse doesn't care about me. Is there a possible reframe, an alternative perspective of my spouse that could be true with some evidence? And because resentment is so directly tied to your thoughts and beliefs, it is absolutely possible to do something about it. We can choose our thoughts. We can actually choose our beliefs. Now, the second piece of the definition, resentment isn't just anger. A lot of people say, "Oh, I have resentment. I'm angry. I'm resentful." And they use it interchangeably. Resentment isn't just anger. It's anger that's kind of waiting. There's a future orientation to it. It's the emotion you hold onto while waiting for the other person to make things right. For them to acknowledge what happened, repair the fight, step back up onto the pedestal you had them on. And that process of waiting matters a lot and will come back to it when we talk about the different types of resentment. But waiting for someone to get back up on that pedestal shows you how much you care about them. So let's just dive right into the six types. I want to talk about, like I said, six types of resentment today. And here's where most conversations about resentment at least that I've been a part of fall kind of flat because they treat resentment as one thing. I have resentment period. But resentment is more nuanced than that. There are, I mean, at least six. I came up with six, but you could argue there could be more. You could distill it down to three or four. But just the point of that resentment is not just one thing. And the way you work with each of these different types is different depending on where they're rooted in. So the first type, type one, we're going to talk about deflected resentment. This is the type of resentment that actually belongs to you, not the other person. So deflected resentment happens when you're holding someone else accountable for something you would have also done yourself if you were in their position. The anger is real. The feeling of unfairness is real. But if you're being completely honest with yourself, if you were standing on their shoes, with their information, their pressures, their childhood, their perspectives, their experiences, you'd have done the same thing if you're completely honest. So what's actually happening here is that the resentment is being deflected outward when the real charge of it is internal. This might be something about you that you recognize in yourself that you maybe haven't made peace with. It might be about an expectation that wasn't realistic to begin with. It might be about a standard. You hold others to that maybe you don't hold yourself to and you feel ashamed or embarrassed about it. For example, I resent my partner for being emotionally unavailable or emotionally unintelligent, just not emotionally intelligent or mature. When you try to have deep conversations, they shut down. They don't initiate emotional connection. They pull back when things get vulnerable. These are all, let's say, behind your resentment. But now let's look at what's underneath if we're talking about deflected resentment. Something you recognize in yourself that you haven't made peace with. So maybe you do the same thing at work when a colleague gets emotional or a conversation gets uncomfortable. You change the subject or you go over logical spreadsheet mode, focus on solutions. You've told yourself like, I'm just being professional, but it's the same mechanism and somewhere inside you, you recognize it and you know it. You just not comfortable with it, but it's easy to deflect it onto another person. Another aspect of deflective resentment is an expectation that wasn't realistic to begin with. So with your partner, let's say, you knew who they were when you chose them. They've shown you this pattern, this version of them since the third date. The expectation that they would naturally become emotionally expressive or become emotionally intelligent without a direct conversation about it or without any like counseling, that expectation was never based in reality, based in like evidence that you had seen. It was just you making an assumption. Or with deflective resentment, it could be a standard you hold the other person to that you don't hold yourself to. So again, with emotional intelligence, when was the last time you initiated a vulnerable conversation? When did you last tell them what you actually need emotionally or were vulnerable with them without hinting or just waiting on the sidelines to see if they'd notice if you're upset or sad? You're holding them accountable for emotional availability while also not making it particularly easy or safe for them to initiate or show up that way. So this reflective resentment is the one type where the work is internal. And until you do this work, this type of resentment will persist because the other person can't give you what you need. It's internal. They're not actually the source. So that's deflective resentment. All right, the second type, relational resentment. Now this one surprises people because this type of resentment is actually a. positive, loving emotion, which is hard to wrap your brain around. But relational resentment is what you feel when you're waiting for someone you care about to make things right. You're not indifferent to them. You haven't written them off. You're holding space, a kind of painful, frustrated space. But you're holding space, waiting for them to come back to like who they were, some version that they used to be, or to repair what was broken, ruptured between them. Between you two, to get back up on the pedestal, you put them on to make things right. So this type of resentment shows you how much you care about the other person. The opposite of love is not hate. It's indifference. If you hate someone, you're still feeling something toward them to make things right. But if you were truly indifferent, if you had completely detached, there would be no resentment. There would really be kind of nothing. So relational resentment means the relationship still matters to you. It means you haven't given up. The resentment is almost like a placeholder, a signal that says, "Hey, I want more from you. I want more from our relationship, from our friendship. I think it's possible. And I'm not ready to walk away or I'm not ready to accept less." Now that doesn't mean this kind of resentment. Just because I'm describing it as a positive emotion, it doesn't mean that it's comfortable or that it's pleasant or that it gives you a feel-good feeling. It doesn't mean it's healthy either. But it means it is looking or deserves some acknowledgement before you try to let go of it. It's telling you something about how much you care about the other person, how much you're invested in them making things right with you. Okay, the third type, protective resentment. I see this so often with couples. This is resentment that shows up as like a fortress, like Fort Knox. You've been hurt and you made a decision, not necessarily a conscious one. This could be subconscious, unconscious, that you made a decision that you're not going to let that happen again. So maybe someone your spouse really hurts you or they betrayed you, they let you down and then they wanted to make it right with you and you said, "Okay, then you trusted them again and then they made steps to change and they changed and you were feeling good and all of a sudden they betrayed you again or they let you down again." They went back to that addictive habit and now that just carries extra disappointment and extra pain. So you start to hold on to the memory of that pain and you start to build a fortress where your open-mindedness, your openness to trust, trusting them again is kind of depleted. So you hold on to that resentment as a protection. You're not necessarily punishing the other person but you're protecting yourself. You're protecting yourself from hope, from believing in optimism again, from seeing the optimistic perspective. You're protecting yourself from believing things might be different that they'll change. And the reason is that hope can be a horrible place for people because it just opens you up to being hurt again. So protective resentment is the survival brain doing its job really well. It's recognizing patterns. It's the body saying, "Last time I let my guard down in this way something bad happened and this is how you've adapted to pain." You started protecting it. Fort Knox came in and this protective resentment is doing its job very effectively. The problem with protective resentment is that it's indiscriminate. It can distinguish between real danger and genuine change. So it blocks repair across the board, blocks repair with other people or your spouse. So your spouse can be actively doing the work and what I see a lot with couples work is the spouse can actually be changing, actually showing up differently. What your resentment, the protective resentment, holds the door shut. This is one of the hardest types to work with because it's doing something really beneficial for you. Protection is just so beneficial and releasing it doesn't just mean, "Oh, forgiving, I'm going to forgive them." Releasing means tolerating uncertainty, opening yourself up to hope again. It means being willing to be potentially wrong and have another fall. For a lot of people, that's the scariest thing there is. They don't have a lot of stamina or just even patience for it. That's protective resentment. The fourth type, displace resentment. Displace resentment is when anger is legitimate, but it's aimed at the wrong person. The classic example I can think of is maybe a partner, absorbing resentment that actually belongs onto a parent. You're in a relationship with someone who in some way shape or form maybe how they express feelings or lack thereof. Maybe they shut down emotional unavailability or their tendency to not have deep conversations with you or minimize you or they're too expressive or volatile, whatever it is. Whatever your partner is doing, it reminds you of something or someone from earlier in your life. Without realizing it, the resentment you carry toward that original parent, original caregiver, starts shifting onto the person in front of you, your current relationship. Your partner becomes or your relationship, your marriage becomes like a WWE arena, pro-wrestling arena for an older, just like unfinished fight, unfinished battle. And the person in front of you, your spouse, can't ultimately win that fight. No matter how much change they do, no matter how many apologies and making amends, they will never win that fight because it was never actually about them. I'm not saying your partner doesn't do anything to upset you or is an angel, not saying that. For sure, they're doing things that are upsetting, but the charge behind it is what can typically come from an original wound, some parents, some caregiver from your past. And this is one of the primary ways attachment wounds show up in your romantic relationships. The attachment, we'll call them templates, styles, we develop in childhood, what we expect from closeness, from love, from the people we depend on, how we get attached to people, sticks with us into adulthood. They show up in our romantic relationships, our friendships, our colleagues at work, those relationships as well. And displace resentment is what happens when one of those template styles, those attachment templates, gets triggered, activated by someone who isn't the original source. And then the fifth type of resentment is inherited resentment. Now, inherited resentment is resentment you didn't come to all on your own. It has to do with your surrounding, it could be your family of origin, your original home environment where you just absorb certain thoughts and beliefs and feelings from a parent who passed down their bitterness about a certain type of person. It could be about their parent, it could be about a certain class or type of people, it could be from an institution like the government, or generational family system or values that passed it on from parent to child over and over. It could be, like I said, from a culture or community that gave you a narrative about who you are and who can be trusted, who can't be trusted, who has power and who doesn't, what you're owed and what you'll never get. So much of our values and beliefs are seeded when we're young, about success, money, love, all of it. The thing about inherited resentment is that it can feel like your own. It's so thoroughly mixed into your worldview that it doesn't feel like this is someone else's or it's borrowed from someone else. It just feels like flat out truth. You might carry deep resentment toward a group or deep fear towards a group or a demographic, a certain type of person without ever having had a personal experience that would justify the intensity of your feelings. So this is worth exploring more because inherited resentment can really influence your entire relational life, how you relate to everybody. And it can sustain a bitterness or a fear or an anger that isn't even your own. And then the last type, the sixth type of resentment is self-recentment, self-recentment that gets thrown outward. So this is one of the most common types. Self-recentment is what happens when the anger actually, again, belongs to yourself, but it's too painful or too threatening to direct inward. So it gets redirected toward another person. So examples are, let's say you were in a competition or had some sort of conflict with a person and you didn't speak up when you should have. Or you tolerated something that really just violated your values or your boundaries, your personal boundaries. Or you kept yourself small. in order to keep the peace or in order to belong, just kind of went along with things. Now I spoke up to avoid conflict. And somewhere, the resentment toward the other person became a good outlet, just percolating like a slow burn, a quieter feeling of like, I let this happen. Why didn't I say something? Why do I always do this? This is why some resentments are impossible to resolve with the other person. No matter how many conversations you have with them, the other person isn't the source. They're the arena, they're the container, holding your self resentment. And until you turn towards the actual source, towards yourself and the frustrations and the anger and the shame and the bitterness that you have towards yourself, possibly, toward your own choices, toward the patterns you've been carrying, the disempowerment, the resentment won't move. Now you may have had a very good reason for not being the version of yourself that you wanted to be. Maybe conflict felt genuinely dangerous, was genuinely dangerous and you had to stay small. Or belonging felt conditional. I'm only gonna be loved or wanted or belonging if I do these things, very transactional. Oh, you did something for me. I need to quit, do something for you. Otherwise, it's gonna be a balance and you're gonna hate me. So maybe you learned keeping the peace is how you stay safe, literally stay safe. That's excellent adapting on your part. He learned very well as a child, young adult. But now you're older and you notice there's this resentment that has really built up a lot. You notice a lot of blame towards other people. You're maybe if you sat down with yourself, honestly, you're kind of a victim a lot when you don't need to be. And instead of looking at the pattern of not using your voice, you blame the other person for the situation you're in. You pushed me forward, I'm being bullied, you're not giving me a choice. That kind of attitude may feel better. It feels better to blame people. I know I've struggled with anger, great deal in my life. Something I really had to work on. And it feels indulgent. It's soothing, it's self-suiting. And it feels good to blame other people to get mad and angry at other people. But it also gives those other people all the power, all the agency. They created this. They have the power here. They tell me what to do. You're the victim of their choices. And no, you're not. You're not the victim of their choices. But with that attitude, now you're kind of stuck. Because if they're the problem, if the only way out for you, out of this resentment, or out of your situation, is for them to change. You've now made your own relief, your own peace, peace of mind, dependent on someone else's behavior. That's complete disempowerment. How do you restore your power? The moment you turn towards your own role, not to shame yourself. You've got plenty of that to go around. Not to shame yourself, but to genuinely examine, to get your agency back. Because if you contributed to the situation, you can also change your contribution to the situation. You can learn to speak up now. You can learn to set the boundary now. You can learn to make different choices, even if they're going to be uncomfortable. Self-recentment shows up in people who say, this always happens to me. Because as long as the cause is always external, the solution is always just out of reach. So those are the six types of resentment. And I wanted to add something about chronic resentment, or longstanding resentment, regardless of what type it is. Chronic resentment has nothing to do with time. It has nothing to do with how recent it was, or how old the original thing happened. This is one of the most important things I want you to take from this episode, is that there's a common assumption that resentment should fade with time. Like emotions always fade with time, right? That if it's been long enough, you should be over it by now. And there's a corollary to that. If you're not over it, something is wrong with you, right? That's not how this works. Chronic resentment is not about how long ago something happened. It's about what got reinforced throughout your experiences in life. So memories don't fade, emotions don't fade, painful emotions don't get stored the way memories do. When we think of memory, we generally think of explicit memory. This is where we can recall details of the day it happened. And the weather was this, and I was wearing this clothing, and then I said this to this person, and they did this back, where we can recall details of what happened. That's more explicit memory. But emotional memory, traumatic memory is different. Painful emotions are stored as implicit memory. And what that means is it's only stored as an emotion. As a child, you were mistreated poorly, maybe emotionally neglect, whatever it was, a band-in. And you had a certain emotion from that, from that experience, fear, sadness, whatever it is. And then you go through life, using myself as a personal example, go through life experiences, other instances of abandonment. Again, the perception of abandonment. And re-experiencing that emotion over and over and over. This gets stored in the brain. Now, I don't have explicit memories of all these times that I've been abandoned by friends or whatnot, but I still have the implicit memory. So that's why when something happens in the present, and you have this full charge of something that's seemingly small or innocuous, it's like, wow, why did I react so much? So big. It's because of implicit memory. Decades of stored similar experiences erupting when you feel that emotion so strongly again. The body just doesn't forget and it doesn't organize records by sort of timelines and dates and details. Just know you're not responding only to what's happening right now. I'm not saying these things aren't upsetting. They are upsetting in the moment, but the charge, when we're triggered, the charge of it, is from all that implicit memory from your previous years. You're responding to every single time that specific feeling has been felt or activated in your life and across your entire history. So that's why a single comment from a partner can feel like a full-on attack. That's why a small disappointment can just spiral into something that feels like life-altering, disproportionate to what the actual thing is. It's not disproportionate to what implicit memory is your brain is accessing, but the brain is accessing the collective of those implicit memories. So the nervous system never responds to only in this moment. That's why we have to retrain the nervous system, the body, the recondition ourselves. Your nervous system otherwise is responding to the cumulative weight of every moment that you've experienced the same thing. And this creates your card to bias, the lens, the lens at what you look at the world through. Your brain has been building a case for years with this lens. The trigger just like reopens the case file in court. It's like, hmm, what's the evidence here? Oh yeah, I can see how you showing up late for dinner or you not scheduling a date night is confirmation that you don't care about me boom, confirmation bias confirmed, reinforced. So if chronic resentment isn't about time or when it happened, what is it about? It's about the belief, back to the triangle, CBT triangle. It's about the belief, the belief that got etched in stone very deeply when it happened. The belief and the perspectives that you really internalized from that experience. Every significant painful experience, especially ones that happened repeatedly or early in life, leaves a little something behind. It leaves a conclusion. It leaves a belief about how the world works, about how loving people can be or not, about what you can expect from people, about how they treat you, about whether you are someone who deserves to be treated well. Examples of this are the lens of people always let me down. I have to do everything myself. Love always comes with conditions. It's always transactional. There's no such thing as unconditional love. Others don't care about my feelings and how I'm impacted. No one ever cares. People take advantage of me. I'm a failure. Nothing I do is good enough. I'll never be successful. So these are all just examples. They're not just these passing thoughts. They're the lens. They're the deep beliefs. And once a lens is in place, the brain starts filtering all your experiences through it. What reaffirms reinforces confirms that lens that you're trained to see, confirming it, reinforcing it at every turn. Every experience that fits the belief becomes evidence. Confirms the bias you're trained to see. Every experience that dissolves or disproves the bias gets missed. It gets passed off, dismissed, explained away. So this is why two people can go through the same betrayal and one carries it for decades while the other eventually finds a way to move on. It's not that one person. loved more or was hurt more deeply, it's that for that one person who couldn't move on, that betrayal was part of a cumulative lifetime of betrayal experiences. And then this recent betrayal in the present just confirmed it, reinforced it. So the most useful question you can ask yourself about chronic resentment is not, what did they do? How did they wrong me? It is, what did this teach me? What did I conclude about myself as a result of it? What did I conclude about love, about others? Others' ability to love? How do I expect to be treated? What did I conclude about the fairness of the world? That is where the actual wound lives, not in the event or what happened necessarily, but in the lesson you've learned from that event. So what do you do with all this? First, identify which type you're holding or types, it could be more than one type for sure. It could be different types for different specific resentments or different people. You maybe have one type of resentment with this person, a different type with this person. The practice for repairing it looks different for each one. So the first type, deflected resentment needs inner work, not a conversation with someone else necessarily. Relational resentment does require communication with someone else, giving the other person a chance to actually make things right, going through repair conversations, that sort of thing. The third type, protective resentment requires you to grieve the loss of certainty to be able to move back into openness and hope and trust again to get out of fort knocks. The fourth type, displaced resentment needs you to trace it back to the original source, instead of displacing all this resentment onto this person. Let's go back to the source, who are these original people responsible for the wound? Inherited resentment needs you to question whether this actually belongs to you. Do you actually have bitterness and resentment towards this type of person or this institution? If so, why? Maybe it does, maybe it's something that you adopted. Sometimes it's not something that you feel or something that's based on your personal experience. And then finally, self-recentment needs you to stop outsourcing or pushing away or giving away your accountability and your power. You can't use a universal approach on these six different things. So start with identifying the resentment's first, second, find the belief. Remember, it's less about what happened to you and more about what you concluded about yourself as a result. What did this experience teach you about yourself, about the world? That belief, top of the triangle, that belief is running in the background of every triggered response. It influences all of your conversations, all of your perspectives of people, how you get attached in the world. Every resentment that won't go away, every pattern that keeps repeating, you have to name it before you can examine it and release it. And third, understand that beliefs are a mindset, which means they are within your power to modify them. This is not a small thing because so much of trauma is experience as something that was done to you. It's like something really harmful and horrific happened to me as a child. Well, what do I do now? I guess I'm just damaged goods for the rest of my life. And in terms of what originally happened, there needs to be conversations and processing for the pain of what happened. I'm not saying just dismiss it and not spending time on it, but once you spent time on the pain of it, understand that there's a second piece and that is what conclusions did it leave you with? And that deserves its own conversation to process the pain of it. But what the trauma left behind in terms of beliefs and conclusions, in terms of the lens you've been looking through ever since, that is not fixed. The events that happened way back when that's fixed. The events happened. But the lens that you've been looking at yourself through and looking at others through ever since, that's not fixed. That's not permanent. That's a conclusion that was formed under really painful conditions and has been treated as just fixed and immovable facts, objective facts ever since. You did not choose the experiences that shaped these beliefs, these really impressionable beliefs when you were young, but as an adult, you do have agency, you have power, you have the potential over what you do with them now. Healing resentment is less about forgiving the other person and more about just interrupting the story you've been confirming ever since. If this episode resonated with you or if you recognized yourself in any of these types, if you've ever been carrying something and couldn't quite name it, this is exactly the kind of work we do inside my community, the practice. We spend less time on service level reframes or self-awareness because all of you have a lot of self-awareness by now. It's just, there's so much available through AI and just podcasts and YouTube videos, self-awareness I find is not the bottleneck so much these days. It's practice. We go into the actual structure of how your patterns formed in my community, what they're protecting and how to practice them rather than just accept them. The link to join is in the show notes and if you found this episode useful, please share it because I promise you, there is someone in your life who is holding at least one of these six types of resentments right now and has no idea what to do with it. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next week.