Resentment: accepting yourself, and where empathy fits

What resentment points at

How it works

Resentment can follow a loss, or anything that changed or ended, and it can point at many people: someone who died, a family member, a doctor, an employer, a former partner, or yourself. Resentment toward someone still alive is also covered in Grieving someone who is still alive.

Nothing here asks you to understand, forgive or contact anyone who harmed, threatened or controlled you.

Resentment is a signal worth listening to. It points at a line that was crossed, something you needed and did not get, or something still going on. Where it gets stuck is in going over and over the offence. In studies that followed people someone had wronged, stretches of going over the offence more were stretches of less forgiveness, and anger, not fear, seemed to carry the link. None of this makes anger a fault.

When resentment turns inward

Why it matters

Resentment often grows out of something that mattered: anger that something or someone you cared about was taken, mishandled or not protected, or that a future you had worked toward did not happen. Sometimes it also lands on something older: a familiar feeling of being overlooked, let down or left to carry it alone. Either way, the hurt is worth feeling rather than replaying.

Anger at others and anger at yourself are different, and anger at yourself is the one that most needs kindness. In a one-time survey of bereaved adults, more self-compassion went with fewer grief and trauma symptoms, and anger at oneself and anger at others played different statistical parts in those links.

Kindness toward your own part points toward repair, not giving up. In short experiments, mostly with undergraduates, a brief prompt to meet a weakness, a wrong one had done or a failure with self-compassion raised motivation to improve and make amends. In three studies, people who met a recalled regret with self-compassion reported more personal improvement, partly through acceptance. Guilt and shame have their own article, Guilt, shame and the inner critic.

Being kind to yourself is not standing still. In a survey of undergraduates, self-compassion went with personal growth initiative, the active pursuit of changes toward a fuller life. The healthy-adult move is this: own your part, accept yourself, and act on what is yours.

Three places people get stuck

Where people get stuck

1. Feeling you have to forgive first. Forgiving can feel like the price of moving on. It is not. Whether to forgive is yours to decide, in your own time, and forgiving is not always protective. In one study of newlywed couples, spouses who tended to express forgiveness saw a partner's aggression stay stable; for less forgiving spouses, it declined. Its author argues for weighing that cost before promoting forgiveness where harm continues.
2. Taking a guess for knowledge. Understanding another person, where it comes at all, comes from your own experience, not from guessing at their mind. Across many experiments, being told to imagine another person's perspective did not reliably make people more accurate about that person's mind, and sometimes raised their confidence. In several studies, people who saw themselves as capable of a similar offence were more forgiving of the person who did it. Forgiving was what those studies measured; it is not this article's aim.
3. Expecting empathy to settle the anger. The way through resentment does not run through the other person's mind. It runs through your own hurt. A pooled analysis of studies in adults found people's general level of empathy only weakly tied to how aggressive they were.

When resentment is worth taking to someone

Here is what I would tell you: resentment that fills most days, or anger at yourself that has become a verdict on who you are, is worth taking to a doctor or a therapist who works with grief. If the resentment is not about a loss, a doctor or a therapist is still worth reaching.

If someone close is hurting, threatening or controlling you, reach local support services or someone you trust. If you are thinking about hurting someone or yourself, or about not being alive, please reach someone now. The help box near the end of this page says how. For immediate danger, contact local emergency services.

Where the research on resentment and self-acceptance is thin

Where the research is thin, or disagrees

Only two of my sources heard from bereaved people, and none of the empathy studies was about grief. One trial of group compassion-focused therapy for lasting grief found grief symptoms fell no more than on a waitlist; that one trial does not rule out other compassion work or grief therapy. Whether understanding another person, or kindness toward yourself, changes resentment after a loss has not been tested.

Noticing what resentment points at

One thing you might notice

If resentment is here, you might notice what it points at: a line that was crossed, something you needed and did not get, or something still going on. If you want to, and only about someone who did not harm, threaten or control you or someone close to you, and only if you are sure of that, you might recall a time you did or felt something of a similar kind. That memory is yours. It is not a verdict on you, or a step toward forgiving. It tells you nothing certain about their mind, and you can set it down at any point.

If anger, or a memory this brings back, comes with thoughts of hurting someone or yourself, or of not being alive, please reach someone now. The help box near the end of this page says how.

What a session does with resentment

How Feelings Buddy fits

Feelings Buddy is built for working through feelings with self-compassion, toward self-acceptance and self-motivation. A hard feeling is the obstacle, not the destination.

A session is an AI working from written instructions, so it can get them wrong. Its instructions say to:

• never bring in a feeling the person did not mention, except as a question they can wave away;
• never agree with or add a fixed verdict about someone in their life, and ask what that person might have been feeling at most once, as a question they can wave away, and never when anything suggests that person frightens, hurts or controls them;
• if the worry shows, say that understanding someone is not agreeing with them or giving in.

Each of these is my judgement call, not a tested method.

There is no diagnosis, and a session carries nothing about risk into a later session. No one reads the conversation as it happens.

No study has tested Feelings Buddy. How a session works, step by step