Resentment is Fossilized Anger

in #psychology3 days ago

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As a news editor for wanttoknow.info, I'm routinely exposed to the sordid details of the systemic problems that are dragging society down. The rigged economy. The extortion racket we call healthcare. The censorship schemes and propaganda campaigns poisoning public discourse. After 10 years in this position, I've become something of an expert in what's wrong with the world. I've also become an expert in harboring massive resentments.

I was playing a game recently and drew the card combination above. In it I see a person's various energy bodies surrounded by resentment. I'm not sure what this represents. So I'm seizing the opportunity to clarify my resentments.

I resent the control regime and everyone who supports it. I resent how the problems created by the regime are internalized by individuals, who then blame themselves for failing to thrive. I resent the way existence itself has become inextricably entangled with the economy, such that even the passage of time has a financial cost. And I resent all of the people who treat each other like interchangeable parts in a vast machine.

I like to think of resentment as fossilized anger. And anger as essentially energy generated by the body to respond to a perceived boundary violation. If the boundary in question is legitimate, the anger is justified. Of course, justified or not, this energy doesn't always have a place to go.

Many boundary violations occur in situations where the offender is insulated from or even unknown to the aggrieved party. So the anger encodes itself into the psyche as resentment. Resentment, then, is the pattern etched into the person by the movement of this energy, like the structure of an ancient seashell fossilized in sandstone. It's a record of a boundary violation that may be useful for informing future decisions.

Some people allow anger to take control of their thinking and end up making bad decisions. Some become obsessed with their resentments, and this obsession has a corrosive effect on their psychology. Both anger and resentment have a place, but our culture represses these feelings as a matter of course. Instead of being taught to process and express these feelings in healthy ways, we're encouraged to avoid them completely.

The widespread repression of anger is very useful to power abusers. They want to violate boundaries without allowing their victims to respond in any way that might be inconvenient. The control regime as a whole operates like this. Its cultural engineers label naturally arising feelings like anger and resentment negative, except when these feelings are plugged into the divisive squabbles they've scripted to hijack public discourse.

If we were encouraged to channel our anger more constructively in response to the boundary violations producing this anger, power abusers might have a harder time bending us to their wills. If we were better at learning the lessons our resentments have to teach us, incredible things could happen. These feelings themselves aren't the problem. But they can quickly become problematic if a person starts identifying with the them, mistaking the feelings for parts of the actual self.


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