Short Episode: A Meditation to help with Resentment

In this brief episode I share a helpful meditation / prayer to help with resentment.  It has helped both my patients and myself and can be useful as we build the "forgiveness muscle."  To learn more about forgiveness, listen to the seventeen brief "forgiveness series" episodes on this show. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

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SPEAKER_01 0:37

Hello. This is a super fast podcast, super short podcast on a helpful technique for dealing with the painful effects of resentment. As humans, we do experience resentment, and it only hurts ourselves. Resentment is a precursor to anxiety, a precursor to depression. It takes up space, it takes up energy. And I hope that this technique will be helpful to you. I introduced this technique to a patient many years ago. It's I guess we could call it a meditation. This particular gentleman wasn't religious, um and he liked it. It was helpful to him. His resentment was about his birth parents. He um he never he couldn't remember them at all, but they gave him up for adoption and he was taken to the United States. Um but he actually was resentful every single day of them and it was interfering with his life and it hurt. And he just kept repeating it in his mind, and how could they? And so this is how it goes. What you do is you think of three things that you want for yourself. So ideally three words that uh that you can think of. So uh I can't remember exactly what he came up with, but let's say that he the three things that he wanted for himself were security, connection, and meaning. So what you do is, and I had him do this twice a day, once for his mom and once for his dad. So he would do one maybe in the morning and one in the evening. And and what you say with your three words, you say as I want security, so may she have security. As I want connection, so may my mom, my mother have connection. As I want meaning, so may my mother have meaning. And then maybe in the afternoon he would do his father. So as I want security in my life, may he have security in his life. As I want meaning in my life, may he have meaning in his life, and as I want connection in my life, may he have connection in his life. So he did this day after day, and really after a couple of weeks, there already was a difference. There was already relief for him in this uh debilitating resentment. I am doing this this I'm gonna call it a prayer for me, that's how I see it. I'm doing this for length, and in my faith tradition, we talk about doing good to those who hurt us. Um we even talk about loving our enemies. So not only am I giving something up for length, but I'm also doing this prayer daily. And the three things that I want for myself is to share, to love. And when I think of love, I think of the highest form of love. To share, to love, and to thrive. So every day I have two people that I'm thinking of in my life, I will, you know, as I want to share, um, may she also be able to share. As I want to thrive, may she also be able to thrive. And so when I think about it psychology-wise, why does this work? One way to think of it is exposure therapy. Um another way to think of it is that you are forced not to see the other person in a black and white way. Um it humanizes that person that you are feeling resentful for. Um it's a paradoxical approach, but it works. Um, I think it's I hope it'll help you. And um I think it's good for uh those that want to do the deeper work of forgiveness. It's Robert Enright, who's been featured on my podcast, and he's really the founder, and he's done so much research on the benefits of forgiveness. He talks about developing the forgiveness muscle. There are different things you can do to kind of prepare yourself to forgive someone who's hurt you, and I think that this is a nice way to work on developing that muscle, so to speak. But it does give relief, and if there is something or someone who has hurt you, I think it could be helpful. So best wish to put it.