Ep 207: Resentment

Resentment. It’s a feeling that can be hard to admit to, especially when you’ve been taught to be ashamed of it, talk yourself out of it, or convince yourself that you shouldn’t feel it in the first place.

But resentment is not a character flaw. It is not proof that you’re petty, ungrateful, or a bad friend, partner, or mom. Resentment is a messenger. It can show up uninvited to tell you something you haven’t yet let yourself hear. The problem is, it tends to get shot down before you read the message.

In this episode, we’re taking a closer look at what resentment might actually be trying to tell you. We talk about resentment toward the people in your life and toward yourself, why so many of us were taught to swallow it instead of speak it, and what can happen when you stop treating resentment as something to be ashamed of and start getting curious about the message it’s carrying.

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Transcript

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Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hey, beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. I'm Melissa Parsons, your favorite life coach and your favorite podcast host.

And today, I wanna talk about a feeling that almost every single one of you has been taught to be ashamed of, a feeling you probably try to talk yourself out of the second that you notice it, and a feeling that you might not even let yourself call by its real name.

That feeling is resentment. Here's the thing I want you to know right at the top. Resentment is not a character flaw. It is not proof that you're petty.

It's not proof that you're ungrateful or a bad friend, a bad partner, a bad mom. Resentment is a messenger. It can show up uninvited to tell you something true that you've not yet let yourself hear.

And like most messengers, it tends to get shot down before anyone reads the message.

I want to offer one small language shift right up front because it's going to change how you hear the rest of the episode.

In IFS, or internal family systems, we don't usually say, "I am resentful." We say, "A part of me feels resentful," or, "This is coming from my resentful part." That might sound like a small distinction.

I promise you, it is not. "I am resentful," that statement makes the resentment your whole identity.

"A part of me feels resentful" makes it a part, part with something to say but not the entirety of you.

I want you to ask yourself something before we go any further, and I want you to sit with the answer instead of rushing past it the way you would if you were maybe scrolling.

When's the last time you noticed that you were the only one reaching out in a relationship? And then I want you to hold onto that thought and the answer because we're gonna come back to it.

Today, we're kinda gonna go deep. It's gonna be a longer one.

So we're gonna talk about resentment toward the people in our lives, resentment toward ourselves, why so many of us were trained from childhood to swallow resentment down instead of to speak it up, where it can actually live in our body, and what to do once we finally stop shooting the messenger and start reading the message.

So like I said, this is probably gonna be a longer one, so you might want to settle in or save it for some time when you have time to listen to the whole episode.

Here's a reframe I would like to offer you because I think it quietly explains an enormous percentage of the resentment most of us are carrying around.

So much of the resentment that we have isn't actually about what someone did or didn't do. It's more likely about the gap between who they are and who you are hoping they'll become.

So think about that for a second. You're not always resenting a person.

Sometimes you're resenting a version of them, a version who finally initiates plans, or notices what you need without being told, or handles conflict like an adult, or shows up the way you've been quietly hoping they'll grow into for years.

And every day that that future version of this person that you're hoping and dreaming of doesn't arrive, your resentment gets a little thicker, a little bit more permanent, aimed at the real present human being who was never actually running for the role that you have subconsciously cast them in.

This is such tender territory because that hoping that you're having usually comes from love or care. You don't invent a different future version of someone you don't care about.

You do it because you see something in them, or you remember something that they once were, or you can picture so clearly what it would feel like if they just kinda became that person.

But here's the hard truth underneath the tender one. They might not. In fact, they're probably not going to. Some people are not almost the version you're hoping for.

They are simply fully the version that's standing in front of you right here and right now.

I talked in a recent episode about how the people around the strong one often benefit from her staying strong and how, unless it's actually a criticism of them, some people know exactly what they're getting away with.

Resentment carries a companion version of that same idea. Sometimes the person you resent isn't withholding on purpose.

They are simply unremarkably being themselves, and the resentment you're carrying isn't really pointed at them.

It's pointed at reality, at the fact that reality declined to match the story you've been quietly writing, that role you've been quietly writing for them.

And here's where I think the IFS lens can become very useful. That resentful part of you is almost never the whole story.

In the IFS model, usually resentment is what we would call a protector, a part whose entire job is to stand guard, loud and hot at the front door. And protectors don't show up for no reason.

They show up typically because there's something more tender behind them that needs some guarding.

Usually, that's a part that feels unseen or taken for granted or tired from carrying something alone for a really long time.

The resentful part gets loud precisely so that the softer, more vulnerable part doesn't have to feel its ache directly out in the open and undefended.

Resentment isn't the wound, it's the bodyguard standing in front of the wound. I hope that makes sense.

Before we go further, I wanna talk about why so much resentment builds up silently in the first place, especially for the brilliant women listening to this podcast.

I don't think it's an accident that so many of us are walking around with years of unspoken resentment stacked up like unopened mail. We were trained for this. We were socialized into this.

Most of us were raised in ways so subtle we wouldn't have named them at the time to be nice. Not kind, but nice. There's a difference. I did a whole podcast episode about this, too.

Kind is about how you treat people. Nice is about not causing a ripple.

Nice girls don't say, "That's not fair." Nice girls don't say, "I need something from you." Nice girls smile and say, "It's fine," while a small, accurate part of them is screaming that it is, in fact, not fucking fine at all.

So what happens to a completely normal, completely human feeling, "Hey, this doesn't feel equal; hey, I need something here," when you've been trained since childhood that voicing that feeling makes you difficult or dramatic or ungrateful? It doesn't disappear.

Feelings that aren't allowed to be spoken don't evaporate. They go underground. They compound quietly, like interest on a debt that you're not tracking.

And eventually, they come out anyway, just not as a calm, direct conversation.

They usually come out as a short temper over something small, a silence that has an edge to it, as the exact eruption over an ice cube tray that we're going to talk about in a few minutes, which was never really about the ice cube tray.

This is why I want you to hear clearly that noticing your resentment early and often is not you becoming difficult.

It's you interrupting a pattern that was handed to you before you were old enough to consent to it.

Every time you catch a resentful part of you and actually look at it instead of stuffing it back down where nice girls keep things, you are doing something genuinely countercultural.

And to that I say, good. Please keep doing it.

I want to tell you a personal story about a friendship of mine because it's a very clear example I have of resentment doing exactly what it's supposed to do: showing up as a harbinger right on time, whether or not I was ready to listen to it.

There was a particular friend where I noticed over time that I was always the one reaching out.

I was always the one checking in, always the one who was available, who made the time, who sent the first text, who suggested the coffee date, who remembered the thing she'd mentioned three weeks ago and followed up on it.

And she... Let's just say she wasn't.

Not in a cruel way, not in a way that involved a single dramatic moment that I could point to and say, "There, that's where it actually went wrong." It was just quietly, consistently a one-way street.

Once I actually let myself notice that, and I mean really notice it, not the fast little flinch and move on version of noticing, but the slow down and let's look at this directly version, the resentment I'd been feeling made complete sense.

It wasn't me being petty. It wasn't me keeping score in some small way. It was accurate information about an imbalance that had been going on for a long time.

And here's where the reframe really landed for me. I realized this wasn't a relationship at all. Not really. A relationship, by definition, takes two people.

What I actually had was a series of transactions, and every single one of these transactions only involved one person: moi.

Once I saw it that way, I couldn't unsee it, and it became clear that the friendship or whatever we wanna call the thing that wasn't quite a friendship anymore needed to end, not with a dramatic blowup, not with an accusatory conversation designed to make her feel as bad as I'd been feeling.

I just needed to allow it to end, the way a one-way street ends whenever the person walking it finally stops walking. That's what I mean when I say resentment can be a harbinger.

It's not always telling you to fix something. Sometimes it's telling you that something already ended a while ago, and you're just the last one to find out.

Okay, I want to look at resentment kind of relationship by relationship. So first, let's talk about in marriage.

This is probably the single most common flavor of resentment I hear about in my coaching pr- world in my coaching clients, and it almost always centers on invisible labor.

The mental load of remembering every birthday, every appointment, every permission slip, every empty roll of toilet paper before it becomes an emergency.

One partner is holding the entire household in their head at all times, and the other partner genuinely doesn't see it.

Not because they're a villain, but because invisible labor is, by definition, invisible to the person not carrying it.

The resentment builds quietly in the gap between what's actually being done and what's actually being noticed, until one ordinary Thursday, it erupts over something as small as an empty ice cube tray, and it was never really about the ice cube tray at all.

The next relationship, parenting. This one is harder for people to even say out loud because culturally, we're not supposed to feel resentment toward our own children.

But it happens, and pretending it doesn't happen doesn't make anyone a better parent. It just makes the shame that they're holding in the silence heavier.

This shows up as a resentment toward the sheer relentlessness of the role, toward the loss of a self that existed before this small person needed you every single hour of every single day, toward your partner who maybe gets to walk out the door for work while you're still in the trenches.

None of that means you don't love your kiddos fiercely. It means you're still a full human carrying an enormous ongoing job, and full human beings resent enormous ongoing jobs sometimes.

That's not a character flaw. Okay, friendship.

We already talked about the one-way street, but there's a second friendship flavor worth naming, and it connects right back to what I was talking about earlier, the friend who is exactly who she's always been, and you keep quietly hoping she'll change.

Maybe she's always canceled last minute, or maybe she's always turned things around and made them about her. Maybe she's never once asked you a follow-up question in 15 years of friendship.

You're not resenting a betrayal, although there are those that happen, too.

But in this case, you're resenting the persistent gap between the friend you keep hoping she'll become and the friend who's been there in front of you the entire time, being exactly consistently and unmistakably herself.

Let's talk about work relationships. This one connects to a client I told you about a couple episodes back, the one who used to catch every deadline her coworkers pushed to the last second.

Work resentment often builds in that exact structure, a role, a boss, a team that keeps asking for more than it gives back, where the giving is expected and the receiving is optional.

It's the resentment of being endlessly capable in an environment that has learned to depend on your capability without ever really seeing it, and it tends to keep building pretty quietly right up until it can't be quiet anymore.

And then finally, I wanna talk about the version of resentment that we really haven't talked about yet, and I think it might be the most corrosive one of all, and that is resenting yourself.

This can show up as resenting the years you've spent staying somewhere, maybe a job or a relationship, or in a version of your life, long after you knew somewhere underneath that it wasn't quite right.

It shows up as resenting your own past compromises, the time you said it was fine when it wasn't, the times you said yes because saying no felt too dangerous or too selfish, or too unlike the nice girl you'd been trained to be, which we just spent some time talking about.

It shows up as a kind of low, ongoing hum of, "Why didn't I trust myself sooner?" Not aimed outward toward anyone else, but directly at the person in the mirror.

I like to think about this a little like the mayonnaise story I told a while back. Living out of integrity with yourself, even in small ways, can leave a residue.

Self-resentment is what that residue turns into when it's allowed to accumulate for years instead of being addressed on the spot.

It's the resentment of a woman toward a version of herself who didn't yet know what she knows now, who didn't yet have the courage she has now, who was still doing the absolute best she could with the tools she had at the time, and yet still gets blamed in hindsight as if she should've known better.

Here's what I'd like to offer you on this if this is landing anywhere in your chest right now. That past version of you was not failing to trust herself out of stupidity or weakness.

She was doing the best she could with the information, the conditioning, the socialization, and the resources she had access to in the moment.

Resenting her for not already being who you are now is like resenting a seedling for not yet being a tree.

She was exactly as far along as she was supposed to be, given everything that came before her.

Self-resentment run through the same IFS lens we've been using in this episode is often a protector, too, just one that's aimed inward.

It's trying to make sure you never again let something slide the way you let it slide before.

It thinks if it stays harsh enough with you, you'll be able to protect yourself from repeating that same mistake. But harshness was never actually the thing that changed you.

Awareness and gentleness is what can change you. You don't need the resentful part to keep punishing the woman you used to be.

You need to ask it if it's willing to stand down and do a different job now because you've already gotten the message, and you're living proof of that.

Here's what I wanna be careful about because I don't want you leaving this episode and torching every relationship in your life by the weekend.

Resentment is not always a sign that something needs to end. Sometimes it is. My friendship needed to end. It had already ended itself structurally. I just, like I said, was the last to notice.

But that's not the only possible outcome. Sometimes resentment is a sign that something needs to be renegotiated. The invisible labor resentment in a marriage doesn't usually require an ending.

It requires very direct, very unglamorous conversations where the invisible labor gets made visible, named out loud, and divided up on purpose instead of by silent default.

Sometimes resentment is a sign that an expectation needs to be said out loud for the first time because it was never actually communicated.

It was just assumed, and we all know that assumptions are a wildly unreliable way to run a relationship.

And sometimes, this is the quiet, unglamorous one, resentment is a sign that you need to grieve the fantasy version of someone so that you can actually be in relationship with the real person, not to settle, not to resign yourself to less.

Please grieve. Let go of the future version you've been writing, so there's actually room to see and either accept or release the person who's really there.

I am gonna take you through a short practice here in a minute, but before we get to that practice, I wanna name something practical.

Resentment almost always announces itself in the body before you consciously clock it. So maybe it's a tight jaw. Maybe it's wearing your shoulders as earrings.

Maybe it's holding your breath right before you answer someone with, "It's fine." Maybe it's a specific kind of heat behind your sternum. Whatever it is for you, start noticing your own pattern.

Your body has been keeping track of this long before your mind may be willing to admit that there was something to be keeping track of.

And learning your own physical signals is one of the fastest way to catch that resentful part early before it's had months or years to compound or before you catch yourself saying something from that resentful part that you would later want to suck back into your mouth.

So let's talk about a practical piece kinda straight from the IFS lens. Before you do anything else with a resentful part, try just talking to it instead of trying to talk it out of existing.

If you have a few minutes today, try this. Um, don't do this right now if you're driving, for goodness sake. Wait until you're parked, or wait until you have some time later today.

But find somewhere quiet. If you can, bring to mind the relationship or situation where you've noticed resentment building.

Instead of asking, "Why am I being so petty?" try asking your part directly, "Hey, I notice you're here, and I can hear you. You're really loud. What are you protecting?" Then just wait.

Don't rush the answer. If you wait, I promise an answer will come.

More often than not, underneath the resentment, you'll find that softer, more tender part, maybe the part that's tired, maybe the part that feels invisible, maybe the part that's quietly doing the reaching out or the invisible labor or the catching of every deadline without anyone ever once turning around and saying, "I see you, and I'm grateful." When you find it, you don't need to fix it or solve it or make it stop.

You can simply say, "Hey, I see you. Thank you, resentful part, for showing up to guard my more tender parts. I'm not your enemy. We don't need to be enemies. We never need to be enemies. I see you.

I know that you're protecting me. I know that you've been working overtime with really no relief in sight." And just see what happens. Kinda just be there with that part and thank it.

If you feel loving toward the part, send it so much love, and just kind of watch what happens. And that's it. You just have to check in with this part and say, "I see you. Thank you for protecting me." And then, of course, if you wanna dive deeper, we can do that.

So how do you know which outcome fits, whether it's ending something, renegotiating with someone, naming an expectation, or grieving a fantasy that you've been in with another person without their knowledge.

Honestly, you ask, is this fixable with a conversation, or has this been a one-way street for so long that a conversation would just be me negotiating with a wall?

You ask, is this person capable of the thing I'm hoping for, or am I resenting them for a version of themselves that was never actually on offer?

The answer's gonna be different every time, but you can't get to the answer at all until you stop being ashamed of the resentful part long enough to actually get into relationship with that part and ask it a question.

So let's go back to the question I asked you at the very top of the episode. When's the last time you noticed you were the only one reaching out?

Whatever answer just came to mind for you, a marriage, a friendship, a job, a family member you keep hoping will finally become the version you're picturing, or even a much younger version of yourself you've been quietly punishing for not knowing then what you know now, I want you to let that answer be information instead of evidence against your character.

You are not petty for noticing. You are not ungrateful for feeling it. There is not a bad friend, a bad partner, or a bad mom somewhere inside of you.

There is a part of you that has been paying close attention, standing guard over something tender, doing its job of protecting the only way it knows how.

That's really all resentment ever is, a part of you paying attention with nowhere to put their energy yet. So here's your permission slip for today.

You're allowed to notice when you're the only one showing up. You're allowed to stop hoping someone becomes a version of themselves they were never actually building toward.

You're allowed to forgive the woman you used to be for not already being who you are now. And you're allowed to turn toward every resentful part of you with curiosity instead of shame.

And finally, let it hand you the message it's been carrying instead of shooting the messenger one more time. And if this kind of work intrigues you and you're like, "I wanna go deeper. I don't wanna just say hi to the part and thank it. I wanna do the deeper work," please reach out to me at melissa@melissaparsonscoaching.com. I would love to hear from you. Okay.

That's all for this week. I love you all so much. Thanks for listening to Your Favorite You. Please share this with a friend if you think that it might benefit her. I would love that so much. I'll see you next week.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

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