Episode 48: Resentment is the Sentence You Didn't Speak

Katie explores resentment as a signal, not a flaw to suppress. This episode breaks down how unspoken needs, quiet self-silencing, and “being easy” can slowly build into distance, exhaustion, and a sudden flash of irritation that feels much bigger than the moment itself.

The focus is on why resentment accumulates, how boundaries are really honest communication, and what to do the next time that slow burn shows up. 

Katie also shares a practical reset question and a simple way to speak needs earlier, before they harden into resentment.

Key topics

• Resentment is framed as a signal that an important need was never expressed, not as something to meditate away or simply “let go.”
• The “slow burn” builds through tiny moments of swallowing a no, especially when saying something feels unsafe, complicated, or like too much.
• Resentment shows up across relationships, work, and friendships, often after many small unspoken transactions rather than one big event.
• Katie explains how silence can feel safer in the moment, especially when you’ve learned that your needs might be inconvenient or too much.
• The feeling often creates emotional distance, where you remain technically present but less reachable and more protected.
• Boundaries are defined as honest sentences about what you need, what works for you, and what you will or won’t do, not punishment or a power move.
• The real work is building the belief that your needs are legitimate and allowed to be spoken out loud.

“A boundary can literally just be an honest sentence about what you need, what works for you, and what you will and won't do.”

Katie invites listeners to join Fully Expressed, her 12-week group coaching program, and take the next step toward becoming more visible, more honest, and more fully themselves.

More about Fully Expressed Here

Connect with Katie:

On Instagram

Through her Website

Or via email at info@katiemurraycoaching.com.au

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome. This is to our core with Katie Murray, and this is the place where we peel back our layers to uncover who we really are at our centre, at our core. And think of it as a chat with your bestie, the one who can make you laugh until your belly hurts, who is ridiculously unfiltered, and will lovingly call you forward to help you cut through the noise and get real with yourself. Around here, nothing is off limits. And we are mixing this up with equal parts, humour, and heart, so let's dive right in. I want to talk today about a very specific feeling. And when you think about feelings or emotions, I'm not talking about grief, not talking about fear, I'm not even talking about anger in a way that anger normally shows up. The feeling that I'm talking about today is watching someone do something, something that they've always done, and feeling something in your chest might feel like a kind of heat burning. This quiet, low grade building within you that you can't name or justify out loud, and so you don't and what happens is that you just carry it and go to bed and get up the next morning and you carry it again. The feeling I'm talking about is resentment. And I want to talk about it today, not as something that you need to manage or something that you need to meditate away or that you need to suppress. I want to talk about it as a signal, a really specific, really useful signal that something that you needed didn't get said, didn't get expressed. And it's been quietly sitting there ever since, just festering, growing, collecting interest. This is To Our Core. I'm Katie, and today we're going to be talking about the slowburn. Most of the time, when resentment comes up in a conversation, whether that be in a coaching space or between friends or like even those people that have engaged in some kind of therapeutic intervention or seen a psychologist or a counsellor, the advice that I hear follows some sort of version of just let it go. Practice forgiveness, choose to see things differently, focus on what you're grateful for. Which is really interesting because all of that advice is focused entirely on making the feeling stop. Without actually spending a single second asking what the feeling is actually trying to say to you. That's what just let it go does to resentment. Makes it quieter, yes. Does it solve the problem? Not even remotely. And here's how I actually think about resentment. It is like the bill that arrives after a really long series of transactions where your needs or your limits or your most inner honest responses, things that truly deserve to be said, they got swallowed instead of actually expressing them. Resentment does not show up out of nowhere. It shows up at the end of a very long paper trail of unconsciously keeping score. It shows up in marriages. Maybe that's the first place you went to in your mind when I mentioned the feeling of resentment. And it could go something like the internal narrative of, I have told him a thousand times in my head, or at least like I've told him, prefacing it with some humor or lightheartedness or something that slightly resembles passive aggressiveness. I've told him a thousand times in my head not to do that. You may have actually never actually expressed it in words. You just think that all those subtle ways of communicating was enough.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

It can show up in your workplace. I keep saying yes to things that I can't carry.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

And I don't say a word. And then I go home and I cannot literally stand the sight of my email inbox. Or it can show up in friendships. You know what? She always fucking does that. And then I always let her. And then I absolutely need to quarantine myself, and I don't want to answer any of her calls for a week. I just need a break after that. And in every one of those situations, what came before the resentment was the same thing. An unspoken need, or a need that at least was not spoken in a way that actually communicates effectively. So, yes, those subtle little digs at your partner without actually naming what you need or what you want, not quite the same as honestly claiming what that need was. It was a no that stayed inside a yes, because that's what you actually delivered. You know, like just like deep within that box, that parcel that you delivered over to someone disguised and wrapped up with a yes was a no right at the center of that. The silence in itself, it it didn't happen because people are gutless or too weak, or they're passive, or they just don't even care. The silence happened because silence probably felt like it was better as an option at the time. Safer. Maybe even you've convinced yourself that it was kinder, that it was less complicated than whatever the thing that you had to say might start if you actually announced it, if you actually voiced it.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

Just keep it buried, it's less complicated that way.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

That's the belief, usually a very old one, that your needs were probably too much, that asking someone for something might push people away, that being easy was part of the deal that allows you to be lovable or accepted. And so resentment isn't a sign that you're difficult to live with. Instead, it's actually a sign that you have been working overtime trying not to be. Resentment rarely comes from one big moment or one really annoying thing that your partner did, or your work colleague, or whatever. It builds in increments. And they are increments that are small and really subtle and easy to dismiss when you look at them individually. Until what happens one day is that you bump into it and you wonder where the this enormous solid thing came from. Like you've literally hit a brick wall. And here's a very ordinary example of this. It's a Tuesday. You are tired. You have been home for two hours, you've started dinner, you've sorted the kids, you've dealt with a few work things that are popping up that technically probably actually belong to tomorrow, and you have about 30 minutes left before you are running on absolutely nothing in your tank. And then you see your partner has walked in and sat on the couch and picked up their phone.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Something in you wants to say, Hey mate, I might need some help tonight.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Or even just, you know what? I'm really freaking tired. I'm exhausted. And you don't. Or maybe they even look really tired too, and you don't want to make it a competition. Maybe you've said in the past, I'm actually really tired, and they've responded with so am I, and you felt that immediate one-upping of each other. Maybe the last time you said something, it didn't land the way that you needed it to. And dealing with that on top of being tired feels probably more than you have capacity for.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

And so you know what you do? You say nothing. You say nothing.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

You finish dinner, you go to bed, and by morning it's yesterday, and life moves on, as you know, it's not even worth mentioning. Except you know what happens? It doesn't actually quite move on. Not fully. The thing that you didn't say didn't disappear just because you didn't say it. It kind of settles on in and it waits. And then you know what happens? Maybe it's next Tuesday, maybe it's a Thursday, maybe it's the very next day. It happens again. And then the one after that, and you know, maybe it just shows up in different rooms or different situations, yet the essence of it is identical. Something needed to be said and it wasn't. And then one day, over something completely small and technically probably fine, the heat arrives within you. The furnace. And I'm not talking about perimenopause.

unknown 10:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

It is a disportionate reaction, a flash of irritation, as something that wouldn't normally register. Might even come as quite a surprise to the audience. Well, you might even find that you feel this sense of flat refusal inside of you, and you really feel like it's impossible for you to continue to manage it in the same way you normally would.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

I just want to flag something here. The flash isn't the problem.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

The internal furnace that starts to burn up in you, it's not the problem. That's 37 Tuesday nights finally finding somewhere to go.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Of all of those times you watched your partner sit on the couch and pick up their phone and you didn't say anything, it finds somewhere to go.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

And the thing that makes this genuinely quite difficult for some people to navigate is that the unspoken need made sense to leave unspoken in the moment.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Saying I need help with this can feel vulnerable.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

What if they react badly? What if they minimize it? What if it starts a conversation that you don't really have a whole narrative or a story around it yet? You know the justification as to why you're tired, that you feel the need to explain. And saying nothing, that's very known to you. It costs you something, and also at least you know what you're dealing with. The discomfort of swallowing your needs is predictable. The discomfort of speaking up and asking for what you want or naming something of importance to you or an unmet need, that's not so familiar. So what happens unconsciously is that you choose the known cost, the familiarity of swallowing the need again and again until you know what? The known cost has compounded into something that barely resembles that original moment in the first place. So let's talk about what resentment does to a person when it's been sitting around for a while. And maybe you're sitting there listening to this episode going, I know exactly what it does because I am living this experience right now. But I think we skip past it really quickly. What happens for resentment internally is it is tiring in a way that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't felt it. It's not just an early night, yeah? And you'll reset and feel better. It's not the kind that sleep can even fix. What's happening for you is that it's become so much a part of the background that you have stopped noticing it's even there. You're moving through your days and your relationships carrying extra weight, and you've been carrying it long enough that it actually just feels like you're normal now. And what it does, and it what I see in so many people that talk with me is that it creates distance. Not the obvious kind that comes from a fight and the silent treatment, the quiet kind where you're like technically present in a conversation, you're technically in the room, you're technically engaged, and yet you're not quite reachable at the same time. A small part of you has pulled back. And so resentment actually turns into protection. It's not always conscious, yet it is protection nonetheless. If I keep part of myself behind this glass screen, I'm a bit more insulated from the disappointment of needing something and not getting it again. And here's the part that's not on a billboard anywhere to warn you. The person that you resent most often has absolutely no idea that that's happening.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

Because you didn't tell them.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

You managed it quietly on your own, and they've been relating to you the entire time without being able to actually tap into what's happening for you. They might like sense that something feels a bit different. They might notice that you're a bit withdrawn without knowing what's caused it. You know, they might just say that you're just a bit tired and you're just a bit worn out, not actually drawn any connection that has anything to do with them. They don't know that there was anything that they could have done differently because the door to that conversation was never opened. And they never even knew that conversation existed. Because it was in your head. It was in your nervous system, it was in your body. I want you to hear that this is not about blame, not yours, not theirs. It's not about taking sides. It's about what happens when the gap between what you actually feel and what you're willing to express gets too wide for too long in the places that matter the most to you.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

When you think of a boundary, what do you think of?

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Because a boundary is not a wall. It's not a set of rules that you announce to someone, like, hello, these are all my boundaries. Please listen to all the rules that I've created for my own life. It's not something that you announce after someone's done something wrong. It's not a punishment, it's not a power move. Like, let me get out my clipboard and show you how many strikes you've got against the boundaries I put in place that I never told you about. It's not something that you earn the right to have once you feel confident enough to have the boundary. A boundary can literally just be an honest sentence about what you need, what works for you, and what you will and won't do. That's it, genuinely. In practice, what it looks like is honest communication, which, you know, I know sounds very simple and tends to be, for a lot of people, one of the hardest things to actually do because speaking honestly about a need requires believing that the need is worth speaking about. And for a lot of people, that belief is, you know, still under construction, still being built. And so instead of talking about setting boundaries as though it's a technique that you either have or you don't, like a skill set, I think about it as something that grows in proportion to how much you actually believe that your needs are legitimate. The clearer you are on what you need, and that it is real and allowed to be in the room, the more naturally the honest communication of those needs will flow for you. The shakier that belief, the more likely that those needs are actually going to stay inside and quietly build into something heavier. Like this takes actual work. Not like this, say no more, I've got this. Not you need to be more assertive. I mean, that might be like useful in some circumstances. And also I kind of think they're like downstream to something far more foundational than that. What would it mean to actually believe in your body, not just your head, that what you need is allowed to be said out loud? Speaking a need, imperfectly, awkwardly, in words that don't necessarily come out quite the way you planned, almost always will cost less than the resentment that builds if you don't. The difficult conversations are survivable. The relationship level, energy level, decades-long cost of needs that were never spoken is a much harder thing to come back from. And I'm going to offer you some really practical things that will support you. And yet, before I do, I want to tell you about something that I have built specifically for women who are sitting inside exactly what we're talking about today. So if you've been sitting here going, oh my God, like tears springing to your eyes, you see yourself in this mirror I'm holding up, and you're like, how does she know what I'm already thinking and feeling in my own life and my own existence? It's because I have heard it so many times, and in the past I've felt it too. And so I created a program that could support people really practically. And it's called Fully Expressed. It is my 12-week group coaching program, and it is truly for the women who are ready to actually know themselves. Not the version of themselves that they've been performing for everyone else's comfort, instead, the real one underneath all of the managing, underneath all the lists and tabs that you've got open in your mind. Women who want deeper, more honest relationships, women who are ready to stop waiting until they feel ready and start actually taking real steps toward the life that they actually want. And here's why I'm mentioning it in this particular episode. Because the work that we have been talking about today, finding that unspoken need, building the belief that what you need is allowed to be said out loud, learning to say the honest sentence before it turns into that raging furnace that we're not blaming on perimenopause. This work, it's not a solo exercise. I really mean that truly. You can listen to a podcast episode about it. Ideally, this one. And you can journal about it and some things, yeah, it might they might shift for you. Yet the the deeper like excavation, the kind that is actually gonna change how you move and communicate through your relationships in your life, they tend to happen in a room with other women doing the same work alongside them, who can reflect back what you can't see from inside of yourself. You hear yourself in their stories. That is what fully expressed is in that room. And right now I have a really exclusive early bird offer. And I want to be really clear about the word exclusive here because I really mean it. This is not an early bird pricing that's available everywhere. This is only open to my mailing list, and it closes on the 1st of September 2026. After that, if spots are still available, registration opens publicly, yet the early bird rate is no longer on the table. And if anything has landed with you today from this episode, and if you've recognized yourself in the unspoken need, in the slow burn heat, the furnace, in the gap between what you feel and what you say, I would really love for you to look into this. The link is going to be in my show notes. Come and have a read. And if you want to talk about whether or not this is the right fit for you, for where you're at right now, my DMs are always open. That's like a really genuine offer. I get people sliding into my inbox on Instagram all the time, just having a chat about things that have resonated with them from this podcast. And I always respond. Okay? So there's your invitation. There's me calling you forward. Are you willing to actually do something differently? And for now, how I can support you is let's get into what actually you can do with some of this that we've talked about. Both with the resentment that's already there, because we know it's there, and with the habit of swallowing needs before they get a chance to be heard. I want to start by treating the heat as information rather than a verdict. The next time you feel that flash inside of you, that disproportionate irritation or the quiet refusal, or even the I can't believe they have done this again. Before you do anything with it, ask one question. What was the need that didn't get said here? Not, which is very easy to do, not what did they do wrong? But what did I need that I didn't say? Because in that shift, turning the question toward yourself rather than toward the other person is where you can take control, where actual information lives, because it moves you from here's evidence about their behavior to here's something I can actually do something with. And I really am gonna ask you to lean into being specific. I need to feel appreciated is too vague to act on. I needed someone to notice I'd been carrying this alone and say something that's specific. That's a sentence. You can either say out loud or you know what, you could grieve, or you could do both.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

And then you can actually move from that place of knowing.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

The next thing that I would invite you forward to do is start practicing the earlier sentence. And I'm not talking about the one that you deliver six months in to the festering resentment, when the resentment has built to a point where you know everything's loaded. You're just like one tiny little behavior away from going kaboom. It's the one that you say on the actual Tuesday night. I'm exhausted tonight and I need some help. This is too much for me right now. I've got something I've been trying to figure out how to say. Here it is. And they don't have to be polished and they don't have to be timed perfectly, you know, waiting for the perfect time, ultimate, ultimate way to keep yourself stuck.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

Because what is a perfect time? What are the criteria for that? Because all you'll find yourself doing is waiting. Let it land. Even if it lands with a bit of awkwardness.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

The statement, however it's phrased, it just needs to be true to you. One honest sentence, however imperfectly, is always gonna beat like 37 swallowed ones every single time. And underneath all of that, like really truly the most important work, is building the simple belief that what you need is real and legitimate, and that the people who actually care about you would rather know than be managed from like this distance where they don't even get a look in. Resentment is the invoice that's been issued, and like any invoice, it's gonna tell you some details. And it's not just about the relationship or the situation, it's about the need that generated it in the first place. The need that was real and allowed and yours and that deserved a sentence. It never got. And if you're a person that likes to quietly ponder things instead, just spend a few moments with the question, what was the need that didn't get said? Because when you listen on in to her, she might just have a few things to tell you. Until next time, I'm Katie, and this has been To Our Core. Thanks for spending time with me today on To Our Core. If something landed in your heart or gave you a much needed giggle, consider sharing it with a friend who also may need this as a timely reminder. And go on. You know you want to. Give me a five-star review so that this podcast can land in the ears of many, many more people. Because remember that life is too short to stay on the surface. Keep living, loving, and laughing all the way to your core. Go make life great. And if you want support around this, go to the show notes to find out more. Until next time, I'll meet you back here with more truth, laughter, and a whole lot of heart.