'We were prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle.'
When I'm resentful, I'm in victim mode. 'They're harming me. They're causing the resentment.'
The 'entirely different angle' involves reversing this. They're not causing the resentment: I'm causing the resentment.
Resentment has two elements:
(1) I identify that something is wrong. This is neutral. This is the recognition of an error.
(2) I judge the person. This is morally charged. This is classifying the error as sin (= badness).
That things are not as they could or should be is a fact. It's raining. I fell over. The puppy peed on the floor. The student wrote the wrong answer. The client didn't pay.
That's identification. Identification is OK. We need to identify facts and accept them as facts.
Judgement is a layer we add on top: He is bad! She is bad! She needs to be punished!
Error calls for acceptance and maybe response and/or correction. Put up an umbrella. Go to the hospital. Clean the floor and train the puppy. Help the student learn. Send a payment reminder to the client.
The ego reclassifies error as sin (= badness), and this calls for attack, either mentally or in reality: punishment, retaliation, humiliation, defence, retribution, 'teaching him a lesson', 'giving her what for', 'giving him a taste of his own medicine'.
No one is saying ignore the facts. What we're saying, is: withdraw the judgement.
With each person or situation I've judged, I can learn to say: this is not bad; it's either a fact or an error. It needs accepting and maybe responding to and/or correcting, but it does not call for attack.
How do we do this? We're doing it the whole time but don't know it. Resentment is highly selective. We all accept (and where necessary respond to and/or correct) a thousand things without judging them as bad and attacking them. So we're already getting it right most of the time. We just need to universalise the practice.
How?
Find some situations in life where you are in the habit of saying things like, 'So be it!', 'Well, there it is!', 'Well, there you have it!' or the equivalent. Think of situations where you're fine but others get upset: whatever you're doing in those situations to remain calm and happy and not let things affect you, take that, and apply it universally.
This new attitude needs to be consciously adopted and practised:
Exercise 1: Withdrawing the judgement
With each situation in column 2, say: 'This is not a good thing; this is not a bad thing; this is just a thing. It's not good or bad: it's only my interpretation that makes it so. I will withdraw my interpretation. I made a mistake. There is nothing to judge here.'
We've previously learned from examining the third column of the resentment inventory that we're unhappy not because of other people's behaviour per se but because that behaviour did not match our demands. We've identified that some demands are unreasonable and need to be dropped ('I demand to be rich!' 'I demand that everyone obey me at all times'). We've identified that some demands reflect reasonable preferences so need to be downgraded to being just that, preferences ('I prefer it not to rain when I'm going for a walk.' 'I prefer my husband/wife to be in a good mood.'), without getting upset when we don't get our own way, because, hey, it's just a preference. Some demands reflect reasonable goals, for which we can devise action plans, letting go of the results: You want some money? Get a job. You want people to be nice to you? Be nice to them. You want to speak French? Go to French classes.
Exercise 2: Withdrawing the demand
With each resentment, I look at the demand, and say: 'To be happy, I don't need this demand to be met.'
In fact, the only thing that is making us unhappy is the very belief that the demand needs to be met to make us happy. The world is not the problem: the demands are the problem. Drop or transform the demands into preferences and action plans: no problem.
Lastly, people behave badly (as do I) for some combination of the following characteristics: ignorance, stupidity, irrationality, emotionalism (letting emotions steer the car), carelessness, and selfishness (which includes malice: enjoying others' suffering). They have these seven. I have these seven. They're no different than me. If I want to be let off the hook, I need to let them off the hook. So they, like me, are 'spiritually sick': this means that they're stuck in those patterns, just as I was stuck in those patterns until the universe gave me the willingness and the resources to escape. They're not bad, just mistaken and stuck.
Another word to substitute for 'sick' is 'asleep'/'sleeping'.
Exercise 3: Empathy
Take each person on my resentment list, and view the world from their perspective. What might have motivated them? If they did something genuinely wrong, what was the combination of ignorance, stupidity, irrationality, emotionalism, carelessness, selfishness, and malice? When have I shown those seven? When I have shown those seven with those very people?
Exercise 4: Love
Take each person on my resentment list, and pray the following prayers:
(1) 'God, please help me show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.'
(2) 'This is a sick person. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.'
(3) 'God, please help me avoid retaliation or argument.'
(4) 'God, please show me how to take a kindly and tolerant view of this person.'
Footnote: not everyone on my list of people I resent is sick. If they're not sick, omit the phrase 'This is a sick person'.
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