There's been a lot of subsequent discussion about people's resentment, and letting go of it.
But I am having a great deal of trouble with using the word "resentment" for what I am feeling. That word is so equivocal. It has an implication of feelings that are buried, kind of simmering under the surface, not fully expressed or revealed or honored.
I don't feel resentment at what my STBXAH has done to me. I feel anger, I feel rage. And I think those are real, honest feelings that deserve and need to be fully expressed, fully acknowledged, and fully owned. "Resentment" is just too puny for what I feel. It has an ambivalent, almost evasive quality to it.
We have been wronged. We have been treated badly. We have been lied to, vilified, humiliated, debased, slandered, abused, verbally harassed, physically beaten, terrified, threatened, stolen from, snored at by a drunken jerk on the floor, peed on, pick your description of mistreatment, and it has happened to one or all of us.
"Someone done me wrong", as the song says.
My self esteem, my sense of self, my identity have all been damaged by what my STBXAH has done to me. Whether I unwittingly participated in the process, as I became more and more beaten down - and more and more co-opted - is a totally different discussion. He chose this behavior because he intended to build his own self-worth on the back of my destruction. For him to feel good about himself, he had to disown his own destructive behavior and blame me for it, thereby feeling entitled to be "victimized" thereby perpetuating this cycle and driving it deeper with each go-found.
Nothing I did - nothing any human being does - makes them deserving of the treatment I've highlighted above in bold. I will own my own faults, my own flaws, and my own behavior, good bad or indifferent, and right any wrongs I have done to the best of my ability. But I didn't ever do anything of the magnitude to deserve what I got.
My psychiatrist yesterday had some real insight. He's been around for a long long time, very wise, and I showed him my post which, surprise to me, he found very moving.
He told me about a brilliant psychiatrist he had studied under many years ago. She was Dutch, a Duchess, actually, and at her memorial service, he learned that she had been involved in the Dutch underground in World War II, and had taken care of Jews in hiding from the Nazis.
She said that anger was an emotion that usually related to a problem between people that could potentially be resolved by working it out between them.
Rage, on the other hand, requires real change to overcome it.
I think that says it like it is. I think when we truly believe in the depth of our own emotions, we have a fighting chance of getting through to the light on the other side of this emotional thicket of thorns and darkness.
ShootingStar1