Resentment

​Must admit, I don’t like being pulled up when I am wrong.  It is amazing, it can be a really little thing I’m pulled up on, but it can be so hard to take.  I know it seems unbelievable that I could ever be wrong, but it is true I can be.
Yet so often I am not pulled up to humiliate me, but to show me the right way to go.  I am better off for it but it is never easy to accept.  It is silly if I resent it.  It is true that harbouring resentment often hurts the one who resents more than the object of the resentment.
There are times though resentment explodes.  Many lives are lost because maybe someone was promoted above another.  Pay back is mostly not a random act.  Resentment has often built up over years.  I have watched bubbles.  The same with balloons.  Often, they get bigger and bigger.  Then they explode.  It seems often resentment starts out little and gets bigger and bigger and then explodes.
I was amazed.  I started writing this and picked up a book I like to read.  The chapter was entitled “Resentment.”  There was something said that really stuck.  It was said dealing with resentment is not complicated, but it is painful.  The author listed three things needed to deal with it.  Honesty, humility, and vulnerability.
I concur.  Honesty is hard.  So often I would prefer to believe I am right to hold on to something when all the evidence says I would be better off to let it go.  Fair dinkum, for me to be honest with myself, and for that to be needed for anything positive to be achieved is painful.
Humility is a biggy to me to.  The three things listed as being needed seem to me to be the most difficult things that can be asked of anyone.  Humility to me acknowledges that I am not the standard set for humanity for doing the right thing.  It says I blow it (I know that is unbelievable to some).  I’m not the best but I do not need to be.  I just want to be the best that I can be.
To me honesty and humility are hard enough.  Then vulnerability is added.  Woo.  If I allow people to see me, they might not like what they see, and may not think I am perfect.  The illusion could be broken.
Not only do I need to watch it, but I do not need to spend long with someone to know when resentment rules.  In no time at all I am hearing about a perceived injustice that has been wrought.  If I say let it go, I am told I do not understand.  That may be true and what was done may have been wrong but to me it never helps to have wrong perpetuated.
Many years ago someone went to a boss of mine with a perceived injustice they wanted my boss to help address.  My boss investigated it.  His conclusion?  “I agree with the others.”  Perhaps a little honesty, humility and vulnerability would not have gone astray.
Fortunately, to me, hard does not mean impossible.  So much it seems depends on if I want to be better.  If I want to let go.  Really, if I want to be whole.  Sometimes for something to be whole it needs to be broken.  Personally, I prefer a brake that fixes, rather than a brake that is lived with and disfigures because I would not be honest, humble and vulnerable.